LANGUAGE

LANGUAGE

1. First language acquisition

   • the first three years
     • 14 grammatical morphemes
     • Negation stage 1-4
     • Questions stage 1-6
   • The pre-school years
     • ask questions, give commands, create stories
     • begin to develop metalinguistic awareness
     • use language in a greater variety of situations
   • The school years
     • acess to word jokes, trick questions, and riddles
     • atonishing growth of vocabulary
     • acquisition of diferent language registers
   • The behaviourist perspective
     • imitation and practice
     • best-known proponent was Skinner
     • gives great importance to the enviroment
   • The innatist perspective
     • Noam Chomsky
     • all languages are based on innate universal principles
     • The Critical Period Hypothesis
   • Interactional|developmental perspective
     • Vygotsky: language develops primarily from social interaction
     • Piaget: language as a symbol system
     • interplay between the innate learning and the enviroment

2. Second language learning

   • Intelligence
   • language learning aptitude
     • specific abilities thought to predict success in language learning
   • learning styles
     • individual's preferred ways of absorbing new information
   • personality
     • inhibition, anxiety and tension
     • conversational skills than grammatical accuracy
   • attitudes and motivation
     • positive attitudes cause success in learning
     • instrumetal and integrative motivation
   • identity and ethnic group affiliation
     • identity and investment play important roles in learning a second language
   • learner beliefs
     • learners have strong beliefs about how their instruction should be delivered
   • intuition of grammaticality
     • adult learners may learn language in a way that is different from the way young children learn
   • Age
     • younger learners have more time to devote to learning language
     • older learners are often embarrassed by their lack of mastery of the language