Chapter 2: Written and SLA

Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition 1.Learning is what many students experienced in high school or college foreign language classes.Learning is a coucious process that involves studying rules and vocabulary. 2Acquistion is subconscious.Students acquiring a language may not even be aware that they are picking up vocabulary or sentence structures.Acquisition occurs as students use language for a variety of purposes.
1. Learning Concious: We are aware we are learning It's what happens in school when we study rules and grammar.
  1. Schumann's Theory of SLA It accounts for the psychological process of language development. Factors that contribute to social distance: Only limited integration of the two cultural group The minority group itself is large to be self-sufficient When the group is very tight-knit When the group has characteristics very different from those of the mainstream culture When the majority group has a negative attitude toward the minority group The learner intends to stay only a short time in the country
    1. What is lateralization? Division of the left hemisphere of the brain and other functions tot he right hemisphere.This process begins at about age two.Children who acquire a second language before puberty usually speak the new language without an accent.Since people who learn a second language after puberty generally retain an accent,researchers have hypothesized that people are no longer able to acquire some aspects of language,such as the phonology,once the brain is lateralized and language is located in the left hemisphere.
      1. Cognitive Factors According to Piaget, children who develop a second language with a nativelike pronunciation have not yet reached the formal operational stage(it happens at age 11 and it is at the point at which more abstract though is possible).Children in the concrete operational stage may be able to acquire the language without needing to analyze the structure of th language.
        Affective Factors 1.Adolecents or adults learning a second langauge may be more self-concious than children.Older learners may be hesitant to try out a new langauge for fear of appearing incompetent.Nervousness can be another factor.The idea of ego is related to general attitudinal factors.Older learners who acquire a SL and speak with little or no foreign accent are often people who are Americanized.
      2. What is fossilization?How we help students overcome it? It's the prececence of certain kinds of errors that persist in the speech of adult second language learners.
        Advantages of bilingual programs over English immersion: When use appropriately,enhences English instruction by making the English more comprehensible. The instruction builds the necessary background for understanding lessons in the content areas given in English. Students in these programs more fully develop their first language.
2. Acquisition Subconcious: We are not aware we are acquiring It's what happens in and out of school when we recieve messages we understand.
  1. Schauman also considered psychological factors,such as motivation,attitude,and culture shock.His concepts of social and psychological distance complement Krashen's theory.Social distance limits opportunities for students to receive the comprehensible input needed for acquisition.Psychological distance serves to raise the affective filter and prevent input from reaching the language acquisition device.
Goal:Sociopsycholinguistics The goal of reading from a sociopsycholinguistics perspective is to construct meanig.Readers are focused on making mening,not on identifying the individual words.To construct meaning,readers use their background knowledge and cues from three linguistic systems: graphophonics,syntaxt,and sematics.Different readers construct different meaning depending on their prior knowledge and their purpose for reading.
1. Two Views of Writing:
  1. Learning view: Traditional Writing Classroom Goal:Learn how to produce a good piece of writing. Method:Begin with the parts and build up to writing a whole text. Teacher directly instructs students in how to form letters,then words, then how to combine words into sentences,and then sentences into paragraphs. Approach to correctness:Writing product must be conventional from beginning. The teacher corrects each piece of writing.
  2. Acquisition View: Process Writing Classroom Goal:Produce good writing and acquire knowlwdge of the writing process. Method:Begin with a message and develop the skills needed to produce the message. Teacher creates conditions for authentic written responses and then helps students express themselves in writing. Approach to correctness: Writing moves naturally from invention to convention. Classmates and others,including the teacher,respond to drafts.
Goal:Word Recognition The goal for a teacher who takes a word recognition view of reading is to help students learn to identify words.Word identification involves recoding the marks on the paper into words readers already know in their oral vocabulary and then combining the meanings of individual words to get at eh meaning of the text.There is a possibility with recoding that readers may change written language to oral language without ever getting at the meaning.Even though there is an assumption that word recognition will lead to meaning construction,there is a danger that students will simply learn to say the words without knowing what they mean.
1. Two views of Second/Foreign Language Development
  1. Traditional Learning View Goal:Teach language directly so students can produce correct language forms. Method:Break language into component parts and teach each part. Classroom activities:Students do drills and excercises to practice language. Attitudes toward errors: Teachers correct errors to help students develop good language habits.
  2. Current Acquisition View Goal: Make language comprehensible so students can use language for different purposes. Method:Use various techniques to make the linguistic input understandable. Classroom activities:Students use language in communicative situations. Attitude toward errors: Errors are natural,so teachers keep the focus on meaning and help students understand and express ideas.

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Chapter 2: Written and SLA

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