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Psycholinguistics

Second language acquisition

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Acquisition and learning Acquisition

– Gradual development– Communicative situations

Learning– Conscious process of accumulating knowledge

Babies acquire language Long-term residents of a country acquire

language

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Language proficiency Acquisition usually leads to greater proficiency Some parts of the language are more difficult to

acquire than others– Conrad effect– Think about linguistic strata

Lateralization Teenagers are quicker at learning language (and

math) than young children– Cognitive skills are important too

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Affective (emotional) filter A term used by Stephen Krashen A barrier to acquisition What activates the filter?

Teenage self-consciousness Embarrassment about making funny sounds No empathy with the foreign culture or its speakers Boring textbooks No interesting activities Bad classroom environment Exhausting schedule

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Teaching methods: (1) Grammar translation

Like learning any other subject Students learn vocabulary and (prescriptive)

grammar rules “Does not enable students to use language in the

country”– This depends on the student!– It is probably not true of the people in this room

http://www.nthuleen.com/papers/720report.html

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(2) Audiolingual method Advocated by Robert Lado Essentially now discredited, because we now know that

language acquisition is not a mechanical process Habit formation

– Based on drills (mechanical or meaningful)– Keep doing it until students perform without errors– (but of course they make errors in real life)

Syllabus (course plan) based on structure rather than functions

– This week: Present tense, not this week: Going shopping in the USA

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Designer methods The silent way

– Teacher mostly remains silent. Students figure out language patterns using colored rods?!

– Facilitates learning through discovery TPR

– Mostly for kids– Language input with body motions– Acting out stories, giving commands– Not really useful at advanced level

Suggestopedia (find a link yourself)– “LEARN ENGLISH IN THREE WEEKS!!!”– Flashcards, soothing music– Students are at a good state of “relaxed alertness”– Both it and TPR are supposed to stimulate right brain motor activity

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Communicative approach Emphasis is on function, not form And on fluency and communicative quality, not

grammatical and pronunciation errors Different attitude to errors

– They are part of the learning process – Just like broke – breaked – broke

Interesting and meaningful input– Materials from the real world

Task-based learning– Groups or pairs complete a task– It should have a non-linguistic outcome (doing something real,

not just vocabulary matching or answering questions)

Currently popular

TBL Lexical approach Data-driven learning (DDL) Computer-assisted language learning

(CALL)

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