Knowledge of Students Flashcards
Behaviorist Theory of First Language Acquisition
humans learn language through a process of reinforcement; through operant conditioning, they learn the rules and patterns of language
B.F. Skinner and operant conditioning
a change in behavior in response to feedback
theory of the mind
an important social-cognitive skill that involves the ability to think about mental states, both your own and those of others. It encompasses the ability to attribute mental states, including emotions, desires, beliefs, and knowledge.
Innate/ Universal Grammar Theory of First Language Acquisition
Noam Chomsky: humans are born with innate language abilities that can be adapted or activated by any language a child is exposed to.
+ all languages share certain properties
+ children exposed to a common language will all converge in competence
+ children will learn linguistic forms for which they have received no input.
+ focuses on developmental aspects of language, not social or psychological
Cognitive Constructivist Model of First Language Acquisition
Jean Piaget: cognitive and language development occurs in universal, identifiable stages
+ learning occurs when a child has a challenge in their understanding of the world
+ Learning is a form of adaptation to one’s environment
+ stages of complexity– you master functional morphemes in a similar order in all languages
Undervalues culture and social interaction
Cognitive Constructivism vs. Social Constructivism
cognitive believes learners create representations of their world on activities, not social interaction.
Social Constructivism Theory
Vygotsky: importance of social interaction in language acquisition. Children learn and are corrected by adults who are more experienced in language.
Zone of Proximal Development
Vygotsky: children learn best when they have a task they can accomplish with others/scaffolding/assistance, but not alone. Then you take that away to demonstrate the learning
discourse
actual language use….language is developed in a specific context, not necessarily via a universal structure
Discovery Learning Theory
Bruner: students earn best when they construct their own knowledge through inquiry, investigation, and problem solving, not when lectured. Influenced our current teaching ideals of inquiry based learning and activities.
Bruner believes that students learn in different ways as they develop, but that the stateges are continuous, not built upon one another, and students can speed up learning, and theat language causes cognitive develoment rather that vice versa.
Constructivist: Piaget/Bruner
Believing that the active role of the learning through successively more complex engagements with the world is best learning. Seek to engage students in reality based scenarios.
Critical Period
there is an optimal age for learning a language and the older you get, the more difficult it gets
Adults rarely achieve full fluency in a second language bc of native accents and complex grammatical structures
Emergent Theory
children learn language by using a simple set of neural networks to process the language immersed in. Children are born with a pattern extraction abilities. social interaction is crucial for this. brain narrows the field of possible meaning by using context, phonological and morphological cues
Pre-speech stage: (0-6 months)
babies make comfort sounds and hear language while distinguishing phonemes
Babbling Stage (6-8 months)
babies babble, with repeated patterns….allows practice of motor skills to learn how to produce basic sounds
one- word stage (10-18 months)
first words produced, overextension and underextension are common (using words too broadly or narrowly)
two word or telegraphic stage (18-24 months)
2 word phrases using lexical not functional or grammatical morphemes
multi word stage (30 months)
complete sentences adding functional and grammatical elements though making errors
Pivot Grammar
A child uses one word as a base to pivot other words around, such as “all” for all gone, all done, and “more” for more milk, more dinner, more kisses
holophrase
using one word as an expression of a complex thought, such as “up” signals “I want up”
comprehension based learning
focuses on building student’s receptive skills, (listening and reading) before producing the language (writing and speaking). They believe that listening comprehension is the most fundamental linguistic skill
communicative approach to second language learning
providing students with genuine, meaningful, experience-based interactions in the target language. Little time talking about grammar and foci on facilitating target language.
grammar translation
explanations of the grammatical structures of the target language. Read texts in target language to translate sentences from L2 to L1
audio lingual
repetition and drills with language skills built from simple to complex structures… focus is on minimal errors and correct pronunciation.
TPR: Total physical response
Using the body to “answer” … aka telling the students to stand up in L2, and having students stand. Can also mean using the body to create physical movements to help remember a term or vocabulary.
Krashen’s monitor hypothesis
that it is natural for students to monitor and correct language intrinsically, but that it is easier to do so when writing rather than speaking, because there is more time to mentally give conscious attention.
Krashen’s Acquisition/Learning theory
that acquisition is an unconscious natural process of using a language; learning is a conscious process. Only acquisition leads to fluency; learning cannot be transformed into acquisition. adults can acquire fluency ina new language but through immersion.
Krashen’s Natural Order
People acquire aspects of language in a natural order, regardless of which language they are acquiring or which language in their primary language. I.e. in English, we learn -ing before -s on verbs.
Krashen’s Input hypothesis
language acquisition takes place most efficiently when presented input that is slightly beyond mastery…where they can use context clues to determine comprehension/meaning
Swain’s output hypothesis: Krashen does not address the output, or speech. That this does not make students want to speak; that only comes when they are unable to express themselves .
Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis
A student best learns L2 when there are few affective factors, such as anxiety, hunger, poverty, etc. Therefore, a natural approach that does not force students to speak before ready is best, and lowering affective factors is best
Michael Long’s Interaction Hypothesis
Comprehensible input should be just beyond an ELL’s mastery–however, places an added emphasis on conversational interactions and partners in order to negotiate meaning–asking questions, clarifying, restating, etc.
Cognitive Strategies in second language acquisition
Students should use a variety of methods such as categorizing, inductive reasoning, deduction, summarizing, memorizing, etc to learn an L2. Using metacognitive strategies such as self monitoring, prioritizing and setting goals also is correlated with student success.
Keyser’s Skill Acquisition Theory
students learn skills by transforming declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge
