Week 2-Readings

Chapter 1: First Language Acquisition

This chapter covered many interesting facts and studies about how children learn their first language. I enjoyed hearing about the research findings and the implications for ESL/EFL instruction.
Some facts I found most surprising and interesting were:

Children do not simply imitate adults
This is proven with the fact that adults do not ever say sentences such as, "I gaved Sally a book". This proves that children are scientists of language and they are simply testing what works and what does not.

Telegraphic speech
In the early months of a child's life they often speak using only necessary words such as nouns and verbs. A child may say something like "More milk". Over time these short sentences become fleshed out with adjectives and adverbs.

Children are aware of and able to practice Communicative Competence
This idea shows that a child's culture and background can illustrate and define the type of language that child uses and where he/she uses it.

Norm Chomsky's idea of ambiguous sentences
English seems to be a very complicated language when looking at it through Chomsky's eyes. He claims that many sentences are ambiguous in nature and on their surface structure and can contain two deep structure meanings. For example, "I feel frustrated with you right now". One could mean on a deeper level that he/she is frustrated because of the other person or they could imply that they are frustrated at the same source with that other person.

Overall this chapter was very informative and I was excited to read more about how 1st language acquisition research offers insights into 2ND language acquisition.

Chapter 2: Written and Second Language Acquisition

Although I am very aware that I am not an experienced teacher I have made a few decisions from this chapter about how I want to approach reading, writing and literacy in general in my future classroom. It is easy for me to make this decision as a student because I am not faced with students, however, I find it helpful to apply my teaching tool box to my imaginary classroom.

I found that I appreciate the sociopsycholinguistic approach to reading more than the word recognition approach. Background knowledge seems to be of the utmost importance when learning or acquiring something knew. It allows students to make connections to information they already know and therefore cementing the new information.

I also appreciate the idea of acquiring new vocabulary in a variety of contexts and not simply give a list of words to look up. To use my own background knowledge on the subject, when learning Spanish I would feel frustrated at times because I felt I was looking up the same words over and over again. This frustration was experienced even after using flashcards over and over again. I expressed this frustration with one of my Spanish professors and he told me something I will never forget. "It takes 10 times of looking up one vocabulary word to retain it. When finding it in context it takes only have that to retain it." Now I have never verified this statement through research but I can attest even to this day that I can never remember the meaning of "a traves".

With the approach to writing I find that I appreciate the Process classroom. I love the idea of using reading to enrich writing. Also, the activity and research surrounding "read and retell" is fascinating and undeniably effective. (I can never remember which to use affect vs. effect). Also, the idea of error correction in the process classroom appears to work well with students. It is hard to speak a foreign language in front of people and to be corrected out right can be damaging not only to a student's confidence but to their whole language process.