POST #2: How L1 is Learned.

Before we can describe how children acquire their mother tongue, I think it is necessary to give a first look at the word “mother”. The word “mother” means the prime care giver (it can be female or male) of a child. “Tongue” in this sense means the language that is primarily spoken by this caregiver. Therefore, when the words “mother and tongue” are analysed together, the question is asking for the process by which a child develops their first language. It is believed that children acquire the correct structure of a language by listening to people around them or their caregiver while they speak.
At the same time, we can say a baby begins to communicate at birth through non-verbal communication such as, facial expressions, crying, babbling and other sounds.

Generally, there are three main theories explaining how children learn their first language. All of these theories will help us to describe some aspects of first and second language acquisition.

The behaviorist theory believes that language learning is the result of imitation, practice, feedback on success and habit formation, as we have seen in the previous post. Children are rewarded for correct imitation and the stimulus-response theory believes that there is a stimulus that provokes a response of more and better imitation. Behaviorists also believe that environment plays a very important role in acquiring language, especially during children early language development. However, this cannot fully explain how children acquire language because children are not only imitating same words or phrases from adults but also creating the new words and forming the new sentences.

Linguistic, philosopher and cognitive scientist, Noam Chosmky, believes that there is a logical problem with the way behaviourism approaches language acquisition. The innatism theory believes that human beings were born with language acquisition devices in their brain which contains language universals. Chomsky suggested that there is no need to teach children language since all children were born with an innate ability to discover themselves.
His idea also links to critical period hypothesis which it stated that one would have a hard time to learn one language after they passed a certain period of time, usually before the puberty.

The third one would be the interactionist perspective differs from the innatists' view. They believe that children learned language mainly through interacting with people, included adults. This theory was represented by the psychologist Jean Piaget who believes that language development has close ties to the child's cognitive development acquired through interaction with the world. In fact, he believes that as child comes to understand the world, the language follows.
Another psychologist who supports this theory is Lev Vygotsky, who believes that language development is tied to social interaction. He claims that language is acquired through dialogue. That is his famous “zone of proximal development”.

After seeing all these three theories and what they stand for, I personally think that neither the behaviorist nor the innatist theories are able to precisely encompass the complexity of language acquisition. The most comprehensive theory we have at this point is the interactionist perspective that includes aspects of previous theories and builds its own upon them.
However, given that they all can be interconnected, I do think that all three of them can be useful when teaching, but then again it should necessary to make a balance and pay attention to the correct usage of them, always given the case.

But now the question is, how does our first language influence learning new ones? Well, there is evidence that children try to learn new languages by figuring out a set of rules that govern the language they learned before. This evidence, for instance, includes English learners’ tendency to over-generalize rules and overextend word meanings.
For example, it would be normal to find a sentence such as "I eated an apple" for “I ate an apple”.


This second language learner probably never heard anyone say "ate", yet they have learned that adding an -ed ending to a word usually forms the past tense form. This enables them to create their own sentences by over-generalizing the grammar rule.

L1 and L2 share similarities in their processes, but there are also some important differences between them. A difference related to the case mentioned before could be that errors made by first language learners are generally accepted and frequently not corrected while errors made by second language learners are often corrected.

Finally, I would like to point out something. As I see it, today, if we give a quick look at the current methodologies available, they show that communication is set aside and even neglected. In almost all cases, there are courses that revolve around grammar, patterns, repetitions and memorization without even a human interlocutor to interact with. How could you be expected to communicate if you are never given the chance to speak with a real person? Also, the fact that the work done in class is mostly grammatically oriented. Is this similar to the way in which a child "acquires a language?" I do not think so. Not so shocking why so many people fail in acquiring a second language naturally.
The fact that people think that "passive learning" means that you're not going to learn anything new is certainly a big problem, because that is simply not true. You will learn, and more than you think. Children need some room to breathe and freedom to think clearer.

"Acquisition" and "Learning" always seem to be divided into two opposing paths but in my opinion, as future teachers, maybe it should be our duty to create a third path and "Do both". The sooner, the better. It is important to make sure that our students "acquire" AND "learn" the language.

POST #1: Inheritance from Behaviorism.

It has been more than ten years since I began to learn English. I look back and try to recall from my memory how I began learning English, how my teachers oriented me, how I went through the ups and downs in my journey of learning and how I feel today, at this stage. 

It was back in primary school, at the age of nine, when I was introduced to English, i.e. words, and some simple sentences such as "Hello-Goodbye"; "My name is..", etc and we were encouraged to copy whatever the teacher dictated. The books we used contained mostly some stories, pictures and songs. My teacher spoke each sentence and she translated the sentence into Spanish also. We wouldn't ask questions or try to understand the material. All we did was write and memorize words.   

Even years later, in secondary school, our class teacher wrote some words with their pronunciation and meaning on the blackboard and we were asked to parrot them. Parroting vocabulary was almost regular. I hardly tried to understand things then. It was all so robotically-structured that it didn't even feel that English was a means of communication.
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For the reasons mentioned before, I think that even though some view behaviorism as being outdated, I reckon it is still present in almost all of today’s classrooms in some way.

It is important to remember that behaviorism stands on the foundation that all changes in behavior and learning come from a stimulus-response which is driven by reinforcement. For better understanding, this chain can be demonstrated in the following illustration:-
For example, if we see a student who is acting inappropriately and that student is given a negative response such as not being able to go to recess, they will most likely act better the next time. Likewise, if a student is showing a positive attitude, little rewards like stickers are given to them. This will probably prove beneficial in the long run because the students will want to work for this positive reward.  

Coming back a little to my experience as a student, I had higher expectations for English than any other subjects, that is why I decided to formally study English in an institute. It wasn't until then, at the age of fourteen, that I got familiar with the paradigm shift and learned to learn, to use my memory, to think, to organize my ideas, to reason, to use perception. It wasn't until then that I could understand English as a language.

I would finally like to point out that I'm not saying cognitive skills aren't tested through formal education, just that some teachers do tend to prepare students just to "pass exams". I wish I had opened my eyes in those early stages of my life but that is just exactly how it was, we studied to pass exams.