Linguistics Second Language Learning and Teaching

Question: Discuss about theLinguisticsfor Second Language Learning and Teaching. Answer: Part 1 Language is a complex system of sounds and humans generally gain the ability to learn and acquire language at an age of four to six years. However, the learning capability may vary from person to person. Research shows that humans have the capability to learn more at specific periods of their life. At certain stages, the brain learns to gain certain propensities from the environment in which he lives (VanPatten Williams, 2014). For instance, he learns the language of humans and slowly learns how to use it. Humans learn to use and implement language till puberty. In fact, in some cases it has been seen that children learn foreign language more quickly and efficiently than adults (Benson Voller, 2014). Humans learn a language through speech sounds, signs, and symbols. Saussure talks about acquisition of human language. Meaning is attributed to a word. The meaning itself is not contained within it. Sign comprises the linguistic form and the meaning. Both the signifier and the signified are contained within a word (Rock, 2016). When one teaches a child any language, he/she makes him her acquainted with the objects and the meaning contained within it. For instance, a child learns the word cat when he is shown a cat and told that this is a cat. He first sees the expressions that are created on the face of the speaker when the word is pronounced (Ortega, 2009). His understanding of the word cat may differ from the understanding of the speaker. He may take the word cat to be sat. It is pronunciation that is the only physical part of a language and demands programming through neuromuscular activities (Joseph, 2013). A child observes the motor skills in the tongue, lips, throat- precisely the lower face. It is to be noted that all these organs of the body are involved in the production of sound and speech. An individual thus, first learns by seeing, watching, and observing. However, the exact sound produced by the speaker is not always replicated by the listener. The listener may perceive the speech sound completely in a different way. Once a child learns to perceive speech sound, he slowly and gradually learns to associate the meanings attributed to words (Harris, Taylor, 1997) In case of second or foreign language, a person is likely to develop foreign sounding accents when he/ she has learned the first or native language completely. He then learns the second or foreign language in the later period of his life. Compared to adults, children learn languages very quickly and easily. An adult must struggle and toil to learn a new language. However, a child picks up any language out of thin air. For him, it is a part of a play. Children initially communicate using vocalizations and gestures (McGilvray, 2013). It is only through vocalizations and gestures that they make their intents known to others. Children then learn words and their usage. New functions slowly take over the old functions. They learn words and associate the meanings attributed to them. They learn to express their feelings through words which they earlier did through preverbal means. Though the language that humans learn differs from one place to another, the way in which children learn to use a language is universal. Children, with time, acquire the meanings, forms, and uses of utterances and words. In this regard, there are two methods in which the language skill of an individual is developed. There are two approaches for development of syntax. The first is the empiricist approach in which children learn the syntactic rules. The second is the nativist approach in which the principles of syntax are innate. In this approach, the principles are transmitted through genome (Mitchell et al., 2013). The nativist theory was proposed by Naom Comsky. According to him, children are able to learn and acquire a language since they have the innate ability of language acquisition. It is a unique accomplishment of humans. Children have language acquisition device or the LAD (Chomsky, 2014). The LAD is the area of the human brain wherein all the rules of a language are set. The syntactical rules of all languages are stored in the brain of a child. Hence children are able to construct novel words and sentences using their vocabulary. Chomsky claims that it is this innate quality because of which children are able to learn a new language (Moro et al., 2015). Whatever children hear, the external linguistic input is not sufficient to explain their ability to know and learn a language. Naom Chomsky argues that the external input from the environment has limitations and is full of errors. It is thus impossible for a child to learn a language solely from the external environment until and unless he has the innate quality of acquisition. It is because of the language acquisition device that children are able to learn a language wholly and completely despite errors and incomplete information from the external environment (Cohen, 2014). On the other hand, the empiricist theory contrasts Chomskys nativist theory. The empiricist theory suggests that since there is enough information in the external environment and children are able to receive that information properly, they do not need any innate language acquisition device (De, 2014). The existence of an innate device is purely based on assumption. Since external sources are available, there is no need to assume that there exists an innate device and it is only because of this innate device that children are able to learn and acquire a language. Empiricists believe that the brain processes in a human are sufficient for the acquisition of a language. It is of utmost importance that a child is actively engaged with the environment while learning a language (Culler, 1976). The adult or teachers must communicate with the child appropriately that is, he must carry out child directed speech or the CDS. It is through the child directed speech that the children are given the information required to learn a language. According to the statistical language acquisition, children acquire and learn language through perception of patterns (Givn Ranch, 2013). According to the interactionist perspective, children learn language through interaction and communication. Learning a language means creating meaningful ways of communication. It is only through interaction that children are able to learn a language. Language, is, in fact, a mode of communication. It is in the first six years of a human life that a child learns a language. In the first three to twelve months, a baby is merely able to laugh and make cooing sounds. He communicates through symbols and gestures. Children start producing babbling sounds by the age of twelve months (Hoff, 2013). This is followed by jargon phase whereby children start producing unintelligible strings forming a conversation like tone. The babbling sound thus sounds meaningful. In the next twelve to eighteen months, children start uttering words that are rich in meaning. More words are added to the vocabulary and children gain understanding of words and their surrounding environment (de Saussure, 1983). In t he next eighteen months to two years, children start putting the words in their vocabulary together to form meaningful phrases and sentences. In the next three to five years, the child becomes a preschooler and is able to construct longer and more meaningful sentences. He/ she can now put words and sentences together in a variety of ways. Finally, once the child turns six, he/ she begins to understand the working of language. They learn how to use them and are able to find out meanings out of their framed sentences (Hyams, 2012). A child thus first learns to produce sounds by listening and watching others in the environment. It is only after acquisition of speech sounds that a child develops the ability to learn a language. Speech is completely a physical activity controlled by the brain and needs the organs of the lower face such as lips and the vocal cords. Language involves both written and spoken language (Schtze, 2016). Part 2 Teaching English as a second language to the non-native speakers, can in itself be a highly challenging task. The main challenge while teaching English to a non-native English speaker, lies in the fact that a child takes a long time in acquiring the phonemes and speech sounds of the new language. I have a personal experience of teaching English to a 5 year old child, who had been learning English for the first time in the English class. In this part, I intend to discuss as well as critically analyze the language acquisition process of the particular child, as observed by me. The child had been raised by a Chinese couple, and as a result the child had been accustomed to the Chinese language since his childhood. As it is a well-known fact, that any child mostly acquires a new language between 18 months to 4 years, this particular child failed to receive sufficient exposure to English language, during the very early phase of his life. Consequently, the biggest challenge has been to create an organic need for the child to employ the words of the minority language (here English). However, language learning process does not start off very fast. During the very first few weeks, (approximately a period of 2 weeks), the child was acquainted with his native language only, and consequently refused to communicate via the newly learnt English language. This period can be referred to as the silent period, when the child had been more of an observer, trying to observe, and willing to imitate the facial expression, gestures or speech sounds of the teacher. The way I was enunciating common words, such as Book, Ball, or Play, was being observed by the child, who however refused to communicate with me in the foreign language. Once, the silent period has passed, from the third week onwards, the child started enunciating indistinct words, though the sound utterances were not always right. In this stage, although the child have been acquiring new words of English language, he had been hearing n the last couple of weeks, he was unable to form a symbolic association (lantolf et al., 2015). Each word, as even Saussure, had pointed out in his structuralism theory signifies a specific concept that becomes a symbol for the learner, in the language acquisition process. Thus, the picture teaching technique becomes a very fruitful way of teaching new language. The child already had clear acquaintance with the idea of common objects or things, such as play, food, or boy, and hence I used pictures, for each object, to signify the object as well as the concept, it was denoting (Mitchell et al., 2013). The child started forming pictorial association between the objects seen, and the English words signifying the same that helped him remember the words. However, it should be noted that the utterances or the speech sounds of the child were far different from that of the native English students. The English phonemes do not exist in the Chinese language, and more importantly the stress and the intonation patterns of the English language are completely different from those of the Chinese language. The child was unable to distinguish between the pronunciation of ship, and sheep, or full and fool, and he was pronouncing both the words in each set alike. Besides, often when the child was being shown the picture of sheep, he confused it with ship, and wrote the same. Each word in itself stands for, and signifies a specific concept, and in case of a new language learning process, I observed the child got confused between the two similarly spelt and almost similarly pronounced words. I realized that the phoneme video and audio lessons became imperative to solve the problem. During the next stage, although this kind of confusion was not occurring frequently, I observed that the child struggled to comprehend the underlying structure of the language. While he was well-aware of the commonly used inputs of language, the child was unable to understand the rules of word segmentation. The question is how to frame a grammatically correct sentence, or how to absorb the statistical regularities of apparently meaningless acoustic events. I observed that the child had rather shown a fast progress in detecting the probabilities with which one syllable predicts the other. Again, I also observed that the child encountered a huge challenge in assessing the distribution of language elements, and consequently he was not able to understand the significance of grammatical endings ( -s, -ed) or even the function words (to, of ), while constructing a sentence in English. While trying to say, My mom brought me the bag, the students said I brought my mom a bag (Cook, 2013). Thu s, the parsing process, which forms an important part of the language comprehension process, was not developed in the child. However, gradually when I introduced classroom reading sessions and made story-telling sessions a mandate, I was able to solve this problem. Gradually, by engaging in the story-telling and hearing process, the child was finally able to assemble a string of elements among the different inputs of English language. In case I wish to evaluate the teaching method, I would like to appreciate the video and audio method that was being adopted for improving the phoneme and the speech sound of the child. Besides, the video lessons can help in grabbing the attention of a child in a more effective way, and can eliminate his unwillingness or fear of learning a new language. These lessons can easily appeal to the sense of the child, enthuse him to actively participate in the learning process, and can also improve his vocabulary as well (Rost Candlin, 2014). The story-telling sessions, also was a good thing as it helped in fascinating the child, thereby making him a more active and fast learner. However, I feel that I should have also used familiar Chinese images, themes or mythological stories, while explaining concepts or narrating stories in English. Instead of telling him story of Cinderella, I could have used stories of Yeh-Shen, so that the child can easily recognize the inner meaning. Besides, I co uld also have recommended the use of mobile apps to the child, that could help in the effective, faster language learning process. A child developing and acquiring a new language, requires huge effort and time as well as guidance from the teacher and the family. It is not merely about the words, or the grammatical rules, but it is all about learning the new concept and a new framework as a whole. In order to learn a language in an integrated way, the teacher requires focusing on the development of more advanced vocabulary and phrases. The child must not be taught a new language, but must be encouraged and inspired to experiment new words and phrases. 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