Language, learning and teaching.

Summary 2

1. What is a permanent struggle in teaching / learning?

The permanent struggle is to reach beyond the confines of your first language and into a new language, a new culture, a new way of thinking, feeling, and acting.

2. Are we equipped with a do-it-yourself-kit to acquire languages?

Acquire language is not a kit of easy steps that can be programmed.

3. Why do people learn or fail to learn a language?

Many variables are involved in the acquisition process; total commitment, total involvement, a total physical, intellectual, and emotional response are necessary to successfully send and receive messages in a second language.

4. Name the issues to consider in second language acquisition

The issues to consider in SLA are a multitude of questions that are being asked about this complex process:

Who?

What?

How?

When?

Where?

Why?

5. What are the motivations to learn a language?

The motivation to learn a language is understand the system and functioning of the second language, speak and understand a language, its phonemes and morphemes, words and sentences and discourse structures.

6. What is a PARADIGM?

Paradigm is an interlocking design, in this case is a theory of second language.

7. Give 3 definitions for LANGUAGE.

1.- Language is systematic

2.- Language is a set of arbitrary symbols

3.- Language is used for communication

8. What is the relation between language and cognition?

-Explicit and formal accounts of the system of language on several possible levels (most commonly phonological, syntactic, and semantic)

-The symbolic nature of language; the relationship between language and reality; the philosophy of language; the history of language.

-Phonetics, phonology; writing systems; kinesics, proxemics, and other “paralinguistic” features of language.

-Semantics; language and cognition; psycolinguistics.

-Communication systems; speaker-hearer interaction; sentence processing.

-Dialectology; sociolinguistics; language and culture; bilingualism and second language acquisition.

-Human language and nonhuman communication; the physiology of language.

-Language universals; first language acquisition.

9. Which are some LEARNING definitions?

1. - Learning is acquisition or “getting”

2. - Learning is retention of information or skill

3. - Learning is a change in behavior

10. Can we define TEACHING apart from learning?

Teaching cannot be defined apart from learning. Teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, setting the conditions for learning.

11. What is the importance of our PEDAGOGICAL PHILOSPHY?

Is very important, because is how I see the learner learns, my own teaching styles, my approach, my methods, and my own classroom techniques.

12. Refer to the 3 schools of thought in SLA? 

1. - Behaviorism, description, observable performance, scientific method, empiricism, surface structure, conditioning, reinforcement.

2. - Cognitive Psychology, generative linguistics, acquisition, innateness, interlanguage systematicity, universal grammar, competence, deep structure.

3. - Constructivism; interactive discourse, sociocultural variables, cooperative group learning, interlanguage variability, interactionist hypotheses.

13. Describe the GTM

A classical method, focus on grammatical rules, memorization of vocabulary and of various declensions and conjugations, translation of texts, doing written exercises.