Language Acquisition

Foreign language classes are often put off until high school due to the fact that this is when people believe students are most ready to learn another language. This belief is widely accepted despite the fact children are able to learn to speak like natives in foreign languages, whereas teenagers and adults usually are not able to learn how to do this. Speaking “like a native” entails being able to think in a foreign language without having to translate (Nadia 1). The ability to speak like a native in a foreign language can be easier to obtain when taught the foreign language during elementary school. Once a student passes the prime learning stages, learning a foreign language can be extremely difficult. Adults starting to learn a language have to work through an established first-language

In many schools throughout the country, there are populations of students that have been pushed to the side, with their education thought of as just their specialized teachers’ responsibility. While this situation is changing for some students, such as those with disabilities and students who are lucky enough to have dual language immersion programs in their school, many students who are learning English are still struggling to access the same curriculum that everyone else in the school has a chance to learn. Guadalupe Valdés (2001) looked at the English as a Second Language (ESL) program at a school which she called Garden Middle School. Although Valdés completed this study over fifteen years ago, the experience that her focal students had

One-point teachers should be aware of language acquisition is that the child ability to participate in a classroom may be affect because of the lack of communication, must of the time students that are second language learners tend to stay quite and demonstrate lack of understanding. It is important to identify these students to be able to approach and teach them adequately.

Many popular theories of second language acquisition have been analyzed throughout history. The socialization of L2 learners, their present emotional state that is present at time of acquisition, as well as the comprehensible input and output with the use of scaffolding play a major role in second language acquisition. Let us also not forget the importance of written expression as well as reading comprehension with these L2 learners. Each play a role in language development. However, I believe that in acquiring a language, one must use a variety of techniques that work together to create a balance within the learning environment. Furthermore, all L2 learners learn differently and so a variety of resources will need to be used based on the ability of each student. There are many theories that have been developed by highly qualified experts in the field on linguistics. However, I will address those areas that I agree with as I present my personal theories on second language acquisition.

The student is also within the range of having typical language development for the student speaks clearly and is fluent, along with having a long and strong sentence when discussing information. Therefore, the student within their stage of language development is capable of learning receptive and expressive strategies to gear towards of being a non-atypical child. For there many different strategies to help build a student’s ability to transfer from an atypical language student to a typical language

Many of their learning needs are similar to those of other children and young people learning in our schools. However, these learners also have distinct and different needs from other learners by virtue of the fact that they are learning in and through another language, and that they come from cultural backgrounds and communities with different understandings and expectations of education, language and learning”. (NALDIC, 1999).

When an educator walks into her classroom for the first time, she needs to be prepared to encounter students that come from a variety of backgrounds. The children will be in different stages of language development, and the educator must accommodate for each of these students. Magruder, Hayslip, Espinosa, and Matera (2013) state, “The US Census Bureau projects that by the 2030s, children whose home language is other than English will increase from roughly 22 percent to 40 percent of the school-age population” (p. 9). This increase in second language learners will cause the educator to accommodate for those needs. Second language learners “need teachers who welcome them and recognize their unique abilities, what they know, and what they need to learn” (Magruder, Hayslip, Espinosa, and Matera, 2013, p. 10).

It is not easy to learn a foreign language. It is definitely one of the hardest and challenging thing to do, especially when you are a bit older. Therefore, it is extremely important to be taught the language in a safe environment and with a good teacher. And a teacher has to think about the way they interact with student, if not they can end up scaring them rather than helping them.

She also notes the difference between academia language also known as CALPS: cognitive academic language proficiency and meaningful language - BICS: basic interpersonal communication skills. She mentions how academic language requires more comprehension of the language than interpersonal language; which is more informal and contextual. She also illustrates the importance of treating students for who they are going to become, not the by the fact that they are struggling. A methodology that is represented throughout the book that illustrates the ways teachers can accommodate their language learning students is with scaffolding. Scaffolding is a variety of instructional techniques that are used to assist students to move towards a better understanding of the content and towards independence when it comes to their learning processes. The teacher provides a form of temporary support that will assist the students reach increased levels of understanding and skills acquisition that would not be achievable without aid. All in all, this book will be great for all K-12 teachers and professors; but, I did not review this book because I already did a book review for this book in a different course and it would not widen my prospects of learning more about special

One way that I know will help students learn a new language is from their environment. People learn language from being emerge, the hear it all the time, they speak it and it is spoken to them. People learn a new language when they are continually hearing and speaking the language.

This literacy report is based in a ESOL student which primary language is Spanish. The student is in a 3rd grade class, and his current literacy level is 3.5, which means that the student is in 3rd grade in the 5th month of the school year. The student socializes and expresses himself well in the classroom, which demonstrates good BICS management. However, his academic language, CALP, is not as broad as it should be. The student uses simple and common words, and sometimes talks to his peers and the teacher in Spanish. The student is able to read grade level literacy and write about the same; however, his oral language is not very broad. Since this is an ESOL class, most of the student’s primary language is Spanish; therefore, the students sometimes will communicate in their native language. This is a difficulty that the teacher faces every day because this doesn’t help the students enrich their English vocabulary. In my tutoring sections, I have observed that the student will speak in his native language and the teacher will reply in English, to kind of force the student to speak the English language. However, this is the student dilemma because he wants the teacher to speak and explain certain assignments in his native language. Moreover, the student presents behavior issues, which makes it more difficult for the teacher because she has to spend a good deal of her time correcting the student’s behavior.

Numerous theories try to explain the process of language acquisition. These theories fall into one of two camps. The environmentalist (or connectionist) theory of language acquisition asserts that language is acquired through environmental factors (Halvaei et al. 811). Theorists in this camp believe that a child learns language by gaining information from the outside world and then forming associations between words and objects. The nativist (or rationalist) approach, on the other hand, asserts that it is innate factors that determine language acquisition. Noam Chomsky, often described as “the father of modern linguistics”, falls into this camp as he believes that speech is the result of hidden rules of language that are hidden somewhere in the brain (Rahmani and Abdolmanafi 2111). Steven Pinker, a colleague of Chomsky, is a renowned psychologist, cognitive scientist and linguist who discusses his own theories on language acquisition in his book Words and Rules.

Acquiring and learning a second language do not refer only to handling oral communication skills. It is more than that; it takes the students´ abilities in enhancing their lexicon, their management in syntax, and their perspective about words´ influences in people. Thus, summing this up, it is indispensable that ESL students have a grand deal about linguistic knowledge. In other words, ESL learners not only require speaking, but also reading, writing and thinking in English when they complete whatever English career.

* In the educational field, the teaching learning cycle is a model used in contemporary teaching in both school and adult educational settings. Rothery (1996 in Derewianka & Jones 2012, pg 43) who originally developed the model used this to aim at disadvantaged children for teaching literacy and writing in the KLA (Key learning areas) who were from socially disadvantaged areas. Over time the model has been phased across other areas of the English language such as listening, speaking, reading as well as writing. The key involvement of the teacher also known as ‘expert other’ in the teaching learning cycle is guiding the learner to understand key concepts in academic literacy through use of scaffolding strategies to transform students

In order to learn how writers write, study, and research the abilities of how a individual successfully learn a foreign language, it is important for the learner to know of the factors that are believed to contribute to the ease or difficulty at which one learns a foreign language. Some of these