1 Psycholinguistics Second language acquisition

2 Acquisition and learning Acquisition – Gradual development – Communicative situations Learning – Conscious process of accumulating knowledge Babies acquire language Long-term residents of a country acquire language

3 Language proficiency Acquisition usually leads to greater proficiency Some parts of the language are more difficult to acquire than others – Conrad effect – Think about linguistic strata Lateralization Teenagers are quicker at learning language (and math) than young children – Cognitive skills are important too

4 Affective (  emotional) filter A term used by Stephen Krashen A barrier to acquisition What activates the filter?  Teenage self-consciousness  Embarrassment about making funny sounds  No empathy with the foreign culture or its speakers  Boring textbooks  No interesting activities  Bad classroom environment  Exhausting schedule

5 Teaching methodsTeaching methods: (1) Grammar translation Like learning any other subject Students learn vocabulary and (prescriptive) grammar rules “Does not enable students to use language in the country” – This depends on the student! – It is probably not true of the people in this room

6 (2) Audiolingual method Advocated by Robert Lado Essentially now discredited, because we now know that language acquisition is not a mechanical process Habit formation – Based on drills (mechanical or meaningful) – Keep doing it until students perform without errors – (but of course they make errors in real life) Syllabus (course plan) based on structure rather than functions – This week: Present tense, not this week: Going shopping in the USA

7 Designer methods The silent way – Teacher mostly remains silent. Students figure out language patterns using colored rods?! – Facilitates learning through discovery TPR – Mostly for kids – Language input with body motions – Acting out stories, giving commands – Not really useful at advanced level Suggestopedia (find a link yourself) – “LEARN ENGLISH IN THREE WEEKS!!!” – Flashcards, soothing music – Students are at a good state of “relaxed alertness” – Both it and TPR are supposed to stimulate right brain motor activity

8 Communicative approach Emphasis is on function, not form And on fluency and communicative quality, not grammatical and pronunciation errors Different attitude to errors – They are part of the learning process – Just like broke – breaked – broke Interesting and meaningful input – Materials from the real world Task-based learning – Groups or pairs complete a task – It should have a non-linguistic outcome (doing something real, not just vocabulary matching or answering questions)

Currently popular TBL Lexical approach Data-driven learning (DDL) Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) 9