YOU JUST HAVE TO LOOK FOR "HORRIBLE HISTORIES" IN YOUTUBE AND YOU´LL FIND LOTS OF VIDEOS...
Learning is an adventure!
sábado, 15 de noviembre de 2014
LEARN HISTORY WHILE HAVING FUN!!!
THIS IS A FANTASTIC SITE TO LEARN HISTORY IN A VERY DIFFERENT WAY!!! YOU CAN FIND LOTS OF VIDEOS WITH ACCURATE INFORMATION (IT´S FROM THE BBC), AND YOU WILL LEARN A LOT WHILE HAVING FUN!!!
YOU JUST HAVE TO LOOK FOR "HORRIBLE HISTORIES" IN YOUTUBE AND YOU´LL FIND LOTS OF VIDEOS...
YOU JUST HAVE TO LOOK FOR "HORRIBLE HISTORIES" IN YOUTUBE AND YOU´LL FIND LOTS OF VIDEOS...
martes, 4 de noviembre de 2014
miércoles, 22 de octubre de 2014
Hi everyone! Here I´m leaving the link to our presentation on "Teaching pronunciation". I uploaded it to Google Drive, please tell me if the link works. I´m also leaving below the link to the powerpoint templates to prepare games. Hope you find them useful!
Powerpoint templates
Powerpoint templates
miércoles, 8 de octubre de 2014
Which will be
my baby´s first words? If this is one of the thoughts that cross your mind and
you do not have a clue of which the answer could be, you should probably talk
to a mother whose child already speaks, and from there you will infer what your
child´s first utterances will be. This is due to the fact that all children
acquire language in much the same way, following more or less the same order. Otherwise,
how is it possible that a child from Argentina and a child from China produce
the same sounds at around the same age?
The nativist
position states that any human child learns any human language whatever the
situation; they learn it effortlessly, regardless of culture, intelligence or
personality. This is why I strongly support this theory of language
acquisition. I believe we come to the world with a predisposition to acquire language;
otherwise it would be too hard to explain how it is that all children in the
world learn to use their language in much the same way and in such a short
period of time.
It is a common
belief that children acquire language through imitation. I myself used to have
that idea before being exposed to these theories of language acquisition. But,
do children really acquire language via mere imitation? If this was the case,
they could only imitate what they hear and they would never be able to discover
what not to say or to create things which they have never heard before.
What is more,
there is not only the poverty of the data available to the learner; there is
also the complexity of language. So, if the child´s mind could not create
language knowledge from the data in the surrounding environment, given
plausible conditions on the type of language evidence available, the source
must be within the mind itself. Therefore, the data in the stimulus are too
thin to justify the knowledge that is built out of them.
Did you ever try correcting your child when he/she
made a mistake? Did it work? Most probably not, and the reason for this is that
some children are corrected by their parents and some are not, yet all acquire
language, so acquisition cannot crucially depend upon correction. Therefore, as
Chomsky concludes, a model of language acquisition cannot rely on a particular
feature of the environment unless it is available to all children.
Acquisition of
language is, to Chomsky, learning in a peculiar sense, it is not acquisition of
information from outside the organism, it is internal development in response
to vital, but comparatively trivial, experience from outside. So, knowledge of
language needs experience to mature, without it nothing would happen; but the
entire potential is there from the start. The physical basis of UG means that
it is part of the human genetic inheritance, a part of biology rather than of psychology.
UG theory aims to explain grammatical rather than pragmatic competence:
principles of UG are incapable of being learnt by social interaction.
The lingüist recognizes
three possible types of evidence for acquisition. First comes positive
evidence, which can set a parameter to a particular value. Then comes the
direct negative evidence (corrections by the speech community) and finally
there is the indirect negative evidence (the fact that certain forms do not
occur in the sentences the children hear may suffice to set a parameter).
Positive evidence alone is insufficient to acquire the principles of UG. The
alternatives to innateness are insufficient because they rely on positive
evidence, or they occur too rarely or too inconsistently.
I believe one
of the weaknesses this theory might have is that Chomsky concentrates too much
on the grammar aspect of language and does not go deep into the social
interaction or the functions of language. However, he does not deny the
importance of social context, he was only not interested in studying it As Cook
and Newson state “UG theory has a unique central place in first language
acquisition studies. But it is only part of the broad picture. UG theory is
concerned with the acorn rather than with the tree in all its complexity; vital
as the acorn may be as the source of growth and development, for many purposes
the leaves, the wood, or the blossom are more important. The danger is that UG
may be seen as a threat to other ideas of language development, rather than as
a complementary theory that accounts for a specific area of vital concern to
those interested in the unique properties of the human mind”.(P.124)[1]
All things
considered, I believe the innateness hypothesis of language acquisition is very
strong and reliable, since it is able to answer the main questions that any
theory of language acquisition should be able to answer, namely: why is it that
children follow more or less the same order when acquiring a language?; how is
it that they acquire the language is such a short period of time and how the
two systems (the system of sounds and the system of meanings) are acquired? So,
even though Chomsky´s theory may still lack some explanations, I strongly
believe that all the afore mentioned explanations of the process of language
acquisition give enough credibility to this theory.
[1] In Cook, V.J. and Newson, M. (1996) Chomsky´s Universal Grammar. An introduction -2nd
edition. Blackwell (Chapter 3)
_______________________________________________________________
Here I´m leaving a link to an interesting video on this topic!!!
Imitation theory vs innateness theory of language acquisition
miércoles, 1 de octubre de 2014
Interesting website for teachers and learners of English as a Foreign Language!!!
http://americanenglish.state.gov/resources/american-rhythms#child-1628
http://americanenglish.state.gov/resources/american-rhythms#child-1628
miércoles, 24 de septiembre de 2014
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