1. LEARNING ACQUISITION
Ana Valeria Caicedo

2. Language, Learning and teaching
What is learning?
Is acquisition or getting
Is retention of information or skill.
Implies storage systems, memory, cognitive organization.
Involves active, conscious focus and acting upon events outside or inside the organism.
Is relatively permanent but subject to forgetting.
Involves some form of practice, perhaps reinforced practice.
Is a chance in behavior.
Schools of thought in Second Language Acquisition
Structuralism/Behavio
rism(1940-1950):
Leonard Bloomfield.
Edward Sapir, Charles
Fries and others.
Rationalism and
cognitive
Psychology (1960):
Noam Chomsky
Constructivism: Jean Piaget and
Lev Vygotsky

3. Structuralism/Behaviorism(1940-1950):
Leonard Bloomfield. Edward Sapir,
Charles Fries and others.
Description, observable performance
Scientific method
Empiricism
Surface structure
Conditioning reinforcement

4. Rationalism and cognitive Psychology (1960):
Noam Chomsky
Generative linguistics
Acquisition
Innateness interlanguage Systematicity
Universal grammar competence
Deep structure

5. Constructivism: Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky
Interactive discourse
Sociocultural variables
Cooperative group learning
Interlanguage variability
Interactionist hypothesis

6. First Language Acquisition
Theories of First Language Acquisition
Behaviorism approaches: focused on the immediately perceptible aspects of linguistics behavior and the
relationships or associations between those responses and events in the world surrounding them.
The nativist approaches: language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a genetic capacity
that predisposes us, an internalized system of language.
Functional approach: study of deeper functional levels of meaning constructed from social interaction: cognition
and language development, social interaction and language development.
Issues in first language acquisition
Competence and performance
Comprehension and production
Nature or nurture?
Universals
Systematicity and Variability
Language and thought
Imitation
Practice
Input
Discourse

7. Age and acquisition
The critical period Hypothesis: a biological determined period of life when language can be acquired more
easily and beyond which time language is increasingly difficult to acquire.
Neurological considerations:
Hemispheric lateralization
Biological Timetables
Right-hemispheric participations
Anthropological evidence
Cognitive considerations:
Stages of intellectual development in child:
Sensory stage (birth to two)
Preoperational stage (ages two to seven)
Operational stage (ages seven to sixteen)
Concrete operational stage (ages seven to eleven)
Formal operational stage (ages eleven to sixteen)
Linguistic considerations:
Bilingualism: coordinate bilingualism, compound bilingualism
Interference between first second languages
Interference in adults
Order of acquisition

8. Human learning
Learning and training:
Behavioristic viewpoint
(Pavlov and Skinner)
Rational/cognitive
stance (Ausubel)
Constructivism school of
thought (Rogers)
Types of learning::
Signal learning, stimulus-response learning, chaining, verbal association, multiple discrimination,
concept learning, principal learning, problem solving.
Aptitude and intelligence:
Aptitude: some people are able to learn languages faster and more efficiently than others.
Intelligence: a measured in terms of linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities.
Types of intelligences according Howard Garner:
Linguistic
Logical-mathematical
Special
Musical
Bodily-kinesthetic
Interpersonal
Intrapersonal intelligence

9. Styles and strategies
Learning styles:
Field independence style
Left and right-brain function
Ambiguity tolerance
Reflectivity and impulsivity
Visual and auditory Styles
Learning Strategies:
Cognitive strategies:
deduction, recombination, imagery, auditory representation, keyword, contextualization,
elaboration, transfer, interference.
Socioaffective strategies:
Cooperative
Question for clarification
Avoidance strategies
Compensatory strategies

10. Personality factors
Self-esteem, Inhibition, Risk-taking, Anxiety, Empathy, Extroversion,
Introversion
Motivation:
Term used to explain the success or failure of virtually complex
task: behavioristic, cognitive, constructivist.
Measuring affective factors:
The problem of validity
Self-flattery syndrome
Test of self-stem, empathy, motivation and culturally
ethnocentric factor.

11. Sociocultural factors
Attitudes:: develop early in childhood and are the result of parents and peers’ attitudes, of contact with
people who are different in any number of ways
Second cultural acquisition:
Stage1: a period of excitement and euphoria over the newness of the surrounding.
Stage2: cultural shock emerges
Stage3: gradual recovery, cultural stress
Stage4: assimilation and adaptation
Social distance:
Domination
Integration
Cohesiveness
Congruence
Permanence
Cultural in the classroom:
Individualism
Power distance
Uncertainty avoidance
Masculinity (cultural opposes
femininity)

12. Cross-linguistic influence and learner
language
The contrastive analysis hypothesis: : the stockpile of comparative and contrastive data on a
multitude of pairs of languages yielded.
Level 0- transfer
Level 1- coalescence
Level 2- underdifferentiation
Level 3- reinterpretation
Level 4- overdiferentiation
Level 5- split
Markedness and universal grammar:
Markedness theory: accounted for relative degrees of difficulty by means of principles of universal
grammar.
Universal grammar: language rules acquired by children learning their first language are presumed to be
universal.
Learner language: an approach to analyzing interlanguage is to study the speech and writing learners.
Error analysis: human learning is a process that involves making of mistakes, misjudgments and errors.
Mistakes and error: two different phenomena, mistake (performance error), error (cannot be self-corrected)

13. Sources of error:
Interlingual transfer
Intralingual transfer
Context of learning
Communication strategies
Stages of learner language development
Random error stage
Emergent stage
Truly systematic stage
Variability in learner language
According to linguistic context
According to psychological processing factors
According to social context
According to languages function
Error treatment:
Is the manner in which teachers deal with students errors
Basic options:
To treat to ignore
To treat immediately or to delay
To transfer treatment or not
To return, or not, to original error marker after
treatment
To permit other learners to initiate treatment
To test for the efficacy or the treatment.
Possible features:
Fact of error indicated
Location indicated
Opportunity for new attempt given
Model provided
Error type indicated
Remedy indicated
Improvement indicated
Praise indicated

14. Communicative competence
Communicative competence: Aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages
and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific contexts.
Aspects of Communicative competence: grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, strategic.
Languages functions:
1 instrumental function
2 regulatory function
3 representational function
4 interactional function
5 persona function
6 heuristic function
7 imaginative function
Functional syllabuses: what we have defined above as language functions, curriculum is organized
according such functions.
Conversation analysis:
Quantity
Quality
Relevance
Manner
Styles and registers:
Oratorical
Deliberative
Consultative
Casual
Intimate
Nonverbal communication:
Kinesics
Eye contact
Proxemics
Artifacts
Kinesthetic
Olfactory dimensions

15. Theory of second language acquisition
Is a subset of general human learning involves cognitive variations, is closely
related to one’s personality type, is interwoven with second culture learning and
involves interference, the creation of new linguistic systems and the learning of
discourse and communicative functions of language.
Thanks