I'm going to talk about my experience in learning the language. This topic was one of the topics that Ms.Huda suggested to us at the first lecture. And I will relate my experience to the theories that we studied in the book.
At what age should second language instruction begin?
I started learning English in the 7th grade in a public school, and I believe that it's better learning the second language at this time not in early stage so the child would be in control of his first language.
As it said in the book it depends on the goal that you're learning your language for. They mentioned in the book two goals: everyday communication, and native-like-mastery. My goal at first was to learn the language for everyday communication, but now since I'm completing my studies in English my goal has changed to native like mastery.
Exposure
"Young children in informal settings are usually exposed to the second language for many hours every day. Older learners, especially students in language classrooms, are more likely to receive only limited exposure to the second language, they also tend to be exposed to a far smaller range of discourse types."
I think older learners in Saudi Arabia are more exposed to the language and its practice more than children.
When I was in intermediate school I was exposed to the language trough T.V movies and series. But the problem is that I was receiving the language without any communication, but still this exposure developed my vocabulary and I was more capable to understand idioms.
Since I'm talking about my exposure to the language through T.V, I want to talk about the importance of translation in movies. Some people believe that it's better to watch non translated movies when you're a beginner. To a beginner I believe it's better to watch them with the translations so you can hear the word and see what it means, so you would acquire it faster than the beginner who watches it without the subtitles.
But now us at this point I prefer watching movies without subtitles because we are at a point that we can understand what we don't know from the rest of the dialogue. With the exception of medical series that have really high difficult vocabulary.
Field independence and field dependence.
Field independence is "your ability to perceive a particular relevant item or factor in a field of distracting items." And Field dependence is "the tendency to be dependent on the total field so that the parts embedded within the field are not easily perceived, although that total field is perceived more clearly as a unified whole." That means field independence would know the parts from the whole, and field dependence would know the whole before parts.
At first when I started learning the language I was more as field independent, I couldn't hire my knowledge of the parts in real life. I know vocabulary and grammar but using them in communication (the whole) wasn't easy.
Now in university parts started to get harder and the whole started to get easier to me, but now I'm trying to equal them so I won't have one field dominating over the other. As it says in the book "it is clear that both FI and FD are necessary for most of the cognitive and affective problems we face."
So I have covered:-
- At which age should 2nd language learning instruction begin. From the chapter: individual differences in second language learning.
- Exposure in learning conditions, from the chapter: explaining second language learning.
- Brown's learning styles, field independence and field dependence, from the chapter: styles and strategies.
# A presentation I did in Applied Linguistics class.
Dec 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment