LANGUAGE EXPLORER

Hello everybody

Sorry it has been a long time since my last podcast. I’ve been busy lately so I haven’t had time to make one. Today’s podcast is a bit scientific as I have just been reading a book I was given on linguistics. In this book it mentioned the work of Dr Stephen D. Krashen. http://www.sdkrashen.com/ and I have become very interested now in his work.

What is interesting for me is that Dr Krashen has published his ideas in 1981 on language acquisition and learning and I did not know that some of my ideas are similar to the language learning theories he has written about.

In Linguistics, “acquisition” means “the act or process of achieving mastery of a language or a linguistic rule or element”:

We talk of “child language acquisition” and “second language acquisition” for adults.

The interesting ideas he has written about can be read on the website http://www.sdkrashen.com/SL_Acquisition_and_Learning/index.html

What was interesting for me was that Dr Krashen talks about language acquisition and language learning as being different.

When I see some of the ideas of successful language acquisition and learning, I can see the way I have been learning French over the last 17 years, German over the last 7 years and more recently Chinese and Spanish.

In my case, I had been forming my ideas independently, as I have never heard of Stephen Krashen until yesterday.

Here are some of the things that make for a successful language acquisition and learning student.

Some characteristics
 good students pay attention to form
 they monitor their own and others’ speech
 they are prepared to guess
 they always attempt to communicate, to get their message across
 they are willing to appear foolish
 they look for practice – initiating conversations
 they attend to meaning – by attending to context

Important strategies
 clarification/verification of language
 monitoring progress
 memorization words and phrases
 guessing the meaning
 deductive reasoning from situations
 practice-learning on their own

I hope you found this podcast interesting. I am on holiday in Germany for a week, so I will make a podcast in a week’s time. See you soon – bye

PS. Here is an interesting blog I found:
http://languageinstinct.blogspot.com/2006/10/oral-and-aural-skills.html

 

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