This is the second of a two part video series about Second Language Acquisition theories.
Okay.
Let's look at three psychological theories briefly.
The basic aspect of the psychological theories is that every human brain contains the basic
building blocks for learning.
Unlike the Innatists who say there must be a specific location in our brains that contains
Universal Grammar, the psychological theories say that the grammar is not in the brain,
but the ability to learn is in every brain.
Cognitivism thinks of learning a language in much the same manner as learning anything
else.
They believe knowledge is added to knowledge and it just keeps building.
However, when it comes to SLA, they emphasize the importance of paying attention.
Learners are only able to process cognitively what they pay attention to.
Beginning students end up using most of their brain's attention on the meaning of individual
words and are not capable of also processing grammatical endings to the words that might
change it from past to present tense.
As certain words and phrases become automatically recognized, then attention can be paid to
other aspects of the sentence.
Connectionism, on the other hand, does not place as much importance on paying attention
to the language.
For them it is the amount of language that a learner hears or reads, and how often certain
words or language structures are repeated throughout the input.
The greater the frequency of repetition; the more connections that are made in the brain.
So the learner may use language correctly without understanding the particular grammar.
They use it correctly because learners notice that certain words seem to always be used
in certain locations and times, like leaving a store, or they connect the fact that every
time they hear a certain phrase it occurs in relation to an older female.
Again, all these connections are occurring initially subconsciously until they are strong
enough to be consciously stated.
The Competitive Model says that learners are constantly -- in their brains -- fighting
to combine the signal, such as words, with the correct meaning.
By "in their brains," I am referring to their Interlanguage.
Different languages use cues with varying importance, so subject, verb, object are important
word order clues in English, but word order is not as important in Italian for example.
So, part of the Competition Model is the "fight" between the L1 and the L2.
The brain has to figure out what words and endings and grammatical markers are important
in the target language as opposed to what it is used to.
Let's quickly look at some teaching hypotheses that came from these three theories.
First is the Interactionist Hypothesis put forward by Michael Long and others.
They believe that acquisition occurs as learners interact with other learners or native speakers
or any other person.
Whereas Krashen's comprehensible input theory puts a lot of emphasis on the teacher, the
Interactionist Hypothesis focuses on the fact that when we talk to each other, we naturally
modify our speech and language to fit the capabilities of who we are talking to.
It is through these back and forth communication exchanges that language is modified enough
to become comprehensible.
Next is the Noticing Hypothesis by Richard Schmidt.
He argues that nothing is learned until it has been noticed.
He does not go so far as to say that just noticing a word's meaning or a grammatical
structure will automatically result in acquisition.
It is that "noticing" is required as the first step of acquisition.
Generally, this has been perceived as meaning that the learner consciously notices a particular
language aspect, but there is debate from Connectionists that subconscious noticing
will lead to learning also.
I believe I have stated before that I have an eclectic approach to teaching so that I
use anything I think might be helpful.
Most teachers consider interaction and noticing to be key aspects to Second Language Acquisition
and essential to add to the classroom.
In summary, we talked about the psychological theories of Cognitivism, Connectionism, and
the Competitive Model.
Then we looked at two resulting hypotheses of Interaction and Noticing.