Wild Child

This was a very interesting movie because it is a great test of the critical period hypothesis.  The boy was around seven or eight years old and had not developed language during the critical period for children's knowledge of language to be activated.  The wild child shows that the critical period hypothesis is accurate in some ways.  One example is that we could see the boy really struggling in the movie just to finally say one word.  His innate ability to learn a language was not used; therefore, it was difficult for him to understand and communicate through language.  However, Victor was making progress especially in his ability to recognize letters and words that were associated with certain objects.  In my opinion, he was able to build vocabulary in his mind and understand what people were talking about but had no sense of grammatical rules and how to produce the words through speaking.  

I thought it was really sad how the townspeople reacted to him when he came to the village.  They put him in a barn with straw and treated him like an animal.  Rather than coming to visit him like it was a show, I thought people would think of what a tragedy it is that a real human being was abandon and left in the wilderness for eight years of his life.  It seems heartless that they would think of him as merely an animal from the woods. 

Second Language Acquisition

One of the concepts I found most interesting in these readings was the development of interlanguage.  I have taken many classes on second language acquisition but now I feel like I have a better understanding of how the interlanguage is formed.  In her book Introducing Second Language Acquisition , Muriel Saville-Troike explains in detail, the characteristics of interlanguage, which include systematic, dynamic, variable, and reduced system (both in both form and function).  This tells us that the IL is discovered by what the learner can produce and interpret.  I also found universal grammar to be an interesting topic because Chomsky tells us that language abilities exist in children and they only need to build on it to learn the language.  Is this innate resource still available to people who are acquiring additional languages beyond the age of early childhood?  If not, at what age do we lose this innate ability and why?

Chapter 1 and 2

Chapter One

One part I found particularly interesting in Chapter one was on diversity in learning and learners.  While teaching bilingual first grade for the last three years, I have questioned and researched why some L2 learners are more successful than other.  It was interesting to me to read how the thoughts of linguists, psycholinguists, sociolinguists, and social psychologists all differ in their response to why some L2 learners have more success than others.  Psycholinguists make distinctions based on individual aptitude for the L2, which include different learning strategies.  I have found it to be true that students are more successful when a variety of learning strategies (hands-on activities, songs, visual, etc.) are used in the classroom when learning a second language.    

Chapter Two

Chapter two gives a good introduction to the foundations of second language acquisition.  The approaches to the study of SLA address the what, how, and why questions researchers ask about second language acquisition.  Chapter two explains the different perspectives and frameworks including linguistic, psychological, and social.  In addition, this chapter explains in more detail the role of natural ability to learn languages.  This is interesting to me because I started learning Spanish at age 15, which means according to the critical period hypothesis, it would be very difficult for me to reach native fluency.  When I speak to native Spanish speakers, they are able to tell I am not a native speaker by the way I pronounce some of the words or letters.  I would have loved to learn more languages at a younger age when I was still developing.  I think it is amazing that children have the capacity to learn all languages around them!

Early Theories in Second Language Acquisition

In this article, Vanpatten and Williams explain Behaviorist Theories and how language learning is seen as the acquisition of a new behavior.  Children imitate sounds and structures they hear in the environment and reproduce them.  What I found interesting was research on transferring knowledge about the L1 to the L2.  I had always thought this was a positive thing, but in the article they talk about how it can have negative effects as well.  The article also explained Krashens’ theories on SLA.  One hypothesis I can identify with is the Affective Filter Hypothesis.  When I was learning a second language in college, I could easily speak and understand Spanish when I was in a comfortable, natural setting.  However my affective filter was raised when I was in the classroom and felt like I was under pressure to say the right things.  This still holds true in the graduate classes I am taking where the course is instructed in Spanish.