ESL Learning English

Language Exposure and Language Acquisiton

Learning a Language is a complex activity though it is acquired with utmost ease by children within a few years.  Trying to identify the factors which enable  children  to acquire their mother tongue and trying to implement similar procedures in second language teaching has been a never ending quest.  The first and foremost requirement for any language acquisition is exposure to that language in a natural way and the chance to communicate one's ideas and feelings through that language.

It is unfortunate that in India students spend years in schools and colleges memorising  rules of grammar and learning answers to strange questions based on stranger lessons  which focus on one structure at a time.  Even in English medium schools right from the primary education pupils are supposed to memorise answers to questions like – ‘What is a Noun? What is a Verb?’  Their teachers use their mother tongue to communicate with the children and use English only to read out sentences from the textbook before translating them into their mother tongue. It is not surprising then that the students do not possess the  basic  language competence.  At the Postgraduate level too they have to be given special programmes to help them unlearn whatever they have learnt in schools and colleges and to teach them basic  language skills.

L1 Acquisition and L2 Learning

Three to six  year old children are able to use their mother tongue for a variety of purposes.  They accomplish this great feat with the innate competence they possess and without the help of linguists, pedagogues, trained teachers or hoards of books, materials and other aids.  They get no training in learning strategies and they do not  have to appear in any examinations. The ease with which they learn makes a mockery of the tremendous human effort put in to improve the teaching and learning of languages.  Millions of people all over the world begin to learn a second, third or fourth language in schools and colleges every year and yet are unable to compete with  six year olds who are able to build up a systematic working knowledge of a language from the chaotic, unplanned exposure received from people around them.  These people are not trained teachers and they do not follow  courses prepared by expert material producers. They do not try to make a selection of structures and vocabulary items and grade them according to what their children should be exposed to from the first year to the sixth year.  If this is the case with mother tongue learning why is it not possible to help the same children learn a second or third language in a formal situation?

There are many who acquire a second or third language in an informal way when they shift to a place where not many understand their mother tongue. Then they feel the need to learn the language used in the new environment they have moved into and most of them accomplish it in three to four years.

The acquisition of mother tongue at home and the  acquisition of a second language in natural contexts have a lot in common.  A person may acquire native like competence in a new language if  he feels the need to learn and if  he has the chance to learn from real life exposures. The competence he acquires may depend on the person’s mental flexibility  and the readiness to adapt to new experiences .  The person may stop learning when the need to improve is no longer felt or when the purpose for which the language is learnt can be realised with the acquired level of  competence.

The learning of languages in formal situations differ considerably from the situations mentioned above.  It would be useful to identify some of the major differences and arrive at some plans for bringing the formal learning as close to acquisition as possible.

Some part of the first language is `learnt’ in school and similarly it should be possible to help the learners  acquire a second language in formal learning situations.  To do this, the significant aspects which are an inevitable part of first language acquisition should be identified  and made use of in second language teaching situations.

The two most important aspects of child language acquisition is `speech understanding’ and the ability to understand language beyond the level of production. According to Steinberg (1982) `speech understanding plays a crucial role in language acquisition’.

"With the exception of the odd word or phrase, children are not able to utter words and sentences meaningfully until after they have had the opportunity to hear and understand the words, phrases and sentences which others speak."

Absence of speech production is not an indication of lack of language knowledge.  Huttenlocher (1974) found that children were able to understand speech beyond their level of production. Sachs & Truswell (1976) found that children who could produce only single words could understand and follow speech structures composed of more than one word and novel combinations of known words. There are also cases of children suffering from cerebral palsy who cannot speak but who can understand all that is spoken to them.  Hence, language acquisition may occur without speech production but not without speech understanding.

There are a number of approaches like the natural approach, the total physical approach and suggestopedia which try to bring the formal learning situation as close to natural acquisition as possible.

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