Wild Child

     This movie was very interesting in many different aspects. One of the most interesting things was the way the villagers treated Victor. He was the object of teasing and sometimes physical abuse. At the institution for the deaf and mute it was as though they were running a circus. People paid to see him. He was obviously a very rare case, but people thought that he was "an idiot" and that he must have been even before he was abandoned.
      The doctor saw potential though. Victor was completely void of any concept of society. After the doctor took him and started teaching him though, he was nurtured in his education, but also by the house maid. Victor's absence of a childhood and communication with humans deprived him of learning a language in his early years of life, but also deprived him of socialization and nurture. These are all things that humans respond to and need in their first years. Victor definitely disproved the Critical Theory Hypothesis. He did learn his first language, most likely his first contact with it, at the age of 10-12 years old. Although he never produced it, it was obvious he understood and in a very short time span at that.
    One of my favorite things about the movie was when he punished him for the right answer. It was so cruel but it showed that Victor could discern between right and wrong. It showed that all humans have the innate capacity to have emotions, and to know justice. It is a whole new way to look at language, the ties between morals, society, and language acquisition. It is not just about learning a language, but a culture, norms, morals etc. Victor had a great task presented to him to assimilate into a society whom's structure he had never been exposed to before. He was taught a lot, but through the research the doctor also learned a lot about language acquisition and what works and what doesn't. Victor responded very well to visuals. He was also organizationally oriented. The doctor used these strengths to help him improve, and Victor did find ways to communicate. This shows that communication is a part of every humans innate capacity, even if it is not oral. Victor knew how to ask for something, and used his own sign language most of the time. Overall, this movie brought up many important factors of language acquisition, and shows that acquisition is personal to each different situation the learner is in and comes from.

Week 2 SLA

            As a child after I learned how to read I started noticing that on some products there was writing I didn’t understand. My mom had a daycare, and on one of the kid’s car seats, there was a part written in Spanish. I inquired what it was, and my mom told me it was Spanish. After that, I spent time trying to “learn” Spanish by simply matching up each word to what I thought was its English equivalent right above it. It did not take me long though to realize that the number of words didn’t match up in most sentences, the English in comparison to the Spanish. After that, I realized there were words that looked the same (cognates, but at the time I did not know what they were). It was confusing to me though; because I figured that the words that looked similar would be at the same position in the Spanish sentence as it was in the English. At that age I was confused by it all, and it wasn’t until I started taking Spanish in school that I realized why they didn’t match up and that languages cannot be learned simply by translation.

            In this chapter I enjoyed looking at the different examples of how L2 learners of English start producing the language. I saw many similarities in the example of the author’s Korean friend. I had a Korean conversation partner last semester and when she had papers to write, I would look over them for her. The grammatical mistakes she made were not often detrimental to the semantics of the sentence, but it made me realize that I sound that way when I speak or write in Spanish. There are so many things that go into SLA, and these factors affect the success of the L2 learner. What I connected from the reading and from the example above of my own earlier attempts at learning Spanish, is that there can be a lot of negative transfer if the appropriate instruction is not provided. We all have the innate ability to learn language, but after we learn our first, we have a set grammar and way that we believe a language system works. Depending on the L2, these transfers and knowledge from the L1 will successfully or unsuccessfully transfer into the L2.

            There are a lot of theories that we are learning about, and each one has different aspects that make sense, and some that don’t as much, but one that I find interesting is the ZPD. Interaction is the way in which one learns language. Without interaction, for example in the case of Genie, no language is acquired. It depends on the environment a person is in, how they develop language. This makes so much sense. I am still blown away by what we talked about last week, how each person is born with the ability to produce all sounds that exist in any human language, but we only develop those that are a part of our environment. The capacity of our brain is unfathomable. In response to Elise’s post, I am also looking forward to learning and clarifying more of the theories. There are so many which seem similar, and tie into each other. What is exciting is the fact that we don’t know everything yet, and there are still things to be learned and theories to be made.  

Second Language Acquisition

SLA is such an interesting thing to look at. I am a Bilingual Education major so I have heard of a lot of the terms and concepts used throughout the readings we had this week. It was good to have solid definitions of them though. Multilingualism is something I feel that most of the population in the U.S. lacks. The reading mentioned Canada and their success in being a multilingual nation with the way they have set up their education system to foster it. It really is surprising how many people in the U.S. are monolingual. A couple semesters ago I did a research paper on English Only and how many people oppose the fact that there are so many different languages that are actively used in our country. It is disheartening that so many people do not see the benefits of multilingualism.
         It is so interesting What, Why and How we acquire language. These readings made some great points, for example about if a child is adequately exposed to more than one language throughout their first three years of life, that they will have two native languages, or simultaneous multilingualism. This ability changes though if we do not start learning a language until later in life. My personal experience is that I did not start learning my second language, Spanish, until I was 12 years old. At that point in time, I did not intend it to ever be my second language. As I progressed though, I realized I wanted to learn more and became more motivated. As the readings stated, motivation is a factor in SLA, especially when the language is not acquired until later in life. Once I was motivated to learn the language I started working harder and immersing myself more in the language. I feel like a big difference between a two year old learning a second language and a 12 year old is that the two year old already has the environment they need. If a two year old is acquiring a second (or two native languages) it is because of the people and environment around them. For a twelve year old, in most cases there must be motivation for them to learn because in the U.S. we are mostly focused on foreign language acquisition.
       Another point I found intriguing was the part about our innate ability as humans to learn language. I never knew that at six months old we are all capable of making sounds in every language, but after reading that it makes complete sense. We don't learn language based on our DNA or our heritage, we learn it based on our environment. So it makes sense that we all must start with the ability to learn any language we are surrounded by; in another sense we can adapt to learn any language. This of course is as a baby, but it is motivating even as an adult to know that we as humans are capable of acquiring so much knowledge and that we are so capable of learning not just two, but multiple languages.
These readings were great review for me, but also presented things in a new and interesting light. What I love about this field is that there is always new research and ideas that can change and alter the way we look at it and what we know. It will never get boring!