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.