Perspective on Language Learners

       This article really caught my attention and made me think. We have been talking about the different qualities that "good" language learners possess, but appearance and social status are not ones that I have ever thought of as being important. The study on Eva and Julie were both very interesting. In order to learn English they both accessed social acceptance and ties in order to gain opportunities to speak. Although Eva was an adult and Julie was in kindergarten, they both essentially followed at least part of the time the same road to language acquisition. Their atmospheres and circumstances were very different, but both needed to learn English in order to communicate with those around them.
       I think that as humans we all have an innate desire to communicate with others. Perhaps that is part of the reason why Chomsky says every human has the innate capacity to do so. This desire leads to us being social beings. Humans also adapt to their environment. Julie and Eva did not know the language in their environment, so they found ways to adapt so that they could participate in communication as well as interactions.
       What truly got me thinking was in the last part of the article where it described both Julie and Eva as ''appealing to the westerner's eye". Julie probably looked a lot like most of the other children in her class. For this reason, her appearance did not make her undesirable. As with Eva, she was described as being attractive in respect to western standards. She was fairly easily accepted into the social circle at work, after establishing herself as more than the "ESL immigrant". The article said that another girl in Julie's class, who was South Asian did not have the same fortune when it came to fitting into the class socially with her peers. This makes me wonder, had Eva been unattractive according to western standards, would she have been accepted as quickly, or at all, into the social circle at work? Or would she have continued to be seen as undesirable, not only because of her ESL immigrant status, but because of her physical appearance? Overall, this complicates the issue of SLA even more, but this article has made me think even more in depth about it than before.