Lightbrown and Spada

I really enjoyed reading this chapter of the text. It helped to sort out many of the theories and methods we have learned about SLA. One quote that I identified with personally was “This ‘drip-feed’ approach often leads to frustration as learners feel that they have been studying ‘for years’ without making much progress”. This is what I’ve been saying about my own SLA for years. Every time I fill out a form asking how proficient I am in Spanish and how long I have studied it, I feel as though my proficiency should be increasing with the number of years I have studied. I still cannot bring myself to check the “fluent” box, even though I feel as though after 9 years of study, that I should be able to. I feel that I have largely missed out on the opportunity to have frequent and meaningful interactions with native speakers throughout most of my SLA experience.

A strategy that I have used a lot in my own acquisition is to read only to get basic meaning. Because of this, my vocabulary in Spanish is not very extensive. I was surprised by the fact that “in order to guess the meaning of new words in text the reader usually needs to know 90%or more of the words in that text.” That is a huge percentage. I still don’t know that large of a percent of the words in new Spanish texts I read. I have in the past couple of years been trying to readjust this strategy of mine, as it is not beneficial to me in the long run. Old habits die hard though! The last section that really interested me was about a speaker’s ability to produce the phrasing and stress patterns of a language being more important than being able to produce each individual sound. I took French for a two semesters in college and my teacher always said that even if you had perfect grammar, that a native speaker won’t understand you unless you speak in the “melody” of French. Thus in my class, it was more important to produce the phrasing and stress patterns. I wish that all my Spanish classes had been taught like this as well! There are so many factors, methods and theories that go into SLA, this field will continue to change and be an interesting resource that is necessary to keep up with in order to use it in our classrooms.