This is a Wug

“Mockingbird Don’t Sing” is the film I was thinking of in class, which is based off of another case study called Genie. (click on the film title for more information)

Chapter 1 (Lightbrown-Spada)

While my family was still living in Bloomington-Normal, I attended Metcalf Lab School in my elementary days. This meant that I was able to start Spanish in 5th grade, and furthermore, I started learning Sign Language even earlier. I was become rather proficient in the language when I transferred school and no programs were offered. Therefore, my Spanish language skills crept in, and ASL exited. Although I would love to learn other romance languages, I must declare that ASL is the very next language on my list to learn. With this being said, I was intrigued by the comments on page 18-19: “The researchers studied the ability to produce and comprehend grammatical markers in Native signers…, Early learners…, and Late learners.” When you stop to think about it, this very factoid proves how fascinating language really is.

Lastly, it was very interesting to see the familiar phenomena of subtractive bilingualism and additive bilingualism finally put into words. These two concepts play out many times within my heritage Spanish speakers. I personally root for “additive bilingualism.”

I was laughing out loud about the "wug" study because all of my linguistic, nerdy friends have some sort of t-shirt or sticker that looks like the following (just google it):

Chapter 2 (Lightbrown-Spada)

I enjoyed relearning about the different word orders of languages, in the competition model section. Spanish is MUCH more flexible with word order than English, which raises both pros and cons to students trying to learn Spanish. Americans tend to like structure, even in a language setting.

With my past pedagogy and linguistic classes, I was familiar with most of the methods, theories, and models presented. However, I had never really discussed before the competition model, the interaction hypothesis, processability theory, or the noticing hypothesis. As stated in my previous blog, I think each of the ways presented all have both solid and poor instructional elements. It is key to know all the different ones, however, to better formulated your own personalized, holistic views of teaching language.

Comprehensible output hypothesis with an ounce of Krashen’s input hypothesis is what we promote in the Language, Literatures & Culture department (or at least that is my perspective of our pedagogy). Even within the first two semesters, we immerse the students in the target language, all the while saturating them with input and later requiring output (yes, even verbal). I promote this to a certain extent, but I really think that some students need a silent period of just soaking in the whirlwind of another language. Who knows, eh?

Chapter 3 (Saville-Troike)

Wow, these 30 pages were chalked full of theories. I hope I can remember them all! On page 44, I just stopped and stared at Table 3.2 for a few minutes. It was interesting to see the specific, natural orders for English L1 and English L2. I think this type of table is important to keep in mind as we dive into teaching English, not demanding/expecting the certain linguistic forms right away -- such as "third person -s" (which is #9 on the English L2 list). Additionally, the pragmatic functions that Halliday offers on page 53-54 are quite interesting, and I could possibly make the case for interchanging the word "function" for "motive." They seem to be intimately linked.