The intial problem - 3rd post

So, the language acquisition process that governs a child's learning is simply:

1 – lexicalised items (words with strong meaning)

“mama” “no” “doggy” “food” “eat”

2 – super-structure (arranging words according to the environmental norm, with English its Subject-Verb-Object)

“mama, doggy no eat food.”

3 – cohesive sentences (lots of language input leads to a mimicry of accurately constructed sentences)

“Ma, the doggy isn't eating his food.”

4 – cohesive devices joining super-items (cohesive sentences joined by linking devices)

“Ma, the doggy isn't eating his food but he's eating my food”

(at this point, more mimicry leads to more complex structures)

5 – continual, cohesive and coherent speaking turns/written texts (whether written or spoken, the learner can now engage for continuous periods of time linking sentence frames together with contexual, lexicalised items)

“Ma, the dog is not only eating my food, but he is also ignoring his food. I thought you said that you had him trained? Is this what we can expect from all the animals in this house?”

As you know, children can't speak a language initially and therefore this process is seemingly sequencial. However with adults this is not the case as they already have a mother tongue. Adults learning a second language will learn grammar before they have sufficient vocabulary (lexicalised items). They will also impose their mother tongue's super-structure on the language they are trying to learn. Many other small melds occur which blur this process. This is not an issue provided the learner can identify the language items they are learning into these segments and emphasis each one as appropriate.

My issue at the moment is that I have been selecting and memorising lexicalised items, but I have found that: a) I already know many words which I hadn't realised (listening to catchy songs in Spanish means I recognise a lot of language, rendering many to-be-memorised items obsolete) and b) I have been using the super-structure of subject-verb-object (with slight modifications to suit the target language) meaning that I am brokenly conversational (have been conversing with quite a few people including the laundry lady who spoke about her children for half an hour).

This initial 'problem' provides an opportunity to accelerate the process by doubling up the lexicalised items with accurate expressions encountered in every day life. This should add a significant boost to the 'broken conversation' skills and more contextualised items mean stronger memory as well as very commonly used structures providing the first steps to the cohesive sentences.

The plan - 2nd post

Developmental psychologists have done much work into children's' acquisition of language and the dynamics therein. It is necessary at this point to define a few more things. Children explore their vocal muscles, and therefore sounds, whilst adults need only explore a few which are contrasted against their mother tongue. This suggests that adults are able to make the process much more effective, efficient and conscious. Having said that, they are still bound to the same natural process.

Research suggests that children learn words increasingly fast until they reach a 'critical mass' of vocabulary when they begin combining words into more intricate sentences. These sentences are, of course, natural authentic constructions. They might be 'parentese' constructions (emphasising accent/tone/whatever) but they still have highly collocated lexicalised items i.e. “Does the birdy wirdy want to drinky winky some water porta”. The child grows up with this 'parentese' but notices the modifications of vocabulary (birdy wirdy -bird) but the super-structure (does the ___ want to ___ some ___?) remains the same as does the collocations. 'Birds' 'drink'. 'Want to' 'drink'. 'drink' 'water'. The child evolves unconsciously. Adults can bypass this entire process of exploration and 'parentese' by knowledge of the process and therefore analysing the process and using other techniques to speed up the process.

Step 1 – using the 'Roman room' memory technique (http://www.wikihow.com/Remember-Lists-of-Words-With-the-Roman-Room-Trick) and other mnemonics (http://www.mindtools.com/memory.html), a person is able to memorise huge quantities of words to a high level of accuracy in a short space of time.

Using these techniques of memory, and lists of the 100 most common verbs, nouns, adjectives adverbs and expressions (downloaded from google), I will attempt 100 words/ phrases per week whilst also exposing myself to as many constructions which are frequently encountered in everyday life.

Step 2 – by introducing frequently encountered constructions into memory and noting them down, one can precipitate the second stage of acquisition (noticing collocations and sentence frames). But emphasis must first be placed on acquiring the lists of lexicalised common words.

Bob McMurray writes "Children are going to get that word spurt guaranteed, mathematically, as long as a couple of conditions hold," .... "They have to be learning more than one word at a time, and they must be learning a greater number of difficult or moderate words than easy words. Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, I found that if those two conditions are true, you always get a vocabulary explosion." (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070802182054.htm)

Adhering to these principles, I will attempt 100 words/phrases this week and report on the success/ failure/ changes next week. 

Need to be flexible.

The beginning - 1st post

Organic language acquisition

the journey into psycholinguistics

most language education can be divided into three categories: structural, functional and interactive.

The organic approach doesn't draw lines and distinguish between these. Instead it works with methods, techniques and understandings of language which yield high results. It might draw from these approaches but relies mainly on one thing.... learner autonomy. When the learner is responsible for their own learning, acquisition is faster.

At this point we need to define a few primary concepts.

1- most view language as being comprised of language skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening) and language systems (grammar, vocabulary, phonology, discourse). Institutions educate people in all of these areas, spending precious time doing activities and explaining things which do not necessarily benefit anyone (that is they do not yield significant results). The organic approach focusses on discourse (real life language) but offers up a system of identifying structures from the language therein. It sees all other 7 areas of language studies as off shoots of this (as all the others are perceived as skills developed over time which aren't essential to language acquisition).

2 – an important part of the methodology of learning anything is understanding how the brain retains information. This is a three part concept: motivation, memory and material (the 3 'M's). Each is significant with regards to information retention. If you aren't interested, it wont work (motivation). If you cant recall the information, it won't work (memory). And finally if you are practising artificially constructed exercises, you are using time which could be spent learning more important language items (material). Material also relates to where you get your input: books, films, etc.

3 – the learner must train a variety of cognitive skills into themselves, things which develop through trail and error. These include (but are not defined by) : the ability to identify collocations (naturally occurring groups of words), the ability to predict/ infer meaning of an item (or group of items) from a context, the ability to distinguish between more general items (walk) and more specific items ( a type of walking such as march), the ability to memorise multi-layered items at will, to a high level of accuracy, in a short space of time. These are but a few of the skills which are cultivated by using appropriate methods and techniques.

4 – knowledge about the learning process supersedes knowledge about the material. That is not to say that knowledge of the material is wasted, but if someone knows the history of a word, it doesn't guarentee they know how to use, nor does it mean they are successful when trying to recall it to use it in a situation.

With most learners managing to get to an 'advanced' level in 1-2 years, I will attempt to test out the organic theory of language acquisition by setting a goal of gaining proficiency (complete fluency) within a year. ( although I'd like to obtain an advanced level by the end of 6 months).