Presentation: Are Children Better Language Learners than Adults? (for MQuni; unit grade – Distinction)

Linguistics degree

grade: 88%

Choose a statement about which you have changed your mind during the unit: 'children are better language leaners than adults'

Second Language Acquisition reflection / Learning-Teaching Philosophy (for MQuni; unit grade – Distinction)

Linguistics degree - commentary

SBS's World Watch most days before school, in itself, was a type of listening immersion. The languages of foreign news programmes became phonologically familiar to me with respect to at least some of it passing through Baddeley's (1974) loop into the buffer.

At high school I learnt Japanese from age 14 to 18 in a traditional secondary school setting. Then from age 26 to 32 I lived in Argentina, learning Spanish.

Japanese involved oral practice, usually in pairs, course-book work, listening texts, a movie (the same one many times over). Interaction with Japanese students from our sister school in Osaka, Japan, was also there, when they visited. in Argentina, I spoke Spanish at home and in the street. The practice, if you like, I had watching SBS was the replaying words that goes on, or 'rehearsal', in the articulatory loop: listening practice.

Some SLA experience is out-of-classroom, but key, cross-setting factors were key to learning.

Because the learning experience in high school was very good, Japanese is still very close to me today – I feel proud to be able to read two of its scripts and some charactery. My sister-in-law is Japanese, and so it is in the family. I ended up working at SBS after leaving school; I edited out TV commercials from foreign recordings for broadcast on World Watch, there I also met a Japanese subtitler for World Movies and saw how she performed her work. Spanish is really close to me, as I grew, using it daily over a six-year period of me life.

Aside from self-teaching books, I have also had formal instruction in Spanish at both the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and Macquarie University. In French – formal instruction (3 months), self-teaching in Portuguese (3 months). One day of Norwegian by use of the Silent Way (founder Gattegno, 1976) through our teacher trainer (2008), when we learned basic Norwegian greetings, which I can still remember/use. My surname is Polish and so Polish people have thrown handfuls of phrases at me all my life.

Perhaps, monoculturalism in Australia motivated me to watch exclusively SBS then as a teenager, to look for diversity in languages; my brother-in-law, who is Colombian was motivation to learn Spanish. Effective teaching, I think, in high school, motivated me to keep learning Japanese.

Reflect on your own success or lack of success in learning an additional language. What factors do you think were key to your success or lack of success? Think about the individual and societal factors we have looked at in this course, as well as types of instruction.

I remember hitting a plateau in my Spanish acquisition. A lack of new language coming in, it seemed, was causing depression! Roughly the 3rd to 4th year into SLA, I repeated the same mistakes, people corrected me, and I appear to have been sensitive to it. This is predictable now if I read (Murray & Christison, 2019) about the learning curve of acquisition. There was an 'a-ha' (p.184) moment, I remember, after having dreamt in Spanish. Then a long period of positivity. That, followed by discouragement in a levelling off effect. Key to success in learning Spanish was the structural base I had acquired through self-study before I left Australia – with so many verb conjugations, it's really hard to express basic ideas in Spanish without getting these right first and then understanding other morphology and syntax too.

Unpredictably, I (and the other students) found my learning experience at UBA not quite optimal. One teacher seemed ill-tempered by our mistakes. Another teacher seemed to waffle on until the end of the lesson, checking in with Ss only once or twice (I quit one week before completion – how daft!). It would only take a slight change in attitude to move it from negative to positive, as we were all happy to be studying abroad at university. Another key factor to failing at first was the dialectical nature of Argentinian Spanish: I had to relearn some structural elements of the language and pronunciation when I arrived.

Other key factors to positive SLA (Chamot & O'Mallley, 1994, as cited in Murray & Christison, 2019) have been a certain analytical preference, phonemic ability in the languages (Japanese vowels are almost the same as Spanish!), and preference for memorising (working memory). STRATEGY TYPES included: highlighting newspaper headlines and main points to aid comprehension; listening to my partner read the article before I began the task, keeping a reflection log and asking for correction sometimes from whomever I was speaking to – METACOGNITIVE (p. 235); buying Oxford UP electronic dictionaries for Spanish, French, Japanese and English – notes are organised into moleskins (below)

and cutting a story page in half and trying to guess the meaning before reading the rest, or reading above-level novels trying to infer meaning – COGNITIVE (p. 235); controlled environments (such as speaking with partner's parents) and less-controlled-to-freer practice environments (from talking in the street to talking at home) boosted production – SOICIO-AFFECTIVE (p. 236).  

** teacher training was a real teaching-you-how-to-learn experience, learning strategies were integrated into the training, which we could then utilise ourselves (and in the classroom). Another strategy was that learning other skills in Argentina, e.g., tennis and Japanese one-to-one (spoken in Spanish) would also aid SLA.

How do your experiences of success and failure in language learning inform your teaching and learning philosophy?

After changing my whole idea about SLA following a one-day seminar, a very successful task-based, auditory/kinaesthetic and TPR leaning experience, that, and my immersive experience and trial-and-error with the strategies above, my philosophy has changed. My view is lesson planning should include something for everyone. Teaching should be a commitment to correcting a cultural bias towards visual learner styles: learners, whether group or individual, engage in guided discovery under a variety of conditions. I understand the breaking-out-of-the-shell that needs to occur, the curves in acquisition, the attitude adjustments for SLA, and learner autonomy, i.e., taking responsibility for learning skills and strategies. After all it is more of a (endless) journey than a complete acquisition (Harmer, 2007), even in our dominant (first/native) language. Something like this. 

THIS DOES TAKE INTO ACCOUNT the emergent views against learner styles in ELT. Khazan's (2018) article talks about the ineptitude of learner stye questionnaires such as VARK to determine our style, and the inefficacy in tailoring to those styles anyway (Rogowsky et al., 2015; Kraemer et al., 2009) – do auditory learners want auditory input, etc?  In fact, VARK creator Fleming himself warns against getting 'too carried away' by VARK. My emphasis is on correcting an absence I perceive in variety in the lesson. The idea materials can cater to our likes for visual/auditory/kinaesthetic does appeal to me, but my emphasis is on guided-discovery through a more even use of these.