TEFL

1)      Acquisition Vs Learning

v  Acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.

For example, all of this is bound up with the age child and what happens to us as our brains develop and grow. Language acquisition is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter’ (Pinker 1994:293).

However, at around the time of puberty, children start to develop an ability for abstraction which makes them better learners, but may also make them less able to respond to language on a purely instinctive level.

v  Learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.

For example, they had asked students to study grammar; they had explained vocabulary and taught paragraph organization. But it didn’t seem to be working and it did not feel right. How would it be, they wondered, if they abandoned all that and instead devoted their efforts to exposing students to English and getting them to use it, particularly given that they were highly motivated to learn.

Finally, the suggestion that acquisition and learning are such separate processes that learnt language cannot be part of the acquired store is not verifiable unless we are able to get inside the learner’s brains.

2)      Innatism, Behaviorism, and Interactionism.

v  Innatism is believes that human beings were born with language acquisition devices in their brain which contains language universals. The language development is a biological function development.

Noam Chomsky is the main person for this theory. He suggested that there is no need to teach children language since all children were born with an innate ability to discover themselves. His idea also links to critical period hypothesis which it stated that one would have a very hard time to learn or master one language after they passed a certain period of time, usually before the puberty.

 Innatism view language as a create process, and they treat environment as nourishment to support the use of the language.

v  Behaviorism is sometimes derided and its contribution to language teaching practice heavily criticized. Behaviorist believes that environment plays a very important role in acquiring language, especially during children early language development.S.F. Skinner was the person who best known of this theory. He emphasized the importance of imitation and repetition in learning process.

Children got “positive reinforcement” during the learning process, thus encouraged them to repeat the same words or phrases, practice and more practice, gradually they would produce the words or phrases by forming “habits”, so that children could acquire language.

However, the behaviorism cannot fully explain how children acquire language because children are not only imitating same words or phrases from adults; they also creating the new words and forming the new sentences.

v  Interactionism is believes children learned language mainly through through interacting with people, included adults and their peers. This theory was represented by Swiss psychologists Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky.

 Piaget believes that children acquire language through their physical interactions with the environment. He also stated that language is a symbol system. Vygotsky concluded that children were able to have a high achievement if they would have the social interact with the others. This is his famous “zone of proximal development”.

3)      Input, Hypothesis – Comprehensible input

v  The input hypothesis, also known as the monitor model, is a group of five hypotheses of second-language acquisition developed by the linguist Stephen Krashen in the 1970s and 1980s. Krashen originally formulated the input hypothesis as just one of the five hypotheses, but over time the term has come to refer to the five hypotheses as a group. The hypotheses are the input hypothesis, the acquisition–learning hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the natural order hypothesis and the affective filter hypothesis. The input hypothesis was first published in 1977.

The hypotheses puts primary importance on the comprehensible input (CI) that language learners are exposed to. Understanding spoken and written language input is seen as the only mechanism that results in the increase of underlying linguistic competence, and language output is not seen as having any effect on learners' ability.

Furthermore, Krashen claimed that linguistic competence is only advanced when language is subconsciously acquired, and that conscious learning cannot be used as a source of spontaneous language production.

 Finally, learning is seen to be heavily dependent on the mood of the learner, with learning being impaired if the learner is under stress or does not want to learn the language. Krashen's hypotheses have been influential in language education, particularly in the United States, but have been criticised by academics. Two of the main criticisms are that the hypotheses are untestable, and that they assume a degree of separation between acquisition and learning that does not in fact exist. 

v  Comprehensible Input

A hypothesis that learners will acquire language best when they are given the appropriate input.  The input should be easy enough that they can understand it, but just beyond their level of competence. If the learner is at level i, then input should come at level i+1.

 Comprehensible input is an essential component in Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis, where regulated input will lead to acquistion so long as the input is challenging, yet easy enough to understand without conscious effort at learning.

One problem with this hypothesis is that i and i+1 are impossible to identify, though arguably teachers can develop an intuition for appropriate input. That is, teachers develop an intution of how to speak to be understood.

4)      Source Language – Target Language

v  Source Language ;

Source Language as the name suggests is the language in which you will receive the document to translate into another language. A tip, source language should be the language which you have learnt and not necessarily your native language.

 This is the language which your client understands very well, so your expertize in this language can even be upto a moderate level. If you can comprehend this language very well, but cannot think much in this language, then its fine.

v  Target Language ; The idea that students should be involved in ‘solving communication problems in the target language-that is, performing communicative tasks in which they have to (mostly) speak their way out of trouble-has given rise to Task-based language teaching. Task-based learning has at its core the idea that students learn better when engaged in meaning-based tasks than if they are concentrating on language forms just for their own sake. But that learning should grow out of the performance of communicative tasks rather than putting the learning first and following it by having students perform communicative tasks.

For example, or it might happen because the teacher gives feedback on a task the students have just been involved in. focus on form is often incidental and opportunistic, growing out of tasks which students are involved in, rather than being pre-determined by a book or a syllabus.

5)      ZPD (Zone of Proximente Development)

The zone of proximal development (sometimes abbreviated ZPD), is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help.

It is a concept developed by Soviet psychologist and social constructivist Lev Vygotsky (1896 - 1934). Vygotsky stated that a child follows an adult's example and gradually develops the ability to do certain tasks without help or assistance. Vygotsky's often-quoted definition of zone of proximal development presents it as "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers."

Vygotsky among other educational professionals believes the role of education to be to provide children with experiences which are in their ZPD, thereby encouraging and advancing their individual learning. The concept of ZPD has been expanded, modified, and changed into new concepts since Vygotsky's original conception.
The concept of scaffolding is closely related to the ZPD, although Vygotsky himself never mentioned the term; instead, scaffolding was developed by other sociocultural theorists applying Vygotsky's ZPD to educational contexts. Scaffolding is a process through which a teacher or more competent peer gives aid to the student in her/his ZPD as necessary, and tapers off this aid as it becomes unnecessary, much as a scaffold is removed from a building during construction.

 According to education expert Nancy Balaban, "Scaffolding refers to the way the adult guides the child's learning via focused questions and positive interactions." This concept has been further developed by Ann Brown, among others. Several instructional programs were developed on the basis of the notion of ZPD interpreted this way, including reciprocal teaching and dynamic assessment.