...but, I also need some input too. Teachers, moms, or anyone that works with young children or foreign language learners.
What is your take on the language acquisition debate?
Is language simply a series of patterns to be learned and memorized, OR, does language need meaning behind the patterns to be learned effectively?
I know this will open up a can of worms, but it's been on my mind a lot lately in, well, my current position.
On another teaching note, I had a kid (of course, a Korean kid) tell me that SHE wants to be president of the USA today. Good luck with that one kid. Hate to burst your hopes and dreams...but, there's this thing we have called the citizenship rule...try explaining that to a newcomer English speaking nine-year-old. LOL.
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On the language acquisition debate, I will tend to land heavily with Chomsky, arguing that humans have an innate framework for acquiring and understanding and forming language. Other species may communicate, but we use language. We combine it into phrases and words that have never existed before, which to me says we have not memorized anything. The patterns -- which every language has -- simply make it learnable. I work with children with learning disabilities. It is amazing to me to see that even they have almost effortlessly acquired spoken language, with all its rules and exceptions and variations, but struggle with the construct of written language. In those cases, they need to learn the rules explicitly, directly (what letters can make the soung "ee"; when K starts a word, when to double a consonant), and intensively. Yet the spoken language is just there.
As a speech-language pathologist, I work with the few kids who didn't just acquire language effortlessly. But the other 90% of the population did.
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