PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

Chapter 1. Language, Learning, and Teaching

- Some second language acquisition successfully takes place outside of any educational context
or classroom or teacher.
- Language: a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of
conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings.
- Definitions of language
1) Language is systematic.
2) Language uses arbitrary symbols. 1
3) Language uses symbols that are primarily vocal but may also be visual.
4) Language uses symbols that have conventionalized meanings.
5) Language is used for communication.
6) Language operates in a speech community.
7) Language is essentially human, but not limited to humans.
8) Language has universal characteristics.
- Learning: acquiring knowledge of a subject or a skill by study, experience, or instruction
- Definitions of learning
1) Acquisition or “adding”
2) The retention of information or skills
3) The involvement of storage systems, memory, and cognitive organization
4) The application of active, conscious focus, and subconscious attention
5) Relatively permanent but subject to forgetting.
6) The result of practice, perhaps reinforced practice.
7) A change in behavior.
- Structuralism: to describe human languages and to identify their structural characteristics
- Constructivism
1) Cognitive (Piaget) and social interaction (Vygotsky)
2) Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): the distance between learners’ existing
developmental state and their potential development
- Changes in teaching methods: Classical Method → Grammar Translation Method (GTM) →
Audiolingualism (ALM) → Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

Chapter 2. First Language Acquisition

- Steps for language acquisition

1) Age 1: Children utter their first “words.”
2) 18 months: Words are beginning to appear in two- or three-word “sentences.” →
telegraphic utterances
3) Age 2: More sophisticated language use including questions and negatives
4) Age 3: Substantial increase in language input
- Three positions for language acquisition 2
1) Behaviorist: Children come into the world with a tabula rasa (a clean slate) and are
slowly conditioned through reinforcement.
2) Nativist: Children come into the world with very specific innate knowledge
and are conditioned through interaction and discourse.
3) Constructivist: Children learn to function in a language chiefly through interaction
and discourse.
- Behaviorist approach
1) Language: a fundamental part of total human behavior
2) Focused on the immediately perceptible aspects of linguistic behavior and the
relationships or associations between those responses and events in the world
surrounding them
3) Effective language behavior: the production of correct responses to stimuli
4) Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957)
- Operant conditioning: conditioning in which the organism emits a response
(operant)
- Verbal behavior is controlled by its consequences.
5) Challenges
- Noam Chomsky: Novel utterances are created by very young children as
they literally “play” with the language.
- Mediation theory
- Linguistic stimulus elicits a “mediating” response that is self-stimulating
- Charles Osgood: self-stimulation is a “representational mediation process,”
a process that is really covert and invisible
- Account for abstraction by a notion that reeked of “mentalism”
- Nativist approach
1) We are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception
of language around us
2) Eric Lenneberg (1967): Language is a “species-specific” behavior
3) Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
- A metaphorical “little black box” in the brain
- Innate linguistic properties (McNeill, 1966)
- The ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds
- The ability to organize linguistic data into carious classes that can later be
refined
- Knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that
other kinds are not
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

- The ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic

system so as to construct the simplest possible system out of the available
linguistic input
4) Universal Grammar: a system of universal linguistic rules
5) The child’s language at any stage is systematic.
6) Pivot grammars: early grammars of child language
(Sentence → pivot word + open word)
7) Challenges
- Challenges to Chomsky’s “rule-governed” model
- Parallel distributed processing (PDP): information is processed
simultaneously at several levels of attention 3
- Connectionism: Neurons in the brain are said to form multiple connection.
Experience leads to learning by strengthening particular connections
(scaffolding).
- Emergentism: The complexity of language emerges from, relatively simple
developmental process being exposed to a massive and complex environment.
- Functional approach
1) Constructivist view
2) Three possible underlying relations (Lois Bloom, 1971): agent-action, agent-object,
possessor-possessed
3) Piaget: overall cognitive development is the result of children’s interaction with
their environment
4) Dan Slobin
- In all languages, semantic learning depends on cognitive
development.
- Two major pacesetters
a. Functional level: conceptual, communicative
b. Formal level: perceptual, information-processing
5) Language functioning extends well beyond cognitive thought and memory
structure.
6) Other investigations of child language centered on the function of language in
discourse.
- Issues in first language acquisition
1) Competence and Performance
Competence: One’s underlying knowledge of the system of a
language, non-observable ability to do something
Performance: Actual production or the comprehension of linguistic
events, visible, actual doing of something
2) Comprehension and Production
Comprehension: listening & reading, competence
Production: speaking & writing, performance
In child language, superiority of comprehension over production
3) Nature or Nurture?
Innateness hypothesis
- A child is born with an innate knowledge of or predisposition
toward language
- The LAD proposition simply postpones facing the central issue of
the nature of the human being’s capacity for language acquisition.
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

Nature: provides innately, in some sort of predetermined biological

timetable
Nurture: environmental exposure (teaching) that behaviors can be
learned
4) Universals
Language is universally acquired in the same manner
Principles: invariable characteristics of human language that appear
to apply to all languages universally
Parameters: determine ways in which languages can vary (cross-
linguistic variation)
Structure dependency: language is organized in such a way that it 4
crucially depends on the structural relationships between elements
in a sentence.
5) Systematicity and Variability
- Systematicity: Children exhibit a remarkable ability to infer the
phonological, structural, lexical, and semantic system of language.
- Variability: Various “stages” of language acquisition
6) Language and Thought
Piaget (1972)
- Cognitive development is at the very center of the human organism
- Language is dependent upon and springs from cognitive
development
Vygotsky (1962, 1978)
- Social interaction is a prerequisite to cognitive development
- Every child reaches his or her potential development through social
interaction as demonstrated in Zone of Proximal Development
Cognitive and linguistic development are inextricably intertwined
with dependencies in both directions.
7) Imitation
Children are good imitators
Echoing: salient strategy in early language learning
Surface-structure imitation: a person repeats or mimics the surface
strings
Children attend to the “deep structure” of language instead of
“meaning” and “truth value” of the utterance
8) Practice and Frequency
Children’s practice: a key to language acquisition
Children “practice” language constantly, especially in the early
stages of single- and two-word utterances. (frequency)
9) Input
The role of input in the child’s language acquisition is crucial
Adult and peer input to the child is far more important than nativists
had believed.
10) Discourse
A number of research in conversational (or discourse) analysis is on
the rise
Sinclair and Coulthard (1975): Conversations examined in terms of
initiations and responses
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

Children learn how to initiate a conversation and respond to

another’s initiating utterance.
- Application to language teaching
1) Series Method: taught learners directly and conceptually a “series” of 15 connected
sentences
2) Direct Method: second language learning should be more like first language
learning
Principles of the Direct Method
- Classroom instruction in the target language
- Only everyday vocabulary and sentences were taught
- Oral communication skills 5
- Inductive grammar teaching
- New teaching points were introduced orally
- Concrete vocabulary was taught through demonstration, objects,
and pictures; abstract vocabulary was taught by association of ideas
- Both speech and listening comprehension were taught
- Correct pronunciation and grammar were emphasized
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

Chapter 3. Age and Acquisition

- First language acquisition starts in very early childhood, but second language acquisition can
happen at any time.
- Myths (Misconceptions) on language acquisition
1) Children learning their first language practice and repeat words and phrases.
2) Child language acquisition is mainly a matter of imitation.
3) Children practice separate sounds, then words, then sentences.
4) In a child’s speech development, understanding always precedes speaking. 6
5) A very young child listens and speaks, and reading and writing are advanced stages
of language development.
6) You did not have to translate when you were a child.
7) A small child simply uses language, without any instruction in formal grammar.
- Types of comparison and contrast
1) SLA in children (of varying ages) and adults
2) Children’s L1 and L2 acquisition
- Critical Period Hypothesis
1) Critical period: a biologically determined period of life when language can be
acquired more easily and beyond which time language is increasingly difficult to
acquire
2) CPH claims that there is such a biological timetable.
Initially this notion was connected only to FLA
A critical point for second language acquisition occurs around
puberty.
Incorrect assumption: By the age of 12 or 13, you are “over the hill”
when it comes to the possibility of successful second language
learning.
The role of accent is a component of success.
- Neurobiological considerations
1) Hemispheric lateralization
Lateralization: the key to language acquisition
Left hemisphere: intellectual, logical, analytic
Right hemisphere: emotional, social needs
Language functions: left hemisphere
Eric Lenneberg (1967): Lateralization is a slow process that begins
around the age of 2 and is completed around puberty.
Thomas Scovel (1969): There is a critical period also for second
language acquisition.
2) Biological timetables
Sociobiological critical period
- development of a socially bonding accent at puberty
- form an identity with their own community
- attract mates of “their own kind” in an instinctive drive to maintain
their own species
Different aspects of a second language are learned optimally at
different ages.
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

3) Right-hemispheric participation
Right-hemispheric participation is particularly active during the
early stages of learning the second language.
Genesee (1982): There may be greater right hemisphere involvement
in language processing in bilinguals who acquire their second
language late relative to their first language.
Adult second language learners benefit from more encouragement of
right-brain activity in the classroom context.
4) Anthropological evidence
Sorenson (1967): The Tukano culture of South America
- Tukano people must marry outside their group, almost always 7
marry someone who speaks another language
- During adolescence, individuals actively and almost suddenly
began to speak two or three other languages to which they had been
exposed at some point.
Advantages of a child: motivation, affective variable, social factors,
the quality of input
- The significance of accent
1) Persons beyond the age of puberty do not acquire what is called authentic (native-
like) pronunciation of the second language.
2) Exceptions are possible in isolated instances or when only anecdotally supported.
3) Strong version of CPH: one that holds unswervingly to the predictability of age
effects
4) Bongaerts, et al (1995): Certain learner characteristics and contexts may work
together to override the disadvantages of a late start.
- Cognitive considerations
1) Stages of a child’s intellectual development (Piaget, 1972; 1955)
- Sensorimonitor stage (birth ~ age 2)
- Preoperational stage (age 2 ~ age 7)
- Operational stage (age 7 ~ age 16)
* Concrete operational stage (age 7 ~ age 11)
* Formal operational stage (age 11 ~ age 16)
2) Young children are generally not “aware” that they are acquiring a language.
3) Implicit learning: acquisition of linguistic patterns without explicit attention or
instruction
4) Lateralization hypothesis: provide another key to cognitive differences between
child and adult language acquisition
5) Equilibration: progressive interior organization of knowledge in a stepwise fashion,
related to the concept of equilibrium
- Affective considerations
1) We are influenced by our emotions
2) The role of egocentricity: Very young children are highly egocentric
3) They develop an acute consciousness of themselves in preadolescence
4) Therefore, they develop inhibitions about their self-identity
5) Language ego: a person who is developed in reference to the language he or she
speaks
6) The child’s ego is dynamic, growing, and flexible through the age of puberty
7) In a bilingual setting, if a child has already learned one second language in
childhood, then learning a third language is much less of a threat
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

8) The acquisition of second identity might pose a fruitful and important issue in
understanding second language learning.
9) The role of attitudes: another affectively related variable
10) Peer pressure: a particularly important variable in considering child-adult
comparisons
- Linguistic considerations
1) Bilingualism
Children learning two languages simultaneously acquire them by the
use of similar strategies
Most bilinguals engage in code-switching
2) Interference between first and second languages 8
Dulay and Burt (1974a): 86% of more than 500 errors made by
Spanish-speaking children learning English reflected normal
developmental characteristics → Intralingual strategies (not
interference errors from the L1)
Adult second language linguistic processes are more vulnerable to
the effect of the first language on the second
3) Order of acquisition
Dulay and Burt: Children learning a second language use a creative
construction process.
- common order of acquisition
1. present progressive (-ing)
2. (and 3.) in, on
3. plural (-s)
4. past irregular
5. possessive (-s’)
6. uncontractible copula (is, am, are)
7. articles (a, the)
8. past regular (-ed)
9. third-person regular (-s)
10. third-person irregular
- five determinants of acquisition
1. Perceptual salience
2. Semantic complexity
3. Morpho-phonological regularity
4. Syntactic category
5. Frequency in the input
- Age-related teaching methods
1) Total Physical Response
Children do a lot of listening before they speak
Listening is accompanied by physical responses
Right-brain learning
Commands are an easy way to get learners to move about
Effective in the beginning levels of language proficiency
2) The Natural Approach
Krashen: Adults should acquire a second language just as children
do
Characteristics (Krashen & Terrell, 1983)
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

- Learners would benefit from delaying production until speech

emerges
- Learners should be as relaxed as possible in the classroom
- The use of TPR activities at the beginning level was advocated
Aimed at the goal of basic interpersonal communication skills
Teacher’s task: to provide comprehensible input (spoken language)
Learners did not need to say anything during the silent period
Controversies
- The delay of oral production can be pushed too far
- At an early stage, it is important for the teacher to step in and
encourage students to talk 9
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

Chapter 4. Human Learning

- Four steps of learning

1) Entry behavior
2) The Goals of [the] task
3) Methods of training
4) Evaluation procedure
- Pavlov’s classical behaviorism
1) Classical conditioning: a dog salivates to the tone of a bell through a procedure 10
2) Unconditioned response: using the salivation response to the sight or smell of food
3) Conditioned response: automatic salivation at the sound of the bell
4) Stimulus (the sound of the bell) ↔ Response (salivation)
5) Law of effect (Thorndike): Stimuli that occurred after a behavior had an influence
on future behaviors
- Skinner’s operant conditioning
1) Operant behavior: One “operates” on the environment
2) The events of stimuli (reinforcers) constitute a powerful force in the control of
human behavior
3) Operants (classes of responses) ↔ Respondents (set of responses elicited by
identifiable stimuli)
4) Punishment works to the disadvantage of both the punished organism and the
punishing agency
5) The Technology of Teaching (1968): a classic in the field of programmed
instruction
6) Verbal Behavior (1957): described language as a system of verbal operants
7) Skinner’s view gave a rise to Audiolingual Method
- Ausubel’s subsumption theory
1) Learning takes place through meaningful process of relating new events or items
2) Rote learning: the process of acquiring material as discrete and relatively isolated
entities
3) Meaningful learning (subsumption): a process of relating and anchoring new
material to relevant established entities in cognitive structure
- Learners should have a meaningful learning set
- The learning task itself should potentially be meaningful to the
learners
4) Systematic forgetting
- In rote learning, retention is influenced primarily by the interfering
effects of similar rote materials learned immediately before or after
the learning task (proactive/retroactive inhibition)
- Cognitive pruning
- Pruning: the elimination of unnecessary clutter and a clearing of
the way for more material to enter the cognitive field
- A child’s learning of the concept of “so hot it will burn” (p. 86)
- Language attrition: the loss of second language skills
- Subtractive bilingualism: language attrition of L1
- Rote learning can be effective on a short-term basis
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

- Carl Rogers
1) “Whole person” as a physical and cognitive, but primarily emotional, being
2) “Fully functioning persons” live at peace with all of their feeling and reactions
3) Transformative pedagogy: the focus on learning instead of teaching
4) Learning how to learn is more important than being taught something from the
“superior” vantage point of a teacher
5) Teachers, to be facilitators, must be real and genuine, and need to have genuine trust,
acceptance, and a prizing of the other person
6) If the context for learning is properly created, then human beings will learn
everything they need to
- Paolo Freire 11
1) Students should be allowed to: (1) negotiate learning outcomes, (2) cooperate with
teachers and other learners, and (3) relate everything they in school to their reality
outside the classroom.
2) Critical thinking
3) The importance of the empowerment:
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Friere, 1970): inspired many teachers to consider the
importance of empowerment of students in classrooms
- Lev Vygotsky
1) The key to understanding higher forms of human mental activity lay in the
mediation of symbols, signs, and language.
2) We understand the world through symbolic tools of numbers, music, art, and
language.
3) Language is an ability that develops through social interaction.
4) Symbolic relationship is a driving force in the development and growth of cognition.
5) A child’s early stages of language acquisition meaning-making in collaborative
activity with other members of a given culture

BEHAVIORIST FUNCTIONALIST

BEHAVIORISTIC
COGNITIVE CONSTRUCTIVIST
Classical Operant
Pavlov Skinner Ausubel Rogers
- Respondent - Governed by - Meaningful ≫Rote - Fully functioning
conditioning consequences person
- Subsumption
- Elicited response - Emitted response - Learn how to learn
- Association
- S →R - R →S - Community of
- Systematic
- No punishment learners
forgetting
- Programmed - Empowerment
- Cognitive pruning
instruction
[NOTE]S = stimulus, R = response-reward
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

- Types of learning (Gagné, 1965)

1) Signal learning: Attending to something in one’s environment
2) Stimulus-response learning: A specific attendance to a single element in one’s
perceptual environment
3) Chaining: Learning a chain of two or more stimulus-response connections
4) Verbal association: Attaching meaning to verbal/nonverbal chains
5) Multiple discrimination: Learning to make different responses to many varying
stimuli
6) Concept learning: Learning to make a common response to a class of stimuli
7) Principle learning: Learning a chain of two or more concepts, a cluster of related
concepts 12
8) Problem solving: Previously acquired concepts and principles are combined in a
conscious focus on an unresolved or ambiguous set of events.
- Transfer, interference, and overgeneralization
1) Transfer: a general term describing the carryover of previous performance or
knowledge to subsequent learning
- Positive transfer: the prior knowledge benefits the learning task
- Negative transfer (interference): previous performance disrupts the
performance of a second task
- Role of interference: effects of the native language on the target
language
- Errors are not same as negative transfer.
ENGLISH: “I am in New York since January.”
FRENCH: “Je suis à New York depuis janvier.”
1. Positive transfer: perfectly logical transfer of the comparable French sentence
2. Negative transfer: the French verb form interfered with the person’s production of a
correct English form
2) Overgeneralization
- Generalization is a crucially important and pervading strategy in
human learning, can be explained by Ausubel’s concept of
meaningful learning
-Meaningful learning is generalization: items are subsumed
(generalized) under higher-order categories for meaningful retention
- Examples
- a child who calls every animal a “dog”
- application of a regular past-tense rule (‘-ed’) to irregular verbs
- Interference and overgeneralization are the negative counterparts of
the facilitating processes of transfer and generalization

TRANSFER

Positive (+) Negative (-)

OVERGENERALIZATION INTERFERENCE
(L1 →L1) (L1 ↔L2)
(L2 →L2)
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

- Inductive and deductive reasoning

1) Inductive reasoning
- One stores a number of specific instances and induces a general law
or rule or conclusion that governs or subsumes the specific instances
- Audiolingual Method
2) Deductive reasoning
- A movement from a generalization to specific instances
- Specific subsumed facts are inferred or deduced from a general
principle
- Classroom settings are largely deductive
3) Peters (1981): Many children manifested a number of “Gestalt” characteristics, 13
perceiving the whole before the parts.
- Language aptitude
1) Context-reduced vs. Context-embedded (communicative competence)
2) Aptitude may be related to various “stages,” or processes, of SLA
3) Robinson (2005): Aptitude is a complex of abilities that include processing speed,
short- and long-term memory, rote memory, planning time, pragmatic abilities,
interactional intelligence, emotional intelligence, and self-efficacy
- Intelligence and language learning
1) Intelligence has traditionally been measured in terms of linguistic and logical-
mathematical abilities. (IQ: Intelligence Quotient)
2) Multiple intelligences (Gardner, 2004, 1999)
- Linguistic
- Logical-mathematical
- Musical
- Bodily-kinesthetic
-Naturalist
-Interpersonal
-Intrapersonal
3) Three types of “smartness” (Sternberg, 1988, 1985)
-Componential ability for analytical thinking
-Experiential ability to engage in creative thinking
-Contextual ability: manipulating their environment
4) Emotional intelligence: placing emotion (EQ: Emotional Quotient)
- The Audiolingual Method (ALM)
1) First started as the Army Method
2) A great deal of oral activity—pronunciation, pattern drills, conversation practice
3) Borrowed from the Direct Method
4) ALM is firmly grounded in linguistic and psychological theory
5) Characteristics
- New material is presented in dialog form.
- There is dependence on mimicry, memorization of set phrases, and
over-learning.
- Structures are sequenced by means of contrastive analysis and taught
one at a time.
- Structural patterns are taught using repetitive skills.
- There is little or no grammar explanation: grammar is taught by
inductive analogy.
- Vocabulary is strictly limited and learned in context.
PLLT Summary Guide by Chapter (1-4) HUFS TESOL & EL by Hohsung Choe

- There is much use of tapes, language abs, and visual aids.

- Great importance is attached to pronunciation.
- Very little use of the mother tongue by teachers is permitted.
- Successful responses are immediately reinforced.
- There is a great effort to get students to produce error-free utterances.
- There is a tendency to manipulate language and disregard content.
- Community language learning (CLL)
1) Chomskyan view of linguistics turned teachers’ attention toward the “deep
structure” of language.
2) “Counseling-learning” model of education (Curran, 1972): Students and teacher
join together to facilitate learning in a context of valuing and prizing each individual 14
in the group.
3) Teacher’s role as a “counselor”: to center his or her attention on the clients
(students) and their needs
4) Characteristics
- Students first establish an interpersonal relationship and trust in their
native language, and sit in circle
- A student says an utterance to the teacher in the native language, and
the counselor translates back in the second language.
5) Concerns
- The counselor-teacher can become too nondirective.
The success of CLL depends largely on the translation expertise of
the counselor