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Post by ninaev on Jul 4, 2015 22:39:59 GMT 5
Daer Dee Broughton Thank you for your respond. I would like to know more about story telling techniques at work with young learners.
Thank you in advance Nina
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Feruza
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Post by Feruza on Jul 8, 2015 23:44:48 GMT 5
Hi dear All, I agree with Margarita's , Anastasiya's, Saodatkhon's Dilafruz's insights about Comprehensible Input. I absolutely agree with Krashen’s Comprehensible Input . It gives to acquire the language in a consistent way and it is applicable to our current teaching environment.It explains that Language acquisition occurs when learners understand the language level. It should be one level up from the current language level. It represents as i+1 it allows learners to learn language successfully. Comprehensible Input means the process of understanding Language Output means Production period. Krashen explains that Output should be later that input. Naturally there should be “Silent Period” while learner absorbs enough input. 1) I agree with Necessary concept because we have mixed - ability students and we have different learner styles learners. We have bright students too. But the necessary which means Students should understand the meaning , context in language learning not the form of the message. 3) Krashen indicated that " Learning is not as important as acquisition" . I think this distinction is not enough, there should be Learning & Acquisition can be meaningful and useful, according to learners' learning styles . We know that each learner has his / her own learning style. we should consider those sides too.
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Feruza
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Post by Feruza on Jul 13, 2015 12:05:50 GMT 5
Hi dear All, I agree that the meaning in learning or acquiring the language is necessary and it helps a lot to improve the person’s abilities to speak the second language. However, as also Margarita stated, the learners need to know the forms of the language as well. Even though, as Krashen demonstrated in the video with teaching German, the learner may have understood of what he was trying to teach, I personally wanted to know about the form of those words. Particularly, I wanted to know how to spell it and be able to read them. As Krashen said,
“paradox is that we use more than our linguistic competence to help us understand. We also use context, our knowledge of the world, our extra-linguistic information to help us understand language directed at us,” which to me it seems that we use the forms or patterns in the language to be able to speak it. This might be true at the early stage of acquiring the language, but as it gets complicated as we learn more of the language, we may want to pay attention more to the language patterns (or rules).
Krashen demonstrates his hypothesis with the examples of how first language is acquired and how caretakers try to speak in a way that the child understands him or her (Krashen 1982, p.23). In my opinion, while the child is acquiring the new words or sentences he or she is exposed to language patterns. It seems that the meaning and the form is learned almost at the same time.
Sorry, it seems that I was repeating myself a lot, but that’s what I think.
bests, Feruza
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Feruza
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Post by Feruza on Jul 13, 2015 12:09:54 GMT 5
I partially agree with the hypothesis. I agree that input should be meaningful that enhances the learning and comprehension, however, teaching the learners to language structure, forms, and patterns enhances the learning process even more. There are so many other factors that also help or hinder the learning of the language. If it is a second language, our first language structures and forms either help or hinder the process of learning. For example, in Uzbek, we don’t have articles. The lack of articles in Uzbek makes us to omit it in speaking English. Margarita pointed out the differences between children and adult students’ learning process. I agree with her that children do not question the forms, however they notice it, but do not focus on those forms as much as adults do. Adult students need reasoning, where children don’t.
Bests, Feruza
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Feruza
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Post by Feruza on Jul 13, 2015 12:11:13 GMT 5
To me it seems that both of the ideas are the same or connected to each other. I agree with Dilafruz’s point that “language acquisition is one of the steps in learning.” Krashen gives an example of silent period in learning the second language by Chinese children. He states, “The explanation of the silent period in terms of the input hypothesis is straight-forward the child is building up competence in the second language via listening, by understanding the language around him (Krashen 1982, p. 27). Nevertheless, I still believe that the child is learning the language forms or patterns at this time. Even though Krashen says “In accordance with the input hypothesis, speaking ability emerges on its own after enough competence has been developed by listening and understanding” (Krashen1982, p. 27). However, I say that sometimes children make an overgeneralizations by saying ‘goed,’ instead of went. It seems that children are not only listening or understanding, but also acquiring or learning the language patterns at the same time.
Bests, Feruza
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Feruza
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Post by Feruza on Jul 14, 2015 22:51:22 GMT 5
Hi everyone It seems to me that the input theory is perfectly true for development speaking ability that as Krashen says “the only way to teach speaking is simply to provide comprehensible input”. I agree with the statement but the creation the comprehensible model of speaking is not an easy matter. I work at the private kindergarten and teaching speaking is a challenge to me. there are children withlittle schooling skills. Nina Hi, Nina - If you speak English to young children, they will very quickly begin to speak it back to you. Do you have time set aside to speak English, perhaps to read a story to them, showing them the pictures, interacting with them as you tell the story? Or perhaps show them how to do a new simple task or play a game, only speaking English as you do it? They will then talk about that task in English. You don't need to translate, generally, with such young children, just speak simple English showing them what you mean. Does that work for you?
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Feruza
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Post by Feruza on Jul 14, 2015 22:51:53 GMT 5
Hello Nina, I agree with you. It is not easy to teach children to speak a foreign language even if your input is comprehensible. Children are children, and they don’t care about learning foreign languages, unless they need to communicate with their friends in another language. In the past, as a child, I saw my Uzbek friends trying to speak Russian. My friends were forced to speak Russian because their neighbors were only Russian speakers and they didn’t know Uzbek. So, when my friend wanted to play with the ball, she asked “Day myach, day myach,” which she must have learned it by listening to her friends in the backyard. So, she was able to produce this language out of necessity. In your class, probably everybody speaks the same language and why would they speak in English? At present, they don’t understand that they need English, if they are elementary school students. However, you can motivate them by singing Jazz Chants. Students can be divided into groups of two and ask each other question and answer them, and do other activities. Here is the link for Jazz Chants activities americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/teaching_with_jazz_chants_0.pdfbests, Feruza
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Nora
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Post by Nora on Jul 23, 2015 10:43:40 GMT 5
Having read the part on “input” hypothesis only, I have to admit that I mostly agree with Krashen. I do agree that comprehensible input is needed and necessary for successful language acquisition. One of the most convincing points for me is the idea that systematic grammar teaching will not constitute “comprehensible input”. I would like to note that I quite agree with the idea of “silent period”. I have seen this in practice and even experienced it myself. However, I do think that this is strictly of personal choice. I as a learner was very cautious with language and was always scared to make mistakes, for me being silent for some time to accumulate necessary knowledge was necessary. Though, I saw many examples where people would try to talk (without teacher forcing them) knowing only 50-100 words. So, I suppose here this rule might be quite overgeneralizing all the learners.
My biggest concern is that there is no clear definition of what is i+1. How is teacher supposed to figure out what that “+1” is for most of his learners? Krashen’s claim that we should not even “attempt to deliberately aim at i+1” leads to even more misunderstanding. Having read a couple of articles to find evidence for his claims, I noticed that some of the researchers (Ioup, 1984) testing his ideas did not come to any satisfactory results mostly because of the difficulties related to unclear definitions provided by Krashen. From one side, the idea of i+1 gives a lot of freedom to a teacher to move away from strict systematized grammar curriculum, but on the other hand it seems to me that too much would depend on the teacher’s perception of what is good for students to study. In case of poorly trained teachers, I+1 will probably simply lead to a chaotic choice of topics and structures without any clear purpose or learning outcomes. Another problem that I have with this hypothesis is related to the evidence that Krashen provides. He compares caretaker speech to the teacher talk and the foreigner talk and says that the learner will be able to acquire the second language the same way as children. My concern may seem strange to you, but I have been thinking about the time that a parent on average spends talking to his/her child. This may include all day long conversations, the child also experiences this kind of language in kindergarden, but with the language learner this time is strictly limited to class time especially if this is an EFL environment. The input that an average child might get in a day, a learner of a second language may get only in a week or two weeks of classes. Does not it mean that the process of acquiring may involve many more years than if for example we were more interested in learning not acquisition?
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Nora
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Post by Nora on Jul 23, 2015 10:58:27 GMT 5
"To my mind, the language acquisition and learning also depend on production. Through the production, that ideally should be encouraged from the very early stages of second language acquisition, the teachers, for instance, can identify the gaps in linguistic knowledge of the learners and apply these gained insights to their i+1 input." - Anastasiya Bezborodova
I would like to second Anastasiya's concern on the lack of production. As I mentioned in my own post I do think silent period is not probably something that we can generalize to all learners. Also, I question how useful might it be if the students are simply exposed to the language without much to do with it. During the first part of our training we were constantly reminded that we need to design materials that engage students in meaningful use or make them notice some form. Thus, comprehensible input by itself may not be a panacea, and it might be quite unfair to think about this hypothesis just in isolation. I think it can definitely combine well with other sound ideas for teaching.
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Post by mehriniso on Jul 30, 2015 7:59:48 GMT 5
Some of you may not know that my other specialty in ELT is in teaching academic and research writing. One of the things that I propose we do in this Reading Circle is encourage each other to develop ways of writing clearly and in an academic manner about our beliefs. To do that, I'll post readings and some questions to help you think about the source and respond in an academic way. For each reading, I'll post some ways you can try writing about whether you agree, partially agree, or disagree. Feel free to try whichever methods you feel fit your beliefs and needs. Let's start with some ways of responding to Krashen. Try one or more to contribute to the discussion. Be sure to respond to the responses of others!1) The "input hypothesis" is based on the idea that learners must understand the language they encounter. It says that "a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to move from stage i to stage i + 1 is that the acquirer understand input that contains i + 1, where "understand" means that the acquirer is focussed on the meaning and not the form of the message". What does "necessary (but not not sufficient)" mean in this passage? Do you agree that it is necessary, but not sufficient? If it's not sufficient, what else do you think is needed? 2) Do you agree, partly agree, or disagree with the input hypothesis? a) If you agree, give some example from your experience that illustrates why. b) If you only partially agree, tell us about the parts you question. c) If you disagree, tell us about some evidence from research that explains why you disagree. 3) Krashen puts forth the idea that learning and acquisition are different and he says that the "input hypothesis" describes acquisition. Do you think this is a necessary distinction for the hypothesis to be valid? In other words, if you agree with the hypothesis, do you, necessarily, agree with the distinction between learning and acquisition? Do you think these these two beliefs are dependent upon one another or are they separate? Is it possible to agree with one, but not the other? Explain your answer.
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Post by mehriniso on Jul 30, 2015 8:19:36 GMT 5
I agree with Krashen's Input hypothesis only if it regards to Adult learners who are cognitively mature and can analyse logical abstract matters together with logical concrete. Rote and meaningful learning both has input in acqusition , but age of the learner is important in this case. Here i want to refer to Piaget's theory of cognitive considerations of age and acquisition.The child from birth starts to learn language in silent way, then in some cases he tries rote learning then probably he combines forms with meaning. For example my son at the age of 2 (two) knew numbers and could count until 10 in Uzbek , tajic and English but of course he didn`t know for what reason those numbers were used.
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Post by Dee Broughton on Aug 21, 2015 12:40:17 GMT 5
To me it seems that both of the ideas are the same or connected to each other. I agree with Dilafruz’s point that “language acquisition is one of the steps in learning.” Krashen gives an example of silent period in learning the second language by Chinese children. He states, “The explanation of the silent period in terms of the input hypothesis is straight-forward the child is building up competence in the second language via listening, by understanding the language around him (Krashen 1982, p. 27). Nevertheless, I still believe that the child is learning the language forms or patterns at this time. Even though Krashen says “In accordance with the input hypothesis, speaking ability emerges on its own after enough competence has been developed by listening and understanding” (Krashen1982, p. 27). However, I say that sometimes children make an overgeneralizations by saying ‘goed,’ instead of went. It seems that children are not only listening or understanding, but also acquiring or learning the language patterns at the same time. Bests, Feruza "Acquisition" is not a step in "learning," really. Remember, these two terms have specific meanings in this context. Acquisition is the process by which the forms and patterns are incorporated into an implicit linguistic system by attending to comprehensible messages. Krashen is never implying that the forms are not acquired. He is saying that explicitly teaching the forms/rules in lieu of giving comprehensible messages is simply not how language is acquired. He is saying that when "enough competence has been developed by listening and understanding," they have the forms and patterns. That's why they begin to speak. Children do begin by overgeneralizing, but this shows that they are, indeed, acquiring the rules. Given a little more time, children correct this on their own if they are surrounded by correct speech. Older learners do, too. The only disagreement here is whether it's helpful, necessary, or ineffective to tell the older learners the rule before they, themselves, have noticed a need a for it.
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