TEFL Lillie Louisiana

When speaking of first and second language acquisition, we often will think of how children acquire languages at young age. We know that language acquisition is innate and has no direct relationship with a person's intelligence. However this human learning process does have a limited period in which languages are acquired with much less effort at much faster pace-linguists call it “the critical period”. (Kasper) I remember back when I was a freshman in college, I took this linguistics course as part of my general education and it was on the topic of language acquisition. Till this day I still remember an interesting fact our Professor brought up in the course: even though critical period for first language acquisition ends somewhere between a child reaches 4 and 12, the most critical time to learn language is actually from being an infant till about months after the baby was born. She went on and elaborated: this means if the person is never exposed to a language during that period of time, it almost definitely means that the person will never be 100% fluent in the language. (Lee) I couldn't stop but wonder: what about a second language acquisition? According to what I've leant, does it mean that anyone could be fluent in any language if he or she was exposed to it early on? Or in a more practical situation, given most efl learners are teens or adults of ages over 12, how does this linguistic study help them acquire english as a second or foreign language, one that they were probably not exposed to when they were still a baby? Through research I've come to the conclusion that the first language acquisition process could be carried out and imitated to improve second language teaching and learning method. Based on H.H Stern's summary on this subject, the process of learning second language could be compared to that of a child's learning his or her first language and if seen this way the techniques of teaching second language should be done precisely as if you were teaching a small child the first language: “ 1. In language teaching, we must practice and practice, again and again. Just watch a small child learning his mother tongue. He repeats things over and over again. During the language-learning stage he practices all the time. This is what we must also do when we learn a foreign language. 2. Language learning is mainly a matter of imitation. You must be a mimic. Just like a small child. He imitates everything. 3. First, we practice the separate sounds, then words, the sentences. That is the natural order and is therefore right for learning a foreign language. 4. Watch a small child's speech development. First he listens, then he speaks. Understanding always precedes speaking. Therefore, this must be the right order of presenting the skills in a foreign language. 5. A small child listens and speaks and no one would dream of making him read or write. Reading and writing are advanced stages of language development. The natural order for first and second language learning is listening, speaking, reading, writing. 6. You did not have to translate when you were small. If you were able to learn your own language without translation, you should be able to learn a foreign language in the same way. 7. A small child simply uses language. He does not learn a formal grammar. You don't tell him about verbs and nouns. Yet he learns language perfectly. It is equally unnecessary to use grammatical conceptualization in teaching a foreign language.” Stern's theory and research pinpoint the heart of language learning, which is that it is behavioral and language acquisition, whether it's the first or second, involves around habitual and repetitive responses to stimuli. This innovative conquer of the myths between first and second language acquisition opens a door for scholars and teachers for second language teaching because by applying similar techniques and methods from first language acquisition teachers may be teaching the language to the students without thinking much about how different students' mother tongue is to the language they are trying to acquire-it all comes down to these constructs: “practice, habit formation, shaping, reinforcement, conditioning, association, stimulus and response”. (Stern) Works Cited: "Comparing and Contrasting First and Second Language Acquisition." HOUSE OF LITERATURE. Web. 11 Dec. 2011. . "Language Acquisition in Humans." DR. LORETTA KASPER'S esl 91 ON THE WEB. 11 Dec. 2011. . Lee, Felicia, Assistant Professor in Residence of Linguistics, University of California Stern, H. H. Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983. Print.