Language Acquisition

1. Language Acquisition A Study by Catherine Hoang, Rebecca Espinosa, and Therese Trinko

2. Terms to Know • Metacognitive skills • Awareness of one’s own learning or thinking processes • “Improvement” • A higher score on the post-test as compared to the pre-test • “Acquired” • Marked the correct answer on the post-test that s/he had marked incorrectly on the pre-test

3. Language Acquisition According to Vygotsky: “...the meaning of a given word is approached through another word, and whatever we discover through this operation is...a record of the relation in the child’s mind between previously formed families of words”

4. Lev Vygotsky • 1896-1934 • Jewish • Moscow University (Law) • Thought and Language, • Mind in Society, etc. • Communist Suppression

5. How History Shaped His Ideas • Marxism • Engel’s use of tools • Vygotsky: Language is a tool to deal with one’s environment • Individuals create psychological tools to learn, or Metacognitive Skills

6. Vygotsky’s Theories • Zone of Proximal Development • an area / “zone” between the child’s ability to perform independently and with assistance, where the most effective instruction occurs. • Mediation • Movement from a lower form of thought to a higher form of thought • Tools • Language and Metacognitive skills

7. Krashen • Born in Chicago, 1941 • Ph.D at UCLA in Linguistics • Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Education at the University of Southern California • Published over 350 books and papers

8. Krashen’s Theories • Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis-immersion and custom -vs- formal active development • Monitor Hypothesis-We use what we know of a language to self-correct/“monitor” our output • Affective filter-the ability to learn a language is affected by external and internal factors-motivation, anxiety, self-esteem • Natural Order Hypothesis- grammatical structures are acquired in a natural, predictable order

9. Krashen’s Input Hypothesis • Input Hypothesis • We acquire language when we receive language input that is one step beyond current comprehension level (i +1)

10. Input Hypothesis Diagram

11. Question If given an expository text, do monolingual or bilingual students acquire more vocabulary?

12. Hypothesis We believe that the bilingual students are more likely to acquire more vocabulary than the monolingual students. Bilingual students have already developed higher metacognitive skills due to their experience with a second language. According to Vygotsky’s Theory of the Zone of Proximal Development and his expansion on Engel’s Tools with Krashen’s Input Theory, without any assistance to both groups the bilingual students should perform better than the monolingual students.

13. Original Study • “Beyond raw frequency: Incidental vocabulary acquisition in extensive reading” (2008) • conducted in South Korea • Based on the idea that “second language can be learned incidentally while the learner is engaged in...reading for meaning, inferring the idea of unknown words”

15. Subjects • 10 children from Holy Family School • 5 Bilingual 5th grade students • 5 Monolingual 5th grade students

16. Methodology • Based on the South Korean Study • Pre-test • Reading • Post-test • Survey

17. Pre-test/Post-test (sample questions) • What do all vertebrates have in common? • They live on land. • They all have a hard internal skeleton or backbone. • They all have legs. • They are all warm blooded. • When we went to the zoo, my family and I visited several pachyderms, including elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotami. Pachyderm most likely describes an animal that • is small and soft-skinned • is large, thick-skinned, and hoofed • has scaly skin, like a reptile • is covered in feathers

18. Reading (sample) 6 Amazing Animals that Practically Lived Forever ADWAITA THE TORTOISE (1750-2006) Even with the long life expectancy of giant tortoises, an Aldabra Giant Tortoise named Adwaita blows all others away with a life lasting around 255 years.Estimatesput his birth date around 1750, making him an entire generation older than the United States of America. The tortoise was originally owned by a man named General Robert Clive, an important member of the East India Company, who [died in] 1774. Barely a toddler at that time, Adwaita bummed aroundfor a bit before eventually being transferred to an Indian zoo in 1875, where he spent the rest of his life eating and...that's pretty much it. After his death in 2006, carbon dating on his shell confirmed his age, making him quite possibly the oldest living creature ever, and almost certainly the oldest living vertebrate.

19. Average Scores

21. Data Analysis: Monolingual • 3 students(1,3,5): scores remained the same • One student (2): score increased by 1 • One student: (4): score increased by 3

23. Data Analysis: Bilingual • 3 students (1, 2, 4): scores slightly increased • 1 student (3): score stayed the same • Exception: Score of student 5 dramatically decreased by 4

24. Metacognitive Strategies Survey For each question, when you weren’t sure of the answer in the first test, why did you select the answer you choose in the post test? a. Remembered from the article (post test) d. Guessed b. Looked like a word I already knew e. Other c. Sounded right

25. Monolingual Survey Responses

26. Bilingual Survey Responses

27. Grouped Survey Response Bilingual Monolingual

28. Explanation of Data Monolingual: Highest percent: - “guessed” and “already knew” (both 17%) - “other” (25%) Bilingual: Highest percent: - “Context clues” and “learned from article” (both 22%) - process of Elimination (34%)

29. In relation to Vygotsky

30. In relation to Krashen

31. Challenges and Limitations • Of the monolingual students provided for us, one was partially fluent in a second language. • We were unable to acquire a larger sample size due to time constraints and number of students available. • We were unable to obtain an objective measure of the students’ prior knowledge before the pre-test. • The wording of question 7 seemed to affect the results such that students circled several wrong answers for the remainder of both tests.

32. Question 7 7) Circle all that apply. There may be more than one right answer. When the presidential candidates discuss the hotly contested issue, the topic might be • controversial • enthusiastic • calmly discussed • exciting 8) What would happen if you survey a classroom? a) You would watch children learning and playing. b) You would paint it different colors. c) You would grab the pencils. d) The kids would spread out around the room.

33. Conclusion Our hypothesis was disproved upon finding that the rates of improvement were the same for both groups. However, it appears that bilingual students demonstrated more metacognitive skills or tools as proven from our survey.

34. Bibliography http://esl.fis.edu/teachers/support/krashen.htm http://www.s9.com/Biography/Stephen-Krashen http://unt.unice.fr/uoh/learn_teach_FL/img/figures/Stephen-Krashen.jpg http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html http://mentalfloss.com/article/29830/6-amazing-animals-practically-lived-forever http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metacognition Thought and Language, Page 52 Chapter 5: An experimental study of the development of Concepts Catherine