Aula_04

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PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Lesson 04 – Language Acquisition Theories - II
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Agenda:
Brief Revision of Lesson 03;
On Nature & Language;
Chomsky´s Perspective on Language Acquisition;
Assumptions;
Summary;
Bibliography;
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Reflecting upon ...
“Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation” (Aristotle, The Poetics, Chapter IV).
Immitation is natural to man from childhood
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Behaviorism – Context:
“The dominant psychological theory of the 1950s and 1960s was behaviorist learning theory. According to this theory, language learning is like any other kind of learning in that it involves habit formation. Habits are formed when learners respond to stimuli in the environment and subsequently have their responses reinforced so that they are remembered. Thus, a habit is a stimulus-response connection”. (Ellis, 2003, p. 31)
Consequence: knowledge was thought to be built through this pattern of stimulus-response activities
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Reflecting upon:
“A very basic fact of language is that speakers are constantly confronted with expressions that they have never encountered in their previous linguistic experience, and that they can nevertheless produce and understand with no effort. In fact, normal linguistic capacities range over unbounded domains: every speaker can produce and understand an unbounded number of linguistic expressions in normal
language use”. (Chomsky, 2002, p. 2)
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Nevertheless ...
This remarkable capacity, sometimes referred to as a critical component of the “creativity” of ordinary language use, had been noticed at least ever since the first cognitive revolution and had been regarded as a crucial component of human nature. Nevertheless, it had remained fundamentally unexplained in the classical reflection on language. (Chomsky, 2002, p.2)
Consequently, the challenge is: can we conceive a system to explain the language machinery from its roots?
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Chomsky´s Proposal
According to Chomsky´s reflections on this matter, the modern study of language as a mirror of the mind revolves around a number of basic research questions, two of which have been particularly prominent:
What is knowledge of language?
How is it acquired?
By attempting to answer those questions, Chomsky devised a new perspective on language studies
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Knowledge of Language & Language Acquisition
“Every speaker implicitly masters a very detailed and precise system of formal procedures to assemble and interpret linguistic expressions. This system is constantly used, in an automatized and unconscious manner, to produce and understand novel sentences, a normal characteristic of ordinary language use.
The discovery of the richness of the implicit knowledge of language immediately raised the question of acquisition. How can it be that every child succeeds in acquiring such a rich system so early in life, in an apparently unintentional manner, without the need of an explicit teaching?” (Chomsky, 2002, p. 5)
If formal teaching is not present, how is it possible for a child to master so many complex structures in a short period of time?
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Chomsky´s Model
“We can now phrase the problem in the terminology used by the modern study of language and mind. Language acquisition can be seen as the transition from the state of the mind at birth, the initial cognitive state, to the stable state that corresponds to the native knowledge of a natural language. 
Poverty of stimulus considerations support the view that the initial cognitive state, far from being the tabula rasa of empiricist models, is already a richly structured system. The theory of the initial cognitive state is called Universal Grammar; the theory of a particular stable state is a particular grammar. Acquiring the tacit knowledge of French, Italian, Chinese, etc., is then made possible by the component of the mind–brain that is explicitly modeled by Universal Grammar, in interaction with a specific course of linguistic experience”.(Chomsky, 2002, p. 8).
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Assumptions - I
“Universal Grammar is a theory of linguistic invariance, as it expresses the universal properties of natural languages... Universal Grammar expresses the biologically necessary universals, the properties that are universal because they are determined by our in-born language faculty, a component of the biological endowment of the species
This approach assumes that the biological endowment for language is constant across the species: we are not specifically predisposed to acquire the language of our biological parents, but to acquire whatever human language is presented to us in childhood.” (Chomsky, 2002, p. 8-9).
Biological endowment: a quality or ability someone has nature; a “gift” from nature. 
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Assumptions - II
“An interest in the nature and origins of the marvelous invention leads to investigation of the component of the human brain that is responsible for these unique and indeed wondrous achievements. This language organ, or ‘faculty of language’ as we may call it, is a common human possession, varying little across the species as far as we know, apart from very serious pathology…” (Chomsky, 2002, p.47)
Achievements: something successful or impressive that is achieved after a lot of effort and hard work.
 
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Assumptions - III
“The internal language, in the technical sense, is a state of the faculty of language. Each internal language has the means to construct the mental objects that we use to express our thoughts and to interpret the limitless array of overt expressions that we encounter. Each of these mental objects relates sound and meaning in a particular structured form.” (Chomsky, 2002, p. 48).
Language Acquisition Device (LAD): the “innate mental mechanism designed uniquely for the acquisition of language”. (WIDDOWSON, 2003)
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Chomsky´s Basic Dichotomy 
Linguistic competence: the knowledge that native speakers have of their language as a system of abstract formal relations.
Linguistic performance: Actual language behavior as distinct from the knowledge that underlies it, the competence.
Due to his/her linguistic competence, the child is able to produce an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences and reject ungrammatical ones.
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
To Sum up:
The language organ is the faculty of language (FL); the theory of the initial state of FL, an expression of the genes, is universal grammar (UG); theories of states attained are particular grammars; the states themselves are internal languages, “languages” for short;
The human mind is equipped with an unobservable mechanism for learning language, referred to as a Language Acquisition Device. The LAD is supplied
with human children with birth and contains language universals, i.e. the structures and sounds which are common to all human languages;
This faculty is the primary determinant of language acquisition;
Input is needed, but only to ‘trigger’ the operation of the language acquisition device. Formal teaching is not required.
Tema da Apresentação
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES - II 
PRÁTICA DE ENSINO DE INGLÊS - I
Bibliography:
CHOMSKY, Noam. On nature and language. Cambridge: CUP, 2002.
Na Endowment....pesquisar
Tema da Apresentação