THE LANGUAGE ENVIRONMENT
The quality of the language environment is of paramount importance to success in learning a new language.environmental features that accelerate language learning can easily be incorporated into curriculum objectives, teaching technique, and materials to increase the effectiveness of the language classroom.
MACRO ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
Researchers have examined the effects of four macro environmental features on the rate and quality of L2 acquisition :
Naturalness
when the focus of the speaker is on the form of the language, the language environment is formal when the focus is on the content of the communication, the language environment is natural. The distinction between natural and formal language is not new. It is usually made by language teachers who designate part of instructional time for formal activities. E.g. audio lingual drills, structural explanations, dictation,etc. and part for natural communication activities such as free conversation, non language games ( e.g. indoor baseball ), reading, or films.
2. Effects of natural exposure
the beneficial effects of exposure to natural communication in the target language have been demonstrated by three major empirical studies : two studies involved adults and one study involved children; all were acquiring a second language in foreign environments.
3. Limits on the effects of natural exposure
several factors can limit the beneficial effects of natural exposure :
a lack of peers who speak the target language natively
incomprehensibility of the communication
lack of a silent period when one can absorb the new language but need not produce it.
4. Formal environments
a formal language environment focuses on the conscious acquisition of rules and forms, it is severely limited in its potential to produce speakers who are able to communicate naturally and effectively.
5. Benefits of formal exposure
benefits of formal exposure are the speaker may modify their use of the new language through some of the low level rules they know.formal environments are stimulating and useful.
THE LEARNER’S ROLE IN COMMUNICATION
Communication exchanges may be defined according to the manner in which the learner participates in them. In one way communication, the learner listens ( or reads ) but does not verbally. In restricted two way communication. The learner listens and responds but the response is either nonverbal or not in the target language. In full two way communication the learner responds in the target language.
there are three types of communication in which learners participate :
One – way , the learner listens to or reads the target language but does not respond.
In restricted two – way , the learner responds orally to someone, but the learner does not use the target language
In full two way , the learner speaks in the target language, acting as both recipient and sender of verbal messages.
This threefold distinction is important because each has its place in facilitating l2 acquisition.
AVAIBILITY OF CONCRETE REFERENTS
Subjects and events that can be seen, heard, or felt while they are being talked about. Communication about the “here and now” ensure that the learner understands most of what is being said in the new language, and there by becomes a critical aid to progress in acquiring new structures and vocabulary.
d. Target Language Model
The learner’s choice of model significantly affects the quality of speech produced. Research studies indicate the following preferences: Peers over teachers, peers over parents, and members of one’s own ethnic group over non-members.
1. Peer Versus Teacher
When both a teacher and peers speak the target language, learners have been observed to prefer the latter as models for themselves. In immersion programs, the teacher is typically the only native speaker of the target language to whom the children are exposed during the school day.
2. Peer Versus Parent
In first language learning, it has been found that when the speech characteristics of peers and parents differ, the children will tend to acquire the speech characteristics of their peers.
3. Own Social Group Versus Other Social Group
The differences in learner speech characteristics that result from model choice are due not to learning difficulties, but to preferred social group membership.
e. Micro-Environmental Factors
While macro-environmental factors are the broad overall characteristics of the language environment, micro-environmental factors are characteristics of specific structures of the language the learner hears.
Three micro-factors of the language environment have been investigated from the perspective of their effect on the quality or rate of language acquisition:
1. Salience, the ease with which a structure is seen or heard. Psycholinguists have defined salience by referring to particular characteristics that seem to make an item more visually or auditorily prominent than another. The opposite learning order would be expected if salience influenced learning. Clearly, the effects of salience are tempered by other, as yet unknown, factors.
2. Feedback, the listener’s or reader’s response to the learner’s speech or writing. One type of feedback is correction. Another is approval or “positive feedback,” as some call it. Still another way to respond is to expand or otherwise modify the learner’s speech without consciously calling attention to the modification. This type of response has been called “expansion.” Correction and expansion have received the most research attention.
2.1.Correction
Research has produced a rather discouraging view of the effect correction has on learner’s errors
2.2.Expansion
Expansion involves the systematic modeling of either the correct or more complete version of the child’s utterance without calling the child’s attention to the activity. The effect of expansion on the development of child speech has been examined, so far, only in first language acquisition.
3. Frequency, the number of times the learner hears or sees a given structure.
When language patterns are used very frequently within the learner’s earshot, the learner will tend to memorize them. Such memorization may cause some patterns to be excluded from normal analysis, delaying their corporation into the new language system.
One effect of very frequently occurring forms is that at least some of them will somehow be represented in the child’s performance even if its structure is far beyond him or her.
f. Role of Micro-Environmental Factors
The specific type of interaction between the operation of internal factors, micro-environmental factors and the acquisition of new knowledge is found in the series of investigations conducted by Inhelder, Sinclair, and Bovet (1974), psychologists working in the tradition of the famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Their assumptions, procedures and findings should be extremely useful to language acquisition researchers who are interested in the effects of factors in the language environment.
Inhelder et al. studied the effects of certain training procedures on children’s progress in cognitive development. They conducted a series of learning experiments on the acquisition of the process of conservation and class inclusion.
The training sessions “resembled the kind of situation in which [cognitive developmental] progress takes place outside an experimental set-up,” that is, where children interact naturally with features of the environment provided by the experimenters, observing the characteristics of object and making judgments about them. “Experimental situations that might almost automatically elicit the correct answers were avoided” (Inhelder et al., 1974, p. 24).
Interestingly enough, the training sessions, which were the same for all the children, had virtually no effect on the fifteen children at the non-conservation level. Only two of those children improved substantially, while most of the nineteen intermediate level children showed substantial progress. The authors take pains to point out that all the children noticed all the relevant observable features presented to them; however, only the more advanced children were able to use the information for solving the problem at hand. The beginners simply did not know how to use the observations they had made (p. 53). The provision of appropriate information, therefore, accelerates cognitive development only when the learner has reached in cognitive level that permits the formulation of certain kinds of judgments.
However, they illustrate the importance of specifying principles of interaction between external factors and experimental factors in the explanation of learning. This approach makes it possible to predict when a certain type of environment, in this case a type of training procedure, will significantly affect learning and when it will not.
The quality of the language environment is of paramount importance to success in learning a new language.environmental features that accelerate language learning can easily be incorporated into curriculum objectives, teaching technique, and materials to increase the effectiveness of the language classroom.
MACRO ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
Researchers have examined the effects of four macro environmental features on the rate and quality of L2 acquisition :
Naturalness
when the focus of the speaker is on the form of the language, the language environment is formal when the focus is on the content of the communication, the language environment is natural. The distinction between natural and formal language is not new. It is usually made by language teachers who designate part of instructional time for formal activities. E.g. audio lingual drills, structural explanations, dictation,etc. and part for natural communication activities such as free conversation, non language games ( e.g. indoor baseball ), reading, or films.
2. Effects of natural exposure
the beneficial effects of exposure to natural communication in the target language have been demonstrated by three major empirical studies : two studies involved adults and one study involved children; all were acquiring a second language in foreign environments.
3. Limits on the effects of natural exposure
several factors can limit the beneficial effects of natural exposure :
a lack of peers who speak the target language natively
incomprehensibility of the communication
lack of a silent period when one can absorb the new language but need not produce it.
4. Formal environments
a formal language environment focuses on the conscious acquisition of rules and forms, it is severely limited in its potential to produce speakers who are able to communicate naturally and effectively.
5. Benefits of formal exposure
benefits of formal exposure are the speaker may modify their use of the new language through some of the low level rules they know.formal environments are stimulating and useful.
THE LEARNER’S ROLE IN COMMUNICATION
Communication exchanges may be defined according to the manner in which the learner participates in them. In one way communication, the learner listens ( or reads ) but does not verbally. In restricted two way communication. The learner listens and responds but the response is either nonverbal or not in the target language. In full two way communication the learner responds in the target language.
there are three types of communication in which learners participate :
One – way , the learner listens to or reads the target language but does not respond.
In restricted two – way , the learner responds orally to someone, but the learner does not use the target language
In full two way , the learner speaks in the target language, acting as both recipient and sender of verbal messages.
This threefold distinction is important because each has its place in facilitating l2 acquisition.
AVAIBILITY OF CONCRETE REFERENTS
Subjects and events that can be seen, heard, or felt while they are being talked about. Communication about the “here and now” ensure that the learner understands most of what is being said in the new language, and there by becomes a critical aid to progress in acquiring new structures and vocabulary.
d. Target Language Model
The learner’s choice of model significantly affects the quality of speech produced. Research studies indicate the following preferences: Peers over teachers, peers over parents, and members of one’s own ethnic group over non-members.
1. Peer Versus Teacher
When both a teacher and peers speak the target language, learners have been observed to prefer the latter as models for themselves. In immersion programs, the teacher is typically the only native speaker of the target language to whom the children are exposed during the school day.
2. Peer Versus Parent
In first language learning, it has been found that when the speech characteristics of peers and parents differ, the children will tend to acquire the speech characteristics of their peers.
3. Own Social Group Versus Other Social Group
The differences in learner speech characteristics that result from model choice are due not to learning difficulties, but to preferred social group membership.
e. Micro-Environmental Factors
While macro-environmental factors are the broad overall characteristics of the language environment, micro-environmental factors are characteristics of specific structures of the language the learner hears.
Three micro-factors of the language environment have been investigated from the perspective of their effect on the quality or rate of language acquisition:
1. Salience, the ease with which a structure is seen or heard. Psycholinguists have defined salience by referring to particular characteristics that seem to make an item more visually or auditorily prominent than another. The opposite learning order would be expected if salience influenced learning. Clearly, the effects of salience are tempered by other, as yet unknown, factors.
2. Feedback, the listener’s or reader’s response to the learner’s speech or writing. One type of feedback is correction. Another is approval or “positive feedback,” as some call it. Still another way to respond is to expand or otherwise modify the learner’s speech without consciously calling attention to the modification. This type of response has been called “expansion.” Correction and expansion have received the most research attention.
2.1.Correction
Research has produced a rather discouraging view of the effect correction has on learner’s errors
2.2.Expansion
Expansion involves the systematic modeling of either the correct or more complete version of the child’s utterance without calling the child’s attention to the activity. The effect of expansion on the development of child speech has been examined, so far, only in first language acquisition.
3. Frequency, the number of times the learner hears or sees a given structure.
When language patterns are used very frequently within the learner’s earshot, the learner will tend to memorize them. Such memorization may cause some patterns to be excluded from normal analysis, delaying their corporation into the new language system.
One effect of very frequently occurring forms is that at least some of them will somehow be represented in the child’s performance even if its structure is far beyond him or her.
f. Role of Micro-Environmental Factors
The specific type of interaction between the operation of internal factors, micro-environmental factors and the acquisition of new knowledge is found in the series of investigations conducted by Inhelder, Sinclair, and Bovet (1974), psychologists working in the tradition of the famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Their assumptions, procedures and findings should be extremely useful to language acquisition researchers who are interested in the effects of factors in the language environment.
Inhelder et al. studied the effects of certain training procedures on children’s progress in cognitive development. They conducted a series of learning experiments on the acquisition of the process of conservation and class inclusion.
The training sessions “resembled the kind of situation in which [cognitive developmental] progress takes place outside an experimental set-up,” that is, where children interact naturally with features of the environment provided by the experimenters, observing the characteristics of object and making judgments about them. “Experimental situations that might almost automatically elicit the correct answers were avoided” (Inhelder et al., 1974, p. 24).
Interestingly enough, the training sessions, which were the same for all the children, had virtually no effect on the fifteen children at the non-conservation level. Only two of those children improved substantially, while most of the nineteen intermediate level children showed substantial progress. The authors take pains to point out that all the children noticed all the relevant observable features presented to them; however, only the more advanced children were able to use the information for solving the problem at hand. The beginners simply did not know how to use the observations they had made (p. 53). The provision of appropriate information, therefore, accelerates cognitive development only when the learner has reached in cognitive level that permits the formulation of certain kinds of judgments.
However, they illustrate the importance of specifying principles of interaction between external factors and experimental factors in the explanation of learning. This approach makes it possible to predict when a certain type of environment, in this case a type of training procedure, will significantly affect learning and when it will not.
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