Language

Language, learning and teaching
learning a second language is a long and complex undertaking. Your whole person is affected as you struggle to teach beyond the confines of your first language and into a new language, a new culture, a new way of thinking, feeling, and acting. Total commitment, total involvement, total physical, intellectual, and emotional responses are necessary to successfullysend and receive messages in a second language. Many variables are involved in the acquisition process. Language learning is not a set of easy steps that can be programmed in a quick do-it-yourself kit. So much is at stake that courses in foreign languages are often inadequate training grounds, in and of themselves, for the successful learning of a second language. Few if any people achieve fluencyin a foreign language solely within the confines of the classroom.
It may appear contradictory, then, than this book is about both learning and teaching. But some of the contradiction is removed if you look at the teaching process as the facilitation of learning, in which you can teach a foreign language successfully if, among other things, you know something about that intricate web ofvariables that are spun together to affect how and why one learns or fails to learn a second language. Where does a teacher begin the quest for an understanding of the principles of language learning and teaching? By first considering some of the questions that you could ask.

Questions about second language acquisition
virtually any complex set of skills brings with it a host of questions. Whilethese questions can quickly turn into “issues”, because there is no simple answer to the questions, nevertheless we usually begin the process with a set of focused questions to guide our study. Current issues in second language acquisition (SLA) may be initially approached as a multitude of question that are being asked about this complex process. Let’s look at some of those questions, sortedhere into some commonly used topical categories.
Learner Characteristics
Who are the learners that you are teaching? What is their ethnic, linguistic, and religious heritage? What are their native languages, levels of education, and socioeconomic characteristics? What life’s experience have they had that might affect their learning? What are their intellectual capacities, abilities, and strengthsand weaknesses? How would you describe the personality of any given learner? These and other questions focus attention on some of the crucial variables affecting both learners’ successes in acquiring a foreign language and teachers’ capacities to enable learners to achieve that acquisition.
Linguistic Factors
No simpler a question is one that probes the nature of the subject matter itself. Whatis it that the learner must learn? What is language? What is communication? What does it mean when we say someone knows how to use a language? What is the best way to describe or systematize the target (second) language? What are the relevant differences (and commonalities) between a learner’s first and second language? What properties of the target language might be difficult for a learner tomaster? These profound questions are of course central to the discipline of linguistics. The language teacher needs to understand a language and yet another matter to attain the technical knowledge to understand and explain the system of that language—its phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences, and discourse structures.
Learning Processes
How does learning take place? How can a person ensure successin language learning? What cognitive processes are utilized in second language learning? What kinds of strategies are available to a learner, and which ones are optimal? How important are factors like frequency of input, attention to form and meaning, memory and storage processes, and recall? What is the optimal inter-relationship of cognitive, affective, and physical domains for successful...