Homework #1

Learning or Acquisition

In the reading passage, there are two views about how people get their language—the learning view and the acquisition view. In the learning view, the supporters state that people need to learn the language purposely while in the acquisition view, people hold that people could get the language by simply acquired.

Firstly, the author explores about the how people develop literacy—the reading and writing skills of their first language. When developing the reading skill of first language, the learning view holders consider this process as word recognition process, while the acquisition view holders believe it is a sociopsycholinguistic process which is somewhat innate. In the learning view, students need to first learn the vocabulary and then do the reading. What’s more, by reading aloud and connecting the phonetic sounds and words in the book, students could also know some new words. However, in the acquisition view, students will do a lot of reading and will know the new word’s meaning by their background and the cues from the linguistic system. For example, when they meet a new word, they would deduce the possible meaning and then after they reading the later content, the contents will confirm or decline their deduction, and by this process, students would acquire the new words. In the acquisition class, student will not only use the graphophonics which is also applied in the learning view, but also use the syntax and semantic cueing system to know the meaning of the reading.

Things are similar in the writing skills. In the learning view, students would learn how to write well by using correct words, sentences and passages. Students will learn how to write the conventional writing stuff. Teachers will pay more attention to correct students’ wrong words and grammar things instead of the content, and this is actually what a traditional class will do. While in the acquisition class, which is the process writing class, students will first begin to write what they want and then the teacher will help students to make their essays more fluently. So just as the author said, students’ ‘writing moves naturally form invention to convention’. In the process class, not only the teachers but the classmates will do some comments to help the students improve his or her writing skills, so that students can both do good writing and know the process of writing.

Secondly, the author also states about the 2 views that exist in the second or foreign language learning. In the learning view class which is also the traditional class, people learn the foreign language by words and then sentences and learn the language same as other subjects. In this class, teachers will correct students’ errors immediately. Students will pass the quiz and test of the languages, but they usually fail to communicate with others. Different from the learning view, the current acquisition view states that by using some techniques, foreign language could be understandable. In this classroom, students will communicate in this language. The teachers will focus on the meaning that students use and consider the errors as natural.

Personally, I learned my first and foreign language both by the learning view class. Although the recent study support the acquisition view, I think the learning class will be more effective, because even though the acquisition class will help students acquire knowledge with less effort; it is more effective or more accurately, more quickly to learn the language.