homework#1

The difference between learning and acquisition.

According to the reading material, there are distinguishing differences between learning and acquiring a new language.

Learning to read in a new language, which belongs to  word recognition view, is more like to break a subject into several parts and learn the meaning of each part and then connect them to know the meaning of the whole subject. In classroom, teachers may pre-teach some difficult words first to help student better understand the context and have students to read aloud in order to pronounce correctly.  However, acquiring to read a new language, which comes from sociopsycholinguistic view, is another completely different way by using three linguistic systems. One may read extensively, which renders he/she see a word for many times in different reading materials and therefore know the word and its multiple meanings in different circumstances. What is more, teachers may teach more strategies of the context than the vocabulary and pronunciations to help students comprehend, then have the students reading silently.

In terms of writing, there are also conflict views of learning and acquisition. Teachers holding the learning view tend to help students to write in a certain form with a fast speed and without mistakes to cope given topics. Students usually write papers in the given topic with clearly defined structure. On the opposite, holding acquisition view, teachers encourage students to find topics by themselves and focus more on the content of the essay. Also, mistakes are encouraged since students can learn more. In addition, students will not only write essays, but also get feedback from others, do final editing and then share the finished piece with others. 

My experience:

As a Chinese student, who starts to learn English since a first-grade kid, I could say that I have experienced various ways to learn/acquire English. 

When I was in elementary school, the teaching mode of our school is a typical learning style. We first learn to know the 26 letters and then try to remember the meaning of different words and read the articles aloud. What is more, tests are given every week in order to check whether we remembered every single word that our teacher Miss Wang taught us. Though Miss Wang taught us English with a learning view, she practiced many hypothesis of Krashen into her teaching style to help us learn more efficiently and make the classes less miserable for us who are tortured by many kinds of tests. We played many games during class in order to both prevent students from too bored of the knowledge and make the class more easy to concentrate for students. Also, she made the class just a little bit difficult in a very appropriate degree. Though several difficult knowledge is taught, the class is still very comprehensive. However, with this kind of teaching style, I got the worst grades in my first year and was under the shadow of terrible english for the following 5 years in my elementary school.

As I grow to middle school, I had a extra-curriculum activity of english. The teaching style of the instructor Mr Tang was completely different from Ms Wang. He is the teacher who holds the acquisition view and encourage students to read a lot and listen a lot. In class, he never made us to remember certain words and the environment was very relaxing. However, due to tons of reading and listening work is assigned aiming to let students read more and see more words, I couldn't face the homework pressure and dropped the class. Though I dropped the class in the middle, but my English progressed a lot. My ranking jumped from the bottom of the our class to the top of the class, which I think is gained from the new teacher and his new teaching style. 

Now I'm an international student in a completely new environment, in which english is spoken as first language, I also feel some new things about English learning/acquiring. And this experience is helping me turn to agree with Schumann's theory of second language acquisition. According to Schumann, there are two factors that influence the output of acquisition of English. One is distance, the other is psychological factors. Comparing to the former english education that I received in China, where English is considered a second language, here in America the distance between me and American culture is lessened. Therefore, I'm able to progress more quickly.