Sho's homework 9/9 No.1

Xiang Wang

WRT 103

08/09/2013

            According to the reading material, the readers can find some differences between learning and acquisition. For learning, students and teachers just follow a pattern which is just directly remember or teach the words’ meaning, spelling, pronunciation, and grammar. It is very tradition and straight forward method. There is much less flexibility then acquisition. So compare with learning, acquisition is more like put in to real practice by directly use the language with some native. It’s like baby learning a language. As you use it more in real life you get better. But it has some limit and influence by the person who you are talking to. For acquisition, the person who is talking with should provide something you can accept which the reading mentions as the Input hypnosis. If the person such like teacher, native speaker provide something that the person can not understand or too easy for them, they won’t improve themselves.

For me, luckily, I had both experience for learning language by learning and acquisition. I’m Chinese but I was born in Japan, and also my both parents are Chinese. Because of my particular situation, I easily mastered both Japanese and Chinese as both seemed to be a part of me since I was young. For this case, I think when I mastered both languages it’s by acquisition. Because I was young, I didn’t learn them by reading text book, doing dill or practice for learning grammar. I just know them. I can’t explain how the grammar works like other people who learn the language. I just use them in daily life so I got skill. Now, I’m studying in U.S.A. what I use, I guess is learning. I just read text book, take the class, and try hard to remember the vocabularies. As the reading also said, maybe acquisition does have limit period which usually mean by people’s young age. Because what I really thought is that I can’t master English perfectly just by daily conversation which is without learning. I really need to take time and try to remember the grammars and vocabularies. But what I really think is the mixture of both learning and acquisition are the true way to learn a foreign language. As we living in U.S. we actually get both chance which is taking learning class and talk to native in daily life. It should be most correct way to learn English.