Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

12.2 Processing models
General models of L2 learning
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Box 12.1 The Universal Grammar model of L2 learning
Key themes
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Language is the knowledge in individual minds.
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UG shapes and restricts the languages that are learnt through principles
and parameters.
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Language learning is setting values for parameters and acquiring properties
of lexical items, but not acquiring principles.
Teaching
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No need to teach ‘principles’.
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Design optimum input for triggering parameters.
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Emphasize the teaching of vocabulary items with specifications of how they
can occur in grammatical structures.
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What is the subject of the sentence ‘The old man likes bananas’? How do you
know?
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How important is it for students to recognize the subject of the sentence?
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Does practice make perfect in second language learning? Is it the same for all
aspects of language?
Focusing questions
Competition Model: this claims that languages have to choose which aspect of
language to emphasize in the processing of speech, whether intonation,
vocabulary, word order or inflections
declarative/procedural memory: the memory for individual items of informa-
tion (declarative memory) is different from the memory processes for handling
that information (procedural memory)
connectionism: a theory which claims that all mental processing depends on
developing and using the connections in the mind
agreement: the grammatical system in which two elements in the sentence
show they go together by having appropriate word inflections, and so on, for
example singular verb and singular subject in the English present tense
word order: a major element in conveying grammatical meaning in some, but
not all languages, is word order; one variation between languages is the order
of subject, verb and object: SVO (English), VSO (Arabic), SOV (Japanese), and
so on