Student sample paper

Initial Language Learner Profiles and Krashen’s Hypotheses

 

Shuxrat A. Abdukaxxarov
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Webster University

TESL-5230: Theories of Foreign and Second Language Acquisition

Sevinch Daukaeva

November 10, 2023.

Description
I always feel inspired of teaching naturally gifted learners. I am going to describe two of my learners that are both obtaining my language courses with excellent marks.
One of my excellent learner is 8-year-old girl Mamura, who speaks Uzbek as a native language. In her family Uzbek language is the dominant spoken language, but her mother and father knows English language. Besides, her mother is an English language teacher and very eager to instruct her daughter foreign language rules and ways of learning. Especially, Mamura’s mother helps her doing homework, assists her additional grammatical instructions separately from my courses. That is why, her achievements in language acquisitions mainly influenced from her mother. In addition, she is very outgoing that her this character helps to share and revise what she has learned but he has a little lock of utterance in speech.
The other my naturally gifted learner is Marat whose native language is Russian. He has good memory and sensitivity to language as he is left handed and has sensitive skin (loup et al. 1994). When contacting with his parents I identified that his parents do not know English but they assisted him with study books, audio-lingual materials that will help him to esquire natural conversational speech as Marat is a little shy of conducting with others. In addition, his parents were willing to teach him English but they could not give formal instructions except supporting with animated movies and cartoons in English.
Furthermore, his is very fond of learning and his goal is to become excellent speaker and user. That is why, whenever he has spare time, tries to imitate to native speech. On top of all that, his parents noted that his speech in native language come up at his earlier age that is one of his success of learning English as a second language (loup et al. 1994).
According to Krashen, S. (1985) I will explain how “The Monitor Hipothesis, The Input Hypothesis and The Affective Filter Hypothesis” will work in my language instructions for the two of my learners.
The Monitor Hypothesis
Mamura has advantages in grammar but lock of speech utterance. That is why I use illustrated animated materials to instruct the conversational speech and give her time and attention with many repetitions.
Marat has opportunity in speaking but he often makes mistakes. In order to correct in my instructions I give attention to limit the role of conscious learning and try to correct minor errors by giving level related grammar instructions and exercises. Russian grammar is very similar to English, that is why as I know from Krashen (1985) L1 helps “in making English input more comprehensible”.
The Input Hypothesis
While teaching Mamura I choose real life topics, give motivation to read and provide reading materials with varied vocabularies in order to teach writing. Kerashen (1985) clearly mentioned that good “writing competence comes from large amount of motivated readings.”
As for Marat, I mainly add grammatical instructions and tasks that are more complicated in order to form his grammar ability up to automatism (Kerashen, 1985).
The Affective Filter Hypothesis
Mamura is self-motivated and energetic, outgoing learner that is why, while giving feedbacks I took her works as an example. I organize her group works that tailored to boost her practical vocabulary.
When it comes to Marat, I try not to abuse him and instruct more thing individually and by using Russian language that will help him hide his mistakes from other and be confident. This technic helps me to define Maret’s identity thus impotent in affective teaching (Waller, L., Wethers, K., & De Costa, P. 2017).

References

Loup, G., Boustagui, E., El Tigi, M., & Moselle, M. (1994). Reexamining the critical period hypothesis: A Case study of successful adult SLA in a naturalistic environment. Cambridge University Press.
Krashen, S. (1985) The input hypothesis: Issues and Implications. Longman Group UK Ltd.
Waller, L., Wethers, K., & De Costa, P. (2017). A Critical Praxis: Narrowing the gap between identity, theory, and practice. Tesol Journal 8(1).