a summary of chapter from the book titled "How languages are learned"

1. The Cognitivist/Developmental
Perspective
Source: How Languages are Learned
By
Lightbown & Spada
2013
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

2. • Cognitive and developmental psychologists argue
that there is no need to hypothesize that humans
have a language- specific module in the brain or that
acquisition and learning are distinct mental processes.
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

3. • Norman Segalowitz (2003) suggested that learners have to
pay attention at first to any aspect of the language that
they are trying to understand or produce (????????).
• Sometimes changes in language behavior do not seem to
be explainable in terms of a gradual build-up of fluency
through practice.
• ‘Transfer appropriate processing’: information is best
retrieved in situations that are similar to those in which it
was acquired.
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

4. Connectionism
• Connectionists attribute great importance to the role
of the environment than to any specific innate
knowledge in the learner, arguing that what is innate
is simply the ability to learn, not any specifically
linguistic principles.
• Connectionists argue that learners gradually build up
their knowledge of language through exposure to
thousands of instances of the linguistic features they
eventually hear.
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

5. The Competition Model
• The Competition Model is based on the hypothesis
that language acquisition occurs without the necessity
of learner’s focused attention or the need for any
innate brain module that is specifically for language
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

6. The Interaction Hypothesis
• Conversational interaction is essential, if not
sufficient, condition for second language acquisition
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

7. • Psycholinguistic Processes in Language Use and
Language Learning
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

8. Attention, Consciousness, and
Human Information Processing
• Comprehension and communication strategies give
the user the greater ability to handle language
successfully but at the cost that syntax is de-
emphasized.
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

9. Memory functioning
• Short-term memory: The short term memory is
considered to be limited in capacity, and to require
conscious effort and control
• Long-term memory: The long term memory system
is very large in capacity, can operate in parallel
fashion.
• Short-term memory has been replaced bt the
concept of working memory
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

10. • Input working memory output
Long-Term memory
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

11. Van Patten and Input Processing
(1996)
• Principle 1:
• Learners process input for meaning before they process it
for form
• - learners process content words in the input before
anything else.
• - learners prefer processing lexical items to grammatical
items for semantic information
• - learners prefer processing more meaningful morphology
before less or non-meaningful morphology
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

12. • Principle 2: For learners to process form that is non-
meaningful, they must be able to process
informational or communicative content at no or
little cost to attentional resources.
• Principle 3: Learners possess default strategies that
assign the role of agent to the first noun (phrase)
they encounter in a sentence.
• Input intake developing system
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

13. Schmidt and Noticing
• Not all input has equal value and
• Only that input which is noticed then becomes
available for intake and effective processing. Noticing
operates as a necessary but not a sufficient condition
for effective processing to take place
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

14. Influencing upon Noticing
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

15. Rule-based versus Exemplar – based
Memory
• The rule-based interpretation would imply interlanguage
development would be the result of the restructuring that
occurs with linguistic material, motivated by continued
operation of a universal grammar, or by other cognitive
process. The exemplar-based interpretation would argue
for development as being the accumulation of useful
chunks of language, language as formulaic items.
• Sinclair (1991). Language processing does not always
follow a generative, rule governed system, but that
language users are adept at shifting in an out of an
analytic mode
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

16. Consciousness as Awareness
• Schmidt (1990, 1994)
• Consciousness as awareness has considerable importance
in language learning.
• Awareness enables more efficient solutions to the
‘matching’ problem
• Awareness may enable learners to appreciate better the
instruction they are receiving especially the correction that
is being given.
• Awareness may make it easier to transform and recombine
material as the structure of material is more available, and
other organizational possibilities become clear
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

17. Output
• Schmidt (1992): stated that there are three ways of
accounting for the development of fluency:
Accelerating models, Restructuring models, and
instance models
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

18. The development of Fluency
• Accelerating models suggest that there is a natural
sequence in which initial declarative knowledge
becomes proceduralized or automatized, so that
essentially similar processes are used, but more
quickly and with less need to use mental resources to
control them
• Restructuring approaches ( Cheng, 1985) regard
improved performance as the result of using better
algorithms so that performance is better organized
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University

19. • Instance-based approaches regard fluency as the
product of organizing performance so that it is based
not on rules which are applied more quickly, or on
rules which are more efficiently organized, but on
contextually-coded exemplars, such as a particular
example of a past tense form
A presentation prepared by Fahad Almohaisen MA at King Saud University