As I suspected, the reading has consisted of 80% educated guess and 20% real understanding, at the most, which are quite bad figures for lifting spirits up, I must admit. I had no trouble understanding the language itself, as I encountered very few words I did not know (preemption, posit), but understanding the meanings contained in those words was something else. I know too little about grammar and about linguistics to understand in depth what is discussed in the chapter. Now, I can just imagine how some of my classmates that must have had trouble understanding the text itself will come to class tomorrow...
These are some clear ideas I managed to get out of the text:
- This is a book on linguistics, not on language teaching. Thus, little of what is said is directly linked with teaching English at preschool ages, although those who know enough about linguistics and language teaching will most probably be able to bridge that gap and extract very interesting conclusions. Unfortunately, I am not in that position.
- The chapter our group had to read deals with the mechanics of constructing abstract constructions, not the motivational part of the process. As a result, it is not the most exciting thing one can read over the weekend, to be honest.
- Analogy is one basic skill that children use to create abstract constructions. They compare language structures they hear and align the elements that play the same communicative role, so they can then extend that "rule" to new utterances they create.
- Functionally based distributional analysis is another process that children apply to create abstract constructions. This allows them to classify the smallest units of language into categories such as noun and verb, not depending on formal aspects, but on the function that those elements have within a sentence. This classification is not done in a thorough way by children, but rather following a mosaic pattern, depending on their use of language (input they receive and output they produce, plus the feedback the adult sends).
- Early in development, children are conservative learners, and they are mostly influenced by the input they receive, so they "copy" what the adult says, and many constructions are that way entrenched by repetition. Later on, they become more adventurous in their use of language, much more creative, so they start generalising what they learn through analogy and distributional analysis. Of course, many times they will come up with constructions that the adult will judge correct, but others they will overgeneralise. To prevent overgeneralisation errors, children have two additional processes: giving preference to the constructions made by adults (preemption) and making categories of verbs that behave in the same manner (verb classes), so they apply what they know to be correct from one known member of a category to the rest of verbs in the same group. Those are the processes which help children constrain their otherwise excessive creativity with language.
Regarding practical issues that are directly related to preschool teaching, I have found the following:
- The computer model proposed in the connectionist theories, where the computer needed to learn simple sentences first, before it could proceed to more complex structures, and the way the amount of input was limited in order not to "overload" the computer (by limiting the working memory) resembles some aspects of our ontogeny, where some senses, like sight, are limited at birth, and some argue that might have a similar function.
- When it comes to making questions, children seem to acquire them in this order across languages: what/where, who, how/why, when. Well, that would be something we would expect, since children take some time to grasp causality and the notion of time.
- Children seem to apply general cognitive skills, abilities and processes to learn language. This means that children learn language the same way they learn other things. It is interesting to see that they apply one-to-one correspondence to make analogies to construct abstract constructions, and they use this same skill to construct the notion of numbers and to count, as we have learnt in the unit on mathematical thinking. Also, it could be argued that many of the steps of processes explained in the chapter bear similarities with the scientific method we have used in the unit of experimental sciences, which seems to be quite similar to the way children learn about their environment.
- Some general cognitive operating principles that children apply to language learning seem to be: paying attention to the ends of words, paying attention to stressed syllables, note frequency of use and compare utterances heard with those the child would produce in the same situation. Therefore, we should pay attention to those aspects in our adult output.
- We should provide children with input where the structural variables are not too many, in order to promote analogy. Thus, we need diversity (structural variation) of input, but no chaos.
- We should introduce or encourage novelties in language in meaningful communicational contexts, that is, following what children are interested in talking about, not creating artificial situations that will enable us to introduce what we want them to learn.
- Bilingual children tend to overgeneralise syntactic structures from the language they know best to the one they know less well, so in our sociolinguistic context we should expect more overgeneralisation from Spanish to Basque than the other way around.
- Due to developmental aspects explained above, we should expect overgeneralisation errors after the age of three or so.
- Most important of all, the adult can promote syntactic growth by recasting "wrong" structures that children produce IMMEDIATELY AFTER they have been said. The adult should give an alternative expression to the child, so she can compare her utterance and that of the adult to understand the differences between both. Right timing of exemplars is vital.
iruzkinik ez:
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