Me, myself, and I The new Metacognition concept in language learning and acquisition.

Mauricio Andrés Manrique    

We all know  that we are unique individuals, different  from each other  who acquire language through a process exclusively  human.This language gives us the capacity to perceive and comprehend our world, as well as to produce and use words and  sentences to communicate but this capacity requires a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive  vocabulary that we  ourselves  can only  internalize  in a  specific time of our life.

 

  Many theories have been proposed  about how children are able to acquire a language without learning it. Theories that explain how kids just pick up the linguistic input (input in the linguistic context is defined as All words, contexts, and other forms of language to which a learner is exposed), theories that prove that lads also have cognitive abilities  that let them acquire most aspects of language without being explicitly taught.

 

According to Noam Chomsky’s theory a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities. It seems to be that we all have the equipment installed; we just have to read the manual to use these capacities for learning any language we want.

 

The first of Chomsky's notions is called the "language acquisition device" or LAD. LAD refers to a person's innate childhood ability to learn language. It is through this device that a child is said to unconsciously gather ideas about language rules. Through this generative neural capacity, children acquire rules for understanding and constructing their native language (Chomsky, 1957).

 

If we think of his first notion we can say that we possess a device designed to understand languages and to produce ideas, It seems to be something natural and effortless to acquire a language as Stephen Krashen said "Language acquisition does not require extensive use of conscious grammatical rules, and does not require tedious drill."  “Acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language - natural communication - in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding."

 

We also can think of the concept Me, myself and I as the inner factor to understand and develop the function of the brain to acquire a new language, taking into account Vygotsky's most important contribution that concerns   the inter-relationship of language development and thought.  This refers to the profound connection between speech (both silent inner speech and oral language), and the development of mental concepts and cognitive awareness. If we understand that we are independent individuals and different from each other we can have social interaction in the development of cognition,  Vigotsky  strongly believed that community plays a central role in the process of "making meaning." to understand our world.

 

And if we include Bruner’s theory that says we learn when we solve problems for different situations, plus the constructivist learning theory  where the learner draws on his or her own past experience and existing knowledge to discover facts and relationships and new truths to be learned, we can come up with the idea that we are beings that can learn and teach  in different styles according to the situations or problems we are facing or dealing with.

 

Me, myself and I as learner is the new  Metacognition concept  that pretends to raise awareness of the importance of knowing ourselves, how our brain works, how  we can   choose the best method for learning a language, as we have different preferences and ways of learning.  We also change and adjust our learning strategies based on our own development and on the different learning situations in which we find ourselves. By understanding ourselves and becoming more aware of these differences, we become more capable of adjusting to new situations throughout our lifetime as learners.

 

 Me, myself, and I as a teacher must understand that we can use different methods, methodologies, strategies and techniques according to the characteristics of our students and the teaching environment. We must remember that all of us are different and maybe that factor makes us equal.

 

Only me, myself and I can make the difference.
 
 To read more, please visit: http://mauricioandresmanrique.jimdo.com/
 

COGNITIVE FACTORS APPLIED EFFECTIVELY IN THE EFL LESSON PLANNING by Ivonne Londoño

English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom is a place where a lot of situations happen, but they are mostly correlated to human interactions, knowledge development, growth of social abilities, strengthening of linguistic skills, communication practice, acquisition and others. However, sometimes the teacher’s lesson planning and the class environment are isolated from the brain processes and factors that have a tremendous influence in the learning and teaching progresses. While, some think these topics would be complex for every teacher and will be time consuming during the class planning, these factors could reinforce and facilitate learning processes and the acquisition of a second language.
Furthermore,  cognitive factors such as verbal intelligence, phonological and long term memory represent a meaningful category in the EFL class arrangement. The task will be more than planning grammar drills, skills practice for two hours of a lesson. the indication is to cover all areas in knowledge insights starting from the brain. 
Verbal intelligence  is the ability to solve different problems presented in language-based communication with a deep reasoning; Phonological factors depends on the pronunciation and its representation with meaning. Finally the long term memory plays a noticeable role in education because is the continuous storage of information in which the mind accepts those significant memories and avoid  others.
These factors could enhance the activities through using teaching strategies like: Storytelling, brainstorming, writing and publishing; these verbal tasks will develop more than one skill making the student able to use the words well when use the production skills (writing and speaking). Also, in the acquisition of a second language verbal intelligence can be experienced in higher levels of English where  the  reasoning of a language appears and  word  retention, persuasive skills, debating, being able to explain concepts and use conversational  humor  are  performance indicators.
Above all, the idyllic result in a second language classroom is having a near-native communication  as much as possible. But the training  required to reach this goal is challenging. That is why, phonological factors together with the four skills can determine the key of academic success in the acquisition of the second language sounds and pronunciation. Meanwhile, the main problem at school is the intervention of the first language in the second language learning for the reason that learners tend to confuse some phonation characteristics  with their  mother tongue. Nevertheless,  linguistic awareness as a result of  appropriate teaching strategies will alleviate the weaknesses in this area. For example the intervention with:  sound production, recognition, repetition, modeling, choral readings, reading out loud  and the use of web tools definitely will help teachers plan  their tasks.

In spite of the two factors mentioned before, the main worldwide concern in education is the problem in students concepts retention involving memory issues and low grading rates. Long term memory is described as the way we as human beings save information for a long period of time. It occurs when  information received in the brain make some connections between the abstract and the concrete ideas we already have in mind.  In education, one of the types of long term memory that must be strengthened is   semantic memory where  concepts, meanings and understanding are a collection of factual information about a study object. One way to promote long-term memory in the classroom is (Sprenger, 2002) planning enriched lessons where the student can be motivated, focus and keep their attention, take into account their  prior knowledge, let them rewrite concepts as they understood, ask them high level activities, make a review (Recycling Activities) and finally ask them to retrieve those memories.
To summarize, in spite of the intricacy of including these three cognitive factors in our lesson plans,  we teachers should encompass  in all our pedagogical, society and community duties, the neurological profound understanding of everything that happens inside the English classroom.

References
http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/profdev/profdev156b.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_memory
http://psychology.about.com/od/eindex/g/episodic-memory.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/memory/f/long-term-memory.htm
http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/profdev/profdev156b.shtml

To read more, please visit http://englishteacherivonne.wordpress.com/

MAKING MEMORY THEORY OPERATIONAL IN SLA by Sandra Milena Marín Ríos

 

As you know, I am only a common English teacher who is trying to do her best in these fields.  Maybe this is not a “theory” like the ones proposed by Vigotsky, Krashen, Skinner among others, but I tried to take some important aspects from some of them that could help me to “support” my own  “theory”.

     First of all I am going to show you the definition and some important aspects of the human memory. “Memory is the mental processes that are used to acquire, store, retain and later retrieve information.  The information can be obtained from our 5 senses before they are processed by the brain. There are three major processes involved in memory, namely Processing, Storage and Retrieval.

Processing

     New information or experiences make their way to the brain through the 5 senses where they are processed by the neurons in the brain.  The key to having your brain successfully processing the information into your memory is paying careful attention to the information or experience.  For example, if you are explaining a topic and your student is daydreaming, chances are, your student will not remember what you explained.

Storage

     If you have paid enough attention to the new information, your hippocampus, or that part of your brain vital in the information processing, will send a signal to save the information into the long-term memory.  This process can be enhanced if you use some memory techniques.

Retrieval

    When the time comes to retrieve the information, your brain will stimulate the same pattern of nerve cells that was used to store it.  The more you recall and use that information, the better you get at recalling it as the same pathways are strengthened.

How is long term memory compared to short term memory?

     Short-term memory, also known as working memory, is the information we are aware of or think about  at the present moment. For example, when you look up the phone number of a store you need to call to check on the availability of an item. The store’s phone number is held in short term memory. Short term memory is fragile and usually parts or all of it can be forgotten in a short period of time.  Because most times, the information, like the telephone number, is only needed for that moment.  Unless of course, you need to call up the store a few times a day every day for a week, then it will be lodged in your brain for a much longer period of time.

     Long-term memory refers to the continuing storage of information. It  involves the effort (conscious or unconscious) you make around a piece of information in order to retain it for a longer period of time, because it is personally important or meaningful to you (for example, your wife’s birthday); you need it (such as job procedures or material you’re studying for an exam); or it made an emotional impact (a place you had an accident, the restaurant where you were proposed for marriage or the first time you drove a car).   As long-term memory is subject to being faded out or parts or the whole of the event being forgotten, several recalls/retrievals of memory may be needed for long-term memories to last for years, it is dependent also on the depth of processing. Individual retrievals can take place in increasing intervals in accordance with the principle of carefully spaced repetition”.  ( http://www.articlesbase.com)

     Taking into account all these important aspects, let´s try to identify which theories can fit within this “new theory”.

     Beginning with the processing aspect of memory, we have Krashen and his Affective filter in which when students feel comfortable during the development of a class activity the acquisition can be reached easily. Also, with the input hypothesis, since if the student is exposed to the target language he could acquire it and understand the message. If you as a teacher use the appropriate strategies like visual images or TPR commands your students will store the vocabulary in their long term memory and they will start acquiring vocabulary  easily because the activities you did in the classroom were significant for them. They will remember the words or the structures as soon as they need them.   

     After this, we have the retrieval aspect, which could be related to the output hypothesis, from Merril Swain who states that, sometimes,   under some conditions output facilitates language learning, and enhance input due to the mental process connected with the production  of  language. Activities such as role plays, exchanging letters, can be done in this process.

      According to all this, I think that memory plays an important part in acquisition and learning. The long term memory is one of the cognitive factors our students develop the less. We should stimulate and propose to our students the most creative and amazing activities and tasks to show them the big potential they have in their heads.

REFERENCES

LIming,Yu.The comprehensible output hypothesis and self-directed learning: A learner’s perspective.1945.

 Krashen, Stephen. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergammon Press, 1982.

Mak, Martin (oct, 9 2009) ten ways to improve long term memory. Extraido el 2 de diciembrede 2012 desde http://www.articlesbase.com/self-help-articles/10-ways-to-improve-long-term-memory-1320077.html

To read more, please visit http://samimari.tumblr.com/

 

Fostering the Development of Cognitive Factors in your EFL Students by Amanda S. Byrd

Posted on November 12, 2012

Fostering the Development of Cognitive Factors in your EFL Students
“Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them…I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.”
“You can’t make a race horse of a pig.”
“No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
          This is one of my favorite quotes and has been hanging in my classroom since I started teaching eight years ago.  The quote left a big impression on me not only as a teacher but also as a person because it challenges one´s idea of perception and his role inside it. Not everyone is a genius. Not everyone has the orator skills of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Not everyone has the drive or desire to be fluent in more than one language.  So, why should I even try to make my students something they are not? To answer this question I will refer back to the dialogue quoted above. We teachers cannot change and average student into an Albert Einstein or into another John Steinbeck or Tennessee Williams, but with the right stimulation and guidance teachers CAN bring out the best in each student. As the quote says, we CAN make them very fast pigs. The question language teachers must ask is, “How can I foster an environment that promotes the highest learning from each student?”
          The idea that just because students are around the same age and are in the same class, they should be in the same stage of language development is preposterous. To raise the verbal intelligence, phonetic awareness and the long term memory of these abilities a teacher needs to first know where each student´s capabilities lay. Differentiation inside the classroom allows each student to realize what they are truly capable of doing independently. When they are taught to pick “good fit books” and have the liberty to read what they choose then reading becomes a meaningful experience and the advancements they make will stick in their long term memory. When students are grouped by phonetic ability and receive direct instruction within that ability then you can see progress because they are given tasks within their own range of capabilities. When students are given instruction just slightly higher than their independent working level then learning will take place. Differentiation is the only way to make this varied instruction level possible.

Learn Slovak! or Learn Slovak?

 

Learn Slovak!
Or
Learn Slovak?

Any person who advances in their profession will come to a moment in their career when they begin to forget what it was like at the start. They forget how it felt to dump all of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle on the floor and think to yourself, “What the hell am I doing?” They forget that feeling of being at the edge of the 10m platform ready to jump……or not?
The hardest part of doing anything new is convincing yourself in that small moment to just do it. And that’s when all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle somehow seem to find each other, or you experience the thrill and fright of plummeting from a 10m platform with an acceleration of 9.8 m/s2.
Why should we experience these moments again if we already went through them, overcame them, and have even developed a skill in that area? Why would I want to start a new language…again….after already having done it several times before?
The answer to these questions is quite simple. “To not get stuck.” As humans we have a tendency to form habits and patterns of behavior. J.B. Watson explored this in his research on human behavior; but just because it is a commonality amongst us humans doesn´t mean that it is healthy, or progressive.
The most amazing thing about being human is the possibility of creativity, and the power of creation. In my experience, nothing stifles creativity like being stuck in a rut. So here I am, ten years after beginning to learn Spanish,  fifteen years after beginning to learn French and I am ready to go back to the beginning again and learn Slovak; or am I?
My first, and perhaps only, class of Slovak was last Friday. I did not prepare myself for this encounter the way I should have so I was very….um….fresh, shall we say. In complete honesty I was not looking forward to the class. However something delightfully unexpected happened. The growing feeling of nervousness and excitement traveled through me as I stared wide eyed at a person jabbering off in some language that I totally didn´t understand. It was the catalyst that ignited a desire to meet the challenge.
We can say that these are the small moments in life that wake you up and remind you that you are forever young and fresh. Life hasn´t come to a standstill, your behavior has. And it doesn´t have to be that way! Trying something new or starting over again doesn´t put you back or behind in life. It actually propels you forward. It awakens the creativity inside you and takes you to new and exciting states of being.
So to answer the proposition in the title I have to choose “LEARN SLOVAK!” and spark a little bit of enjoyment of a challenge back into my life. Who knows, maybe one day it will come in handy, but even if it doesn´t I know, for the time being, that I am not asleep in this life. I am wide eyed and ready to go!

to read more, please visit http://maniblanca.wordpress.com/

THE EVOLUTIONIST VIEW by Paula Andrea Pelaez

 

USEFUL ELEMENTS OF THEORIES ABOUT LANGUAGE LEARNING AND ACQUISITION

                                                                                    

     All the ideas, researches and opinions about language acquisition and learning make us reflect as language teachers about how people acquire and learn the native language and others. How I can say that one of those methods is better than another. Taking into account my own experience in the classroom when I teach English, I take elements from different approaches, and I use a variety of techniques to teach the language. I consider that cognition evolves by the time our language is developed, according to the motivation and the exposure we have to the environment.

    Let’s define learning and acquisition: in the first action, we are conscious about language, it is formal; in the second one we are unconscious and it is more informal. Krashen defined these concepts in his Natural Approach, not paying too much attention to the grammar or mistakes learners make but communication, in which he bases his theory. In this proposal, Krashen emphasizes in the affective filter as the clue to involve students’ positive emotions in language acquisition. 

     According to Chomsky, Mind and thought processes are very important. The learner of any language has an inbuilt learning capacity for language that enables learner to construct a kind of personal theory or set of rules about language based on exposure, that is to say that all of us were born with some innate knowledge about a language, which is improved through application and construction over and over again.
    

     At this point I wonder: do human beings acquire the language from nature or do we nurture it? Or both? We recognize sounds, words and simple phrases since we are very young, that is our nature; through time individuals construct, rebuild, create and recreate a language, that is nurture. Skinner, in his behaviorism theory said that human beings learn through stimulus- response and repetition. This is a reliable hypothesis for me because motivation and repetition has had a strong influence in my learning. 

     I believe our experiences have a crucial impact in our language learning. Behaviorists said people learn by imitation and association, that is why we enrich vocabulary, grammar, expressions and sounds everyday; at the same time our brains have that innate capability to acquire the language, having in mind L.A.D proposed by Chomsky.

     Interaction, says Bruner, is an important element for language acquisition. The relationship with the environment, with other people, with situations and events allow us acquire and learn a language, that connection is one of the keys to build and maintain the language in our brains. Piaget takes into account the child’s development in the construction of language. Gardner believes that multiple intelligences must be had in mind by the time we want students learn something easier.

    All these entries made me think about the best method to address my English class, and after reading them, I found that there is no a perfect one. All of them can fit my learners’ abilities, because they have to deal with our condition as human beings, I mean our biological brain development and our emotions intelligence to overcome difficulties. It is a matter of knowledge and physiological evolution. 
As a conclusion, there will be more and more researchers and findings in this field and there will always be a theory or theories that can help language teachers get better results, so our contribution is and will be continue taking care of our profession and giving the best to our students.

To read more, please visit http://pandreapelaez.blogspot.com/ 

A mind map of what the course touched upon

A very useful  contribution by  Mr. Andres Felipe Pino.

“How to Master Succesfully Any Language of the World”. Dmitriv Slomov

Book review

There are as many languages as a variety of courses to learn and master them in the world.  It is my intention to provide my own thoughts and views based on the the book: “ How to Master Successfully Any Language of the World”. Firstly, the author poses three questions which I consider crucial when the apprentice desires to learn a second language:

     1. Why do you need to learn the language ?

     2. How are you going to use the language you have learnt?

     3. You have learned the language, what happens next?

It is of the foremost importance to ask oneself  the above questions; therefore by answering each one, and be satisfied with the responses then the learning becomes meaningful and the motivation will be the engine to maintain and reach the intended objective. Secondly, I do consider that the strategies (techniques) that the author suggested to learn a language are sound, and adequate for the process, though, I would like to focus on three of them which seem to me important enough to comment on each one:

 1.     Practice: as the author accordingly mentions it: “You get what you practice”.“Language is not a science, it is a skill and like any other skill to be developed, it should  be practiced”.   No doubt about that,  without a constant practice of the target language it will not only  take longer to master it, but the motivation could at the same time decrease.  Therefore, it is an aspect that cannot be overlooked.

2.     Memorizing: It is quite worrisome that nowadays,  language teachers and language texts do not emphasize the need to memorize words or phrases in the target language, they certainly do omit the important role that this exercise does in learning a second language.  On the contrary, the author in this text does recommend to memorize certain words in second language especially those which tend to be similar in our native language (true cognates)

3.      Culture:  The cultural component may not be left aside and the author certainly does not. The learning of a language must include a vast knowledge of the culture, expressions, costumes, idioms and the like that reflect a particular society.

To sum up, I dare to say that text is worthwhile and consistent for  the purpose  of learning a language.  I do recommend it to anyone interested in this field.

By: Jorge Enrique Arango C.