Lecture 8

Lecture 8
Foreign language learning
Tautenbayeva Ainagul Abdumazhitovna

Definitions
Acquisition: subconscious process which leads to the development of

“competence” and which is not dependent on the guidance of teaching.
Learning: conscious and guided study of the language.
Stages in Language Acquisition
 Children acquire language in similar stages across the world.
 When children are acquiring language, they do not speak a degenerate form of
adult language
– Rather, they speak a version of the language that conforms to the set of
grammatical rules they have developed at that stage of acquisition
The Perception and Production of Speech Sounds
 Infants display an ability to recognize speech sounds

– They will even respond to linguistic contrasts when those contrasts are not
present in the language(s) spoken around them
– They can perceive differences in voicing, place of articulation, manner of
articulation
– But they do not react to nonlinguistic aspects of speech (loudness, gender-based
pitch differences, etc.)
 Infants appear to be born with the ability to perceive and focus on the sounds
that are important for language, so they can learn any human language
– But by 6 months babies begin to lose to ability to discriminate between sounds
that are not phonemic in the language(s) they are acquiring
First Words
• After the age of one, children figure out that sounds are related to meanings
and start to produce their first words
• Usually children go through a holophrastic stage, where their one-word
utterances may convey more meaning– up used to indicate something in the
sky or to mean “pick me up”
• This suggests that children know more language than they can express
Segmenting the Speech Stream
• A major obstacle that babies must overcome is to be able to identify where

word boundaries are.
• English-speaking children may be able to use stress as a cue for word
boundaries (prosodic bootstrapping)
– Every content word in English has stress
• If a word has two syllables, the stress either falls on the first syllable (trochaic
stress) or the second syllable (iambic stress), but the vast majority of English
words have trochaic stress
– Experiments have shown that children do use stress as a cue for word
boundaries since most English words have stress on the first syllable.
The Acquisition of Phonology
 Children tend to acquire the sounds common to all languages first, followed by
the less common sounds of their own language
 Vowels tend to be acquired first, and consonants are ordered:
– Manner of articulation: nasals, glides, stops, liquids, fricatives, affricates
– Place of articulation: labials, velars, alveolars, palatals
 Uncommon but high frequency sounds may be acquired earlier than expected
 Children can perceive more sound contrasts than they can make in early stages
– Thus they know more about phonology than we can tell by listening to them speak
 When they cannot yet produce a sound, they may substitute an easier sound
– These substitutions are rule-governed
– Children tend to reduce consonant clusters ([pun] for spoon), reduplicate syllables
([wawa] for water), and drop final consonants ([ke] for cake)
The Acquisition of Word Meaning
 When children learn the meanings of words they must learn the relevant features of the class
of things that are referred to by that word
– They must learn that dog refers to pugs and Great Danes, but not cats
 When learning words, children often overextend a word’s meaning
– For example, using the word dog to refer to any furry, four-legged animal (overextensions
tend to be based on shape, size, or texture, but never color)
 They may also underextend a word’s meaning
– For example, using the word dog to refer only to the family pet, as if dog were a proper noun
 The whole object principle: when a child learns a new word, (s)he is likely to interpret the
word to refer to a whole object rather than one of its parts
– This principle and others may help the child learn 5,000 words per year
 It has also been put forth that children can learn the meaning of verbs based on the syntactic
environments of the verbs
– This is known as syntactic bootstrapping
The Acquisition of Morphology
 The acquisition of morphology clearly demonstrates the rule-governed

nature of language acquisition
– Children typically learn a morphological rule and then overgeneralize
– Children go through three stages in the acquisition of an irregular form:
 In phase 1 they use the standard irregular past tense forms because they have
learned these irregulars as separate lexical items (broke, brought)
 In phase 2 the child has learned the rule for past tense and therefore attaches
the regular past tense morpheme to the irregular verb (breaked, bringed)
 In phase 3 the child realizes that there are exceptions to the morphological
rule and bring the standard irregular forms back into their vocabulary
(broke, brought)
The Acquisition of Syntax
• At about two years of age, children start to put words together to form two-
word utterances
• Chronological age is not a good measure of linguistic development due to
individual differences, so instead linguists use the child’s mean length of
utterance (MLU) to measure development.
• The telegraphic stage describes a phase when children tend to omit function
morphemes such as articles, subject pronouns, auxiliaries, and verbal inflection
• However, while function morphemes are absent, these sentences have
hierarchical constituent structure like adult sentences
– Telegraphic utterances are not just words strung together and reveal the
child’s knowledge of syntactic rules.
The Acquisition of Syntax
• A child must know the syntactic categories of words in order to apply

syntactic rules
– Semantic bootstrapping: the notion that children first use the meaning of a
word to figure out its syntactic category
– Word frames may also help children determine the syntactic categories for
words
– By the age of 3, most children consistently use function morphemes and can
produce
Comparative method of teaching foreign languages
At the end of the 40s of the last century, a comparative method of teaching
foreign languages appeared, having received its final formalization in the 70s of
the XX century.
The linguistic basis of this methodological direction was the work of L.V. Sherba,
who tried to find practical application of his linguistic research. In fact, L.V.
Shcherba was the founder of this methodological direction.
In the future, L.V. Sherba's ideas were developed by his numerous students and
followers: I.V. Rakhmanov, V.D. Arakin, I.M. Berman, A.V. Monighetti, S.K.
Folomkina, Z.M. Tsvetkova, V.S. Tsetlin and etc.
L.V. Sherba
Lev Vladimirovich Sherba was born in 1880 in St. Petersburg. In 1903 he
graduated from St. Petersburg University. L.V. Shcherba was the founder of the
phonetic laboratory at St. Petersburg University. He developed the doctrine of the
phoneme, giving the term "phoneme" its modern meaning.
L.V. Sherba made a significant contribution to general linguistics, lexicology,
lexicography and the theory of writing. He put forward an original concept of
language and speech. Sherba's interest in teaching methods originated at the
beginning of his scientific activity. In connection with his pedagogical work, he
began to deal with the teaching of the Russian language, but soon his attention
was also attracted by the methodology of teaching foreign languages.
In 1929, L.V. Shcherba in his work "How to
learn foreign languages" (1) showed the
specifics of receptive and productive language
acquisition. In the 30s, he put forward the idea
of the role of taking into account the native
language in teaching a foreign language (2) and
later on the general educational significance of
learning a foreign language
In 1941-1943 he wrote a book that highlighted

all the main issues of the methodology of
teaching foreign languages from a linguistic
point of view. He almost finished the first part
of the fundamental work he had planned.
According to L.V. Sherba’s theory, the language
should distinguish:
speech activity, the processes of speaking and
understanding;
speech material created and used in the process of

communication;
language material, extracted from speech in the form

of a set of grammatical forms and rules for constructing
language units.
Themes of seminars to № 8 lecture
1. Foreign language acquisition particularities
2 L.V.Sherba’s triangle in teaching foreign language

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Lecture 8

Foreign language learning

Tautenbayeva Ainagul Abdumazhitovna

Acquisition: subconscious process which leads to the development of

 Infants display an ability to recognize speech sounds

• A major obstacle that babies must overcome is to be able to identify where

 The acquisition of morphology clearly demonstrates the rule-governed

• A child must know the syntactic categories of words in order to apply

In 1941-1943 he wrote a book that highlighted

speech material created and used in the process of

language material, extracted from speech in the form

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