(no subject)
Referring to the beginning of his acquisition of French adventures, David Sedaris writes,
I'd hoped the language might come on its own, the way it comes to babies, but people don't talk to foreigners the way they talk to babies. They don't hypnotize you with bright objects and repeat the same words over and over, handing out little treats when you finally say "potty" or "wawa." It got to the point where I'd see a baby in the bakery or grocery store and instinctively ball up my fists, jealous over how easy he had it. I wanted to be in a French crib and start from scratch, learning the language from the ground floor up.
This completely captures something an instructor of mine told me when I took an ESL/EFL teaching certification course: Some language acquisition theorists think that adults have a harder time acquiring a new language not (solely) because they're past the magic language learning age, but because the way we learn and treat learners of a new language as adults is so different from how very young children are introduced to a language. (For example, babies hear adults around them talk for a full year and 1/2 to two years before starting to producing any language at all. Adults and older children learning a language are forced to start speaking words out loud before they've really had much of a chance to catch on to the new sounds of the new language.) Interesting... I think it's cool because it's hopeful, in a way--it could mean adults could learn new languages more easily, given different teaching methods. Will someone pay me to study language acquisition? Is that a viable career path? :)
I'd hoped the language might come on its own, the way it comes to babies, but people don't talk to foreigners the way they talk to babies. They don't hypnotize you with bright objects and repeat the same words over and over, handing out little treats when you finally say "potty" or "wawa." It got to the point where I'd see a baby in the bakery or grocery store and instinctively ball up my fists, jealous over how easy he had it. I wanted to be in a French crib and start from scratch, learning the language from the ground floor up.
This completely captures something an instructor of mine told me when I took an ESL/EFL teaching certification course: Some language acquisition theorists think that adults have a harder time acquiring a new language not (solely) because they're past the magic language learning age, but because the way we learn and treat learners of a new language as adults is so different from how very young children are introduced to a language. (For example, babies hear adults around them talk for a full year and 1/2 to two years before starting to producing any language at all. Adults and older children learning a language are forced to start speaking words out loud before they've really had much of a chance to catch on to the new sounds of the new language.) Interesting... I think it's cool because it's hopeful, in a way--it could mean adults could learn new languages more easily, given different teaching methods. Will someone pay me to study language acquisition? Is that a viable career path? :)