Understanding second language acquisition
The first stage of second language acquisition
The first stage is the “silent period” – it involves imitation and responding to visual cues, but not yet conversing. Listening to a person speaking, preferably a friend who is a native speaker, will help a lot. Watching your favourite movies in foreign language is another tremendous help during this stage. For example, to learn German, I spent a lot of time with my German-speaking friends and insisted that they speak German to each other instead of being polite and speaking in English just so I could understand their conversation. I also purchased the German version of my favourite movie Sex and the City and watched it over and over and over. By the time I finished the movie, I was able to understand how to pronounce the words properly.
The second stage of second language acquisition
The next stage will take longer than the first and may take up to six months, depending on your commitment and the intensity of your learning. This is the stage where you familiarize yourself with around 1,000 words. By the end of this stage, you will be able to say phrases and chunks of words.
The third stage of second language acquisition
By the time you reach the third stage, you will have learned a vocabulary of around 3,000 words. He or she can form sentences and even have a decent dialogue with their teacher.
The fourth stage of second language acquisition
The fourth stage will give the student a vocabulary of 6,000 words as he or she can already form complex sentences with the language.
These are just a few stages when a person begins to learn a new language. Understanding second language acquisition is crucial to one’s success in learning the language fast.
The final stage of second language acquisition
It takes students from 4-10 years to achieve cognitive academic language proficiency in a second language. Student at this stage will be near-native in their ability to perform in content area learning. Most ELLs at this stage have been exited from ESL and other support programs. At the beginning of this stage, however, they will need continued support from classroom teachers especially in content areas such as history/social studies and in writing.
6 comments
Karen,
Do you know of any programs that teach (or help students learn) using the Silent Method? This approach is like the abominable snowman of the language teaching world.
Hi ChinaMike,
I like your “abominable snowman” analogy
In terms of programs that teach via the Silent Method, I looked around online but could not find any school or language center that offers that method of learning. What you could do, though, is hire a private teacher who is familiar with this method and has access to the Silent Way materials (sound charts, Fidel tables, etc.)
By the way, I just wrote a post about the Silent Way here: http://language-learning-guide.com/the-silent-way-method-of-language-learning-by-caleb-gattegno
Karen
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
Hi Karen,
This vision of second language acquisition is only one of several. I personally don’t go for it at all.
For me, speaking a language is a know-how, and like all know-hows, has to be learned by doing. This is why I use the Silent Way. It gives me the tools to get my students to learn. Gattegno’s idea was “The subordination of Teaching to Learning” or, instead of teaching, study the students’ learning and graft your teaching onto it so as to achieve more natural learning.
Have you run into Frederick Bodmer’s “The Loom of Language” His thesis is: Don’t learn just German. Learn all five Germanic languages at the same time! Similarly for the Romance languages.
There is a book and CD called EuRom 4. It was paid for by the European Commission, and contains 4 Romance languages (Rom 4) – Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish. The EuRom 4 people propose that if you can speak one of the four, you can learn to read the newspapers in the four other very quickly – after 36 hours, 12 for each language. I followed the program in 2000. It was great fun and very efficient.
Struggling with languages is a sign of bad teaching, not of bad students. And often a sign of bad theory too!
Hi Roslyn, I totally agree with you — learning a language has to be learned by doing. That’s why language immersion in the country where the language is natively spoken is the best way to learn a language. But not everyone has the opportunity to go abroad. In the absence of a study abroad opportunity, The Silent Way is definitely the best. Thanks for sharing Frederick Bodmer’s “The Loom of Language”. I’m very curious to look into this. Based on my experience learning Spanish, French, and German, I definitely see the “synergies” in learning all of them together, although at times I find myself confusing the languages
Thanks for dropping by!
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