Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition


Morphology - change lexis - happening at an unconscious level


Conversation without words

• Sight
• Touch
• Smell
• Hearing
• Taste - primary sense to explore world

NVC - (Non Verbal Communication) as main source of communication






Intonation - sound of words - rhythm, stress


Lip Reading - face to face communication

• 18 months old - learning 10 words a day
• If a person develops language after puberty, he/she will never be able to fully acquire language
• 18 months old - productive vocabulary of 50 words
• A child can understand more than it can speak
• If you expose a baby to 2 languages at the same time, he/she will learn both
• A child says its first recognisable word at around 12 months

There is an ever increasing use of technology, such as tablets and laptops, in the classroom. It is often argued that this is a positive development, whilst others disagree and think it will lead to adverse ramifications. It is agreed that an increase in technology is beneficial to students and teachers. This essay will discuss both points of view before coming to a reasoned conclusion.

It is clear that the internet has provided students with access to more information than ever before. Moreover, learners have the ability to research and learn about any subject at the touch of a button. It is therefore agreed that technology is a very worthwhile tool for education. Wikipedia is a prime example, where students can simply type in any keyword and gain access to in-depth knowledge quickly and easily.

However, many disagree and feel that technology deprives people of real human interaction. Human interaction teaches people valuable skills such as discourse, debate and empathy. Despite this, human interaction is still possible through the internet and this essay disagrees technology should be dismissed for this reason. For instance, Skype and Facebook make it possible for people to interact in ways that were never before possible.

In conclusion, while the benefits of technology, particularly the internet, allow students to tap in to limitless sources of information, some still feel that people should be wary of this new phenomenon and not allow it to curb face to face interaction. However, as long as we are careful to keep in mind the importance of human interaction in education, the educational benefits are clearly positive.

Article with opinion

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/9966117/Text-speak-language-evolution-or-just-laziness.html

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/27/eight-words-sexism-heart-english-language

An article from The Guardian about language and sexism.
These words include - mistress, hussy, madam, governess, spinster, courtesan, wench & tart

Self Analysis

From my transcripts I found that I was the less confident speaker. I don't feel this reflects my  normal speaking habits, however I was in a different environment and this could've affected the way in which I spoke. I found that I interrupted the most and Ellie took more time per turn. I also used fillers such as "umm" a lot more than the other speaker. I felt I back channeled with a lot of what Ellie was saying which would show I am a co operative speaker.

Word of Mouth - Michael Rosen

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06z2pmp

This radio show by Michael Rosen is about the most common words used in the English language nowadays.

With Dr Laura Wright, a linguist at Cambridge University, they speak about the topic. It is suggested the most common words used are - the, be, to, of, and, with, I, you and have. There are no nouns, and few verbs. 

Jonathan Culpepper from University of Lancaster joins and it is shown that we don't realise that we say the most commonly used words, because it is programmed in our brains so much that we don't have to think about it any more. Another important point discussed is that the inbuilt sexism of language is shown with the word counts of lexis in English. 'He' is the 16th most commonly used, 'His' is 23rd and 'She' is 30th in the list. This underlines the fact that sexism is  present in the language we use. 

A point discussed is that we have grammatical words and content words in our language. Grammatical words are the small and useful words which act as a glue to how we form sentences. However content words are the ones which have meanings. They talk about the fact that 'Google' won't even pay attention to the grammatical words, just the content words.

Jonathan says the most popular grammatical words were 'I', 'me' and 'my' whereas the content words were 'love', 'make', 'baby', 'alone', 'rain' and 'sad'. This suggests the artists speak a lot about romance. 

Finally they talk about how technology allows us to make words frequency lists. The expanding world means that we can make statistical comparisons between the language used for different purposes. 

Guardian Article "Eight things I wish I'd known before starting my A-levels" with 2 Frameworks

http://www.theguardian.com/education/mortarboard/2016/jan/11/eight-things-i-wish-id-known-before-starting-my-a-levels

This text is in the form of a newspaper article. Its purpose is to entertain an audience of students, due to it being about A Levels, so roughly an age range of 16 – 19. The text varies between using simple e.g. ‘Back then grades seemed more appealing than social exile for a bad outfit’ and complex e.g. ‘Like many students across the country, I spent the last few years learning about Pythagoras’ theorem, and that mitochondria is the powerhouse of a cell’ sentence structures.

The graphology used is quite simple. It’s the same font throughout which suggests that the writer aims for it to be easily read. The 8 main points are highlighted in bold above the paragraph to stand out. The text here is enlarged which catches the attention of the reader and typically they would end up reading the headings before the rest of the text. The grammar supports the audience; i.e. no full stops on the headings. This is because young readers are not going to pick up (stereotypically as much as an older person) on non-standard grammar.

LANGUAGE AND GENDER THEORISTS REVISION VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBaD0QDJY4A

3D's further explained with theorists