Factors affecting second language learning

According to Patsy M. Lightbown and Nina Spada there are five main characteristics that can make you a good language learner: motivation, aptitude, personality, intelligence and learning style.

Intelligence

That’s right. The bigger your IQ is, the bigger is your chance of being a successful learner. Some recent studies have shown that intelligence may be more strongly related to certain kinds of second language abilities than others. In other studies, intelligence was highly related to performance on reading, dictation and writing task, but not on listening comprehension and free oral production tasks. These findings suggest that intelligence is more related to those second language skills which are used in the formal study of a language, such as reading, language analysis, writing and vocabulary study, but that intelligence is much less likely to influence the way in which oral communication skills are developed. Therefore, intelligence seems to be a strong factor when it comes to learning second languages in classrooms, particularly if the instruction is formal. When the classroom instruction is less formal, however (i.e. more communicative), so called ‘intelligence’ may play a less important role.

Aptitude

When investigating aptitude, researchers developed tests which can predict how successful a language learner will be. The most widely used aptitude tests are the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) and the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery. Both of the measure characteristics such as : (1) the ability to identify and memorize new sounds; (2) the ability to understand how words function grammatically in sentences; (3) the ability to figure out grammatical rules from language samples; and (4) memory for new words. It is thought that learners will be more successful if they have these abilities.

Personality

It is often argued that an extroverted person is well-suited to language learning. However, research does not always support this conclusion.

Another aspect of personality which has been studied is inhibition. It has been suggested that inhibition discourages risk-taking which is necessary for progress in language learning.

Several other personality characteristics such as self-esteem, empathy, dominance, talkativeness, and responsiveness, have also been studied. However, in general, the available research does not show a clearly defined relationship between personality and second language acquisition.

Motivation and attitudes

The overall findings show that positive attitudes and motivation are related to success in second language learning. Unfortunately, the research cannot indicate precisely how motivation affects learning. That is, we do not know whether is the motivation that produces successful learning or successful learning that enhances motivation.

Learning Styles

Different learners approach a task with a different set of skills and preferred strategies. Some people are ‘visual’ learners (those who need to see), some are ‘aural’ learners (those who need only to see), some need to memorize and some need to add physical action to the learning process. Of course we all can benefit from a variety of learning experiences and some approaches are more successful for one person than for another. What is important is to give the students freedom to choose their own way of learning, that way they will do better than those who find themselves forced to learn in styles which do not suit them.

It’s all in your mind: the innatist position

The linguist Noam Chomsky developed the innatist theory in reaction to the behaviourist theory of learning based on imitation and habit formation. He claims that children are biologically programmed for language and that language develops in the child in just the same way that other biological functions do. For Chomsky, language acquisition is very similar to the development of walking. The environment makes a basic contribution (such as people speaking to the child) and the child’s biological endowment will do the rest.
Chomsky argues that the behaviourist theory fails to recognize what has come to be called the logical problem of language acquisition (the fact that children come to know more about the structure of their language than they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language they hear. According to Chomsky, the language the child is exposed does not provide all the information which the child needs and parental corrections have been observed to be inconsistent or even non-existent and when they do they tend to focus on meaning and not on language itself.
According to Chomsky, children’s minds are not blank stales to be filled merely by imitating language they hear in the environment. Instead he claims that children are born with a special ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language system. He originally referred to this special ability as being based on a language acquisition device (LAD) which was often described as an imaginary “black box” that contains the principles that are universal to all human languages, prevents the child from going off on lots of wrong trails in trying to discover the rules of the language. For the LAD (now referred as Universal Grammar - UG) to work, the child needs access only to samples of the natural language that serve as a trigger to activate the device.
In acquiring the intricate and complex systems that make up a language, young children, whose abilities are fairly limited in many ways, accomplish, with apparent ease, something which adult second language learners may envy.

D R E A M S

Can you remember what you dream? I can! Sometimes, my dreams are so real! I can remember numbers, phrases… And sometimes they are a big confusion…

Last night I dreamed my theeth were falling! Oh, It was terrible! And it’s funny because I have already dreamed that many times! Maybe Freud can explain… Yesterday, It was just one thoot falling, but sometimes I dream all of them are falling!

I believe the worst dream I ever had was that I died… And there was “life after death”! So I tried to talk to my mother, but she couldn’t see me! She could hear me, but she thought she was crazy! When I woke up, I felt a really bad head…

I’m really afraid of pit bull… I get really nervous if there is a pit bull next to me. So, it’s normal I dream there is a pit bull where I am. And sometimes, a pit bull strikes me! I have a friend who has one. When I'm in his house, I just don't relax if the dog is not hooked, although he tells me It won't strike me.

Two weeks ago I did the last Law test in this semester. And it was really hard! But I was very good, I got 9! So I dreamed I was telling my father the questions! And I could tell him exactly the questions! And I dreamed about a number of a process that I have, and It was right!

I am used to dreaming about rats. Argh, it’s so disgusting! There are a lot of them and I don’t know what to do… I really hate rats!

Oh, sometimes I dream that I’m driving! But I can’t stop!!! The car has no brake! But I always wake up before an accident…

I also usually dream that there is a thief in my house, or in the street. And I can’t run… Or I can’t scream! I try to run, but I can just walk very slowly! And I try to scream, but I have no voice! And it’s funny, the thief never takes me. I always wake up before it happens.

When I arrive home after parties, I dream that I am still in the party. It’s very curious… When I wake up, I really don’t know what I dreamed and what really happened! Sometimes I have to ask my friends! Oh, I get really shy, they think I was drunk, because I can’t remember what really happened in the party and what was just a dream…

And what about you?? What do you usually dream about??

HOME ALONE

Do you remember Macaulay Culkin in Home alone? I believe everybody have ever seen this movie at least once. When I was a child, this was one of my favourites.

In fact, I want to know if you like to be alone at home. Would you like to live alone?

My parents and my sisters live very far from here. They lived here for a long time, then they decided to live in other city and I decided to stay here. My sisters decided to go with them. In the begin, my father stayed a long time here with me, because he has an office here.

They come to Pelotas sometimes and spend a long time here. I always thought I'd like to live alone, but I've changed my mind. When we are younger, it's nice, our friends can visit us, we can make parties, we can sleep and wake up as late as we want. But now all of my friends are working and studying very hard. So they can't be here every week.

And I really don't argue with my parents. We get on very well, they are my friends. We go out, we chat a lot, we work togheter... And they understand my choises, so I don't need to get worried with them. I don't need to change my life when they're here.

And I really miss my sisters! I'd really like to live with them again, but I now it's not possible. My older sister has a baby, so now she has her family.

I remember when we traveled togheter. We had a little car, so it used to be very full. And we used to spend a long time on road. Sometimes we really fought, but we used to have fun. My older sister is very talkative, so she just didn't shut up! If there was nothing to talk about, she invented something. She is an english teacher, so sometimes she used to translate musics for us. And once she read "The little prince". All of it!

Now she is a hippie. And the other is a rebel. But she is my best friend! I usually say she is my soulmate! It's really good when we're togheter. We never fight! When I need to talk to someone, I just take the phone and call her. And sometimes she listens to me for hours!

Well, you may be not so intersted about my family... I just forgot and got writing...

I really want you to think about your families. I'm really happy with mine. Of course there are problems, but there is always something that we share. There is always a moment when we need them. It's very easy to put the blame for our difficulties in our parents, but we have to understand they're not perfects. And may be we will have children, so we will feel how they feel.

The truth is they're always by your side. But the problem is that sometimes they are not able to accept our life stile or our choises. Maybe because they didn't have opportunities. Or maybe because they don't know what to do, but they pretend to know!

Well, I hope you understand what I say. I know our parents are not angels, but we're not either!

Have a nice weekend. I am on holiday, so I can watch a lot of movies \o/

Juliana

LEARNING A FIRST LANGUAGE

This post is based on the first chapter of the book How Languages are Learned, written by Patsy M. Lightbown and Nina Spada.

In this chapter, they present several examples of dialogs between adults and children that are learning how to speak their native language, and try to explain the first language learning on the perspective of three theories: the behaviorist theory, the innatist theory and the interactionist views of language acquisition.

Traditional behaviorists believe that language learning is simply a matter of imitation and habit formation. Children imitate the sounds and patterns which they hear around them and receive positive reinforcement (which could take the form of praise or successful communication) for doing so. Thus encouraged by their environment they continue to imitate and practise these sounds and patterns until they form ‘habits’ of correct language use. According to this view, the quality and the quantity of the language which the child hears, as well as the consistency of the reinforcement offered by others in the environment, should have an effect on the child’s success in language learning.

The behaviourists view imitation and practice as primary processes in language development.

IMITATION

(WORD FOR WORD REPETITION OF ALL OR PART OF SOMEONE ELSE´S UTTERANCE)

Very detailed analyses showed that children imitate new words and sentence structures until they become solidly grounded in their language system, and then they stop imitating these and go on to imitate other new words and structures. Thus, unlike a parrot that imitates the familiar and continues to repeat the same things again and again, children’s imitation is selective and based on what they are currently learning. In other words, even when the child imitates, the choice of what to imitate seems to be based on something the child already knows, not simply on what is available in the environment.

PRACTICE

(REPETITIVE MANIPULATION OF FORM)

In this example, the child is practicing structures in a way that sometimes makes her sound like a student in a foreign language classroom. The children’s “He eat carrots. The other one eat carrots. They both eat carrots” is reminiscent of a substitution drill.

MOVIES

I always liked to go to the movies. When I was a little child, there was in Pelotas a very old cinema, Capitólio. I used to go there, with my sister, my neighboor and my maid. We watched those Walt Disney movies, like Lion King, Pocahontas...Well, unfortunately, now Capitólio is closed! It became a parking car. It's funny, I went to a party there! And I asked myself "where are the chairs?!".

Oh, I watched Titanic there! I remember Capitolio was very crowded in that day... We had to stay in a very big file to enter. It was really full. I should be ten or eleven... I went there with Renata (my neighboor) and her mommy. I remeber everybody in the cinema was crying!

The last time I went to the movies I watched "Who wants to be a millionaire?". Oh, I really liked this! At first, I think I've never watched an indian movie before this. It's curious, because in India there is Bollywood, but I believe I always watch to Hollywood movies.

When it's holiday, I always try to watch some movies. And I confess that I prefer old movies. I really like those classic ones. So, I go to the LOCADORA and choose some. Last weekend, I watched Dial M For Murder, a Hitchcock's movie and Pulp Fiction, a Tarantino's. It's funny, yestarday in class we talked exactly about them!

One of the best I've ever watched is Hair. I've watched this about four times! Maybe because it's a musical, so it's very easy to pay attention.

Well, it's really imposible to talk about the movies I really like! I was trying to choose one, but I couldn't! I remembered 12 angry men, A dog day afternoon (it's really good! Al Pacino, Al Pacino...) and a lot more. Oh, and we still have Woody Allen! I love his movies!

Ok, I could choose the funniest one: Il Mostro (Roberto Benigni). It's really fun! I've watched it many times and I always laugh a lot! I remember the first time I watched this, I was with my father and we just didn't stop laughing! Roberto Benigni is a genious, although I don't like him so much.

Well, people, I think I made a big confusion! But I'm really into the movies! So it's very hard to choose my favourites! I could stay here a day writing about movies! In the next weekend, I have so much to study... Maybe I won't watch any movie (how sad)! I hope you do!

See you! Thank you for reading!

Ju

*HOW CAN I SAY LOCADORA IN ENGLISH??

PROBLEMS

Last monday, Rafael asked us to talk about our problems.
He said we shouldn't talk about college problems, but it's almost imposible! Everybody is worried about texts, papers, articles... It's not my case, but I can imagine everybody is worried about LITERATURE! In fact, I imagined it would happen, so I didn't take literature! But I know someday I'll have to...

Well, but college is not our life. It's just a piece of. So, what are our really problems?
In fact, we are not accustomed to talk about problems. And we are not accustomed to listen our friend's problems. Ok, we don't need to talk about it all day, but sometimes it's necessary.

Yesterday my uncle sent me an e-mail about it. This e-mail was about a friend who never had time to listen his friend's problems. Untill his friend died. Then he had time to go to the funeral.

I know it's a bit to dramatic, but we should think about. I have my problems and sometimes it seems there is nobody to listen me. But it's not truth, I have a lot of friends, they just don't have time to me (I'm kiding)! In fact, sometimes I don't want to bore them, but I know they would listen and help me.

Although we have many problems, life is still great! I have a good family, great friends, amazing classmates, It's winter (I love sunny-cold days) and we can have "bergamotas" and chimarrão in a square!

Our course is really difficult, but it has to be! We will be teachers! We mustn't forget it. And it must remember we study in a state university, so our responsability is bigger. I don't know you think about, but I really love studying! And I believe this is the time of our life, because afterwoods we will have to work, maybe we will have children, our problems will grow...

So, let's enjoy our time! Let's stay with our friends, let's enjoy our family (our parents won't live forever), and let's listen to our friends' problems! But let's also have some fun with them!

Have a nice (and cold!) weekend! See you!

Ju

Reading in a foreign language: a reading problem or a language problem?

Even knowing that the knowledge of a foreign language is important to academic studies, most students fail to learn to read adequately in the foreign language. Either they read with less understanding than one might expect or considerably slower than they reportedly read in their first language.
Readers do not simply have to learn translation rules, but far more: how to relate what is being processed to one’s existing knowledge, emotions, etc. and to do so with an appropriate degree of flexibility. MacNamara (1970), studying Irish-English bilingual students, found out that those who understood the words and structures of the texts were still unable to understand what they read in the second language as well as in their first language.
Knowing that, researchers started to wonder if reading in a foreign language is ‘simply’ a problem of knowing the words and the grammar of the language, or if there were other causes of the difficulties learners experience.
In Latin-American countries, teachers have asserted that the reason their students cannot read adequately in English is that they cannot read adequately in the native language, in the first place an if only they knew hoe to read ‘properly’ in their first language, the problems of learning in English would be vastly reduced.
Several speculations have risen upon this matter:
Jolly (1978), for example, claims that success in reading a foreign language depends crucially upon one’s first-language reading ability rather that upon the students level of English ‘if this is identifiable’.
Cody (1979) shares the same view and asserts that foreign language reading is a reading problem and not a language problem.

Yorio (1971), however, takes a contrary view. He claims that the reading problems of foreign language learners are due largely to imperfect knowledge of the language and to native language interference in the reading process. In Yorio’s view, reading involves four factors:
1. Knowledge of the language;
2. Ability to predict or guess in order to make the right choices;
3. Ability to remember the previous cues;
4. Ability to make the necessary associations between the different cues that have been selected.

And this process becomes even more complex because of new elements which summarize as interference from the native language and inadequate knowledge of the target language:
1. The reader’s knowledge of the foreign language is not like that of the native speaker;
2. The guessing or predicting ability necessary to pick up the correct cues is hindered by the imperfect knowledge of the language;
3. The wrong choice of cues or the uncertainty of the choice makes associations more difficult;
4. due to unfamiliarity with the material and the lack of training, the memory span in a foreign language in the early stages of it’s acquisition is usually shorter than in our native language: recollection of previous cues then is more difficult in a foreign language than in the mother tongue; and at all levels, and at all times, there is interference of the native language.

Unfortunately, the views of Yorio, Coady and Jolly remain assertions: they are eminently researchable assertions, but do not base themselves upon empirical evidence.
What is needed is the development of a series of researchable hypotheses, from which not only empirical evidence should flow but hopefully also a series of pedagogic implications might be derived for the teaching or learning of reading in a foreign language.

*A cue is anything that leads you to act in a particular way.
*Empirical means resulting from or involving practical experience rather than theory.
*The word span is added to nouns to form compound words which refer to a particular length from end to end in distance or time.

What is reading - The text

This post talks about the text, the second element in the interaction in the reading process, focusing on the features of it that cause difficulty to readers.
Several articles have discovered that if a text is found not to be readable, attempts may be made to alter it in order to make it more readable or simpler. However, that simplification may be a more complex process than has been traditionally assumed and may actually have the effect of distorting the “message” or, indeed, increasing difficulties in other aspects of the text.

The typical readability study takes a range of passages, determines their “difficulty” for a range of readers by means either of multiple choice questions or, more recently, cloze tests. The passages are usually analysed in terms of their linguistic units: structures, words, clause and sentence relationships, or whatever. Word difficulty may relate to infrequency of occurrence, and has been indexed either by reference to frequency lists, or by reference to word length, usually measured in number of syllables, since, on the whole, longer word tend to be less frequent and therefore might be expected to cause processing problems. Sentence complexity can be measured by a variety of devices but, on the whole, the longer the sentence, the more complex it is likely to be, with embedded and subordinate clauses, and the like.

One typical readability formula is Urquhart´s Fog Index:

No. words / No. sentences + no. 3-syllable words/ no. words x 100/1 x .4

The result is interpreted as:
---> 12 – = easy
---> 13 – 16 = undergraduated
---> 16 + = postgraduate.

It should be emphasized that readability studies result in “indices” of difficulty and do not claim to be indicative of clauses of difficulty: that is, if one applies a readability formula to a text, finds it too difficult for a given audience, and the manipulates the text to shorten sentence length and remove long words, it will not necessarily follow that the cause of difficulty has been removed: the text might actually have been made more difficult, although the readability index would be lower.

Other studies have shown how the global organization of a narrative text can influence how a reader recalls the text. Berman suggests the importance of transparency – the opposite of her term opacity – of the kernel sentence: the basic subject – verb – object ordering of sentences. If decomposing a sentence into it’s basic svo constituents is delayed by, for example, deletion of relative pronouns, wh + be deletion in post-noun modifiers, or ‘one’ or ‘do’ substitution for repeated lexical material, and the like, then the sentence will be more difficult to process.

Cooper, comparing what he called practiced and unpractised readers found little difference between them in terms of the processing of syntactic features (tense, aspect, modality), but he did find differences in the problems caused by some cohesive devices and particularly in the relationships between sentences.

When researching with foreign language readers, Alderson found out that vocabulary problems were the most important contributors to text difficulty, but they also found that there were many foreign language readers who did not have “language problems”, including difficulty with vocabulary, but who still found text difficult to process. In fact , a linguistic description of a text is a necessary but not sufficient guide to the problems that readers might have with that text.



- Embedded: A thing is embedded in something when it is fixed or set in it firmly and deeply.
- And the like: You use “and the like” to mean “and other things of the same sort”.

What is reading?

This article was taken out from the book Reading in a Foreign Language - Alderson & Urquhart.
The purpose of the whole book is to answer the question What is reading?, and this first part of the introduction talks about one of the three necessary elements of Reading which is The reader.
It says that, in order to understand the process of reading, teachers and researchers have tried to approach readers giving them a series of passages to understand and then asking them questions about it afterwards. As a result, they came up with levels of understanding that could be only related to the product of reading but not to the process of reading. They came to the conclusion that “a description of what a student has understood of a text is not the same as a description of how he arrives at such an understanding”.
When researchers actually started to investigate and gather information about the nature of the reading process, they realized that since reading is essentially, in most cultures, a silent, and private activity, it would be a difficult task to describe the process itself. So, they came up with a method in which they recorded the eye’s movement while people were reading.
By analyzing the eye’s movement on the reading process, researchers have established that good readers make fewer fixations, with less duration, than do weak readers. So, they started to themselves questions like “What causes regression?”, “What information are the eyes processing when fixating?” and “What is going on in the head when the eyes are not fixating?”. Carpenter (1980) suggests that almost all content words in text are fixated, and that longer fixations occur on infrequent words, and at sentences ends when inferences are being made.
Some authors have developed a process model of several stages:
1. Moving the eye to the site of next input;
2. Encoding the visual features of the word;
3. Accessing the lexicon ( in what is called the working memory, for conceptual information; assigning case roles of the word in question ─ i. e. determining the relation among words in a structure; integrating clauses to each other; sentences wrap-up);
It is now almost universally accepted that frequent fixations and regressions are symptoms of poor comprehension, rather than causes of it.
Researchers also developed another technique called miscue analysis which consists of analyzing oral reading errors and seeing how similar or how different they are from the words in the text. Such work has shown that readers use graphic, syntactic, semantic and discourse information in text during their processing.
The basic reading strategies that miscue analysis appears to reveal are:
- Prediction: what the next chunk of language will be.
- Sampling: selecting the minimal information from text consistent with the prediction;
- Confirming: testing the prediction against the sample;
- Correction: if the prediction is not confirmed, another prediction is generated.

Goodman (in Smith 1978) asserts that “only in special circumstances is oral reading free of miscues, and silent reading is never miscue-free”. However, the connection between reading aloud and silent reading is somewhat difficult to prove, since there is a lack of information about the nature of the silent reading process, the process after all in which most reading researchers are interested.

Pelotas

I know a lot of people who hate Pelotas. Why? They say it's boring, it's is provincial, it's too small and it's retrograde.
But I don't agree whit them! I really love Pelotas. I always lived here, so all my friends also live here. And I can say I had great experiences here! I studied in good schools, now I study at a good College. Ok, UFPel has many problems, but we have good teachers and we have a opportunity of studying in a state university.
Pelotas is an old city, so we have beautiful buildings, parks, like Praça Coronel Pedro Osório, Parque da Baronesa, Charqueadas... It's not a small city: there are about 380000 residents!
Here we have museuns, good restaurants, good schools, theatres, Universities. There are nice parties too, for those who like going out.
And we can feel safe here, it's a very calm city! Of course there are problems, but we can live very well here! I don't have plans for future, but I think I would have a happy life living here. Ok, there are many nice cities where I'd like to live, but I just don't exclude Pelotas!

Well, I hope you like Pelotas too :)
And have a nice week!

Punta del Diablo

Last week, I went to Punta del Diablo with my boyfriend and my friends.
PDD is a beach in Uruguay. It's a very good place to relax (not in summer), because it's very small, very calm, there are no parties, no shops or big restaurants.
And it's really beautiful! We spent five days there.
When I was invited to the trip, I thought "Oh no, five days? We will fight, it won't work!". But everything was so good! Oh, an important detail: we went on a Kombi! Oh yeah, it was very funny and noisy!
We had a lot of fun... When we woke up, we walked, had chimarrão, went to the "mini market" (there were two!)... In the afternoon, we went to the beaches, but it was very cold. In the night we used to cook something, have some beer (or wine) and chat a lot. And we made private parties! But I didn't forget studing english, and when I listened to Beyoncé singing "If I WERE a boy" (her last song), I immediately thought "Why WERE? Why not WAS?".
Can you explain that? I couldn't, so I asked my friends and there was one who gave a good explanation. But he's not an english teacher, so I'm not sure about.


Juliana and Priscila/ Julia and Nahtielen: I can't see your blogs. I don't have a permission!

*How can I say Punta del Diablo in english??

See you! Thank you for reading!

Welcome to AllMyEnglish!

This Blog was created by Carla Antunes and Juliana Ribeiro, both English students at UFPEL University (http://www.ufpel.tche.br/).
The great idea of creating this virtual space came from Professor Rafael Vetromille, English III teacher, as part of this subject’s evaluation. Each Blog is owned by two students who will have the responsibility of writing (posting) an article, in English language, about any subject of their interest in every 2 weeks.
The brand new owners of this newborn Brazilian babyblog are full of great expectations. We hope to finish this assignment in the end of the semester finding ourselves with much more experience on Writing in this idiom which we wish so much to dominate as if it was our own natural language. Hopefully, we will discover good writers among us in the way. Who knows?!

Oh! And we also hope we get 2 full points for this.

What will we talk about? Any subject we feel like and sometimes even about English. We hope you find some of the articles useful and interesting.

If you like it, feel free to leave us a comment.

And if you are one of Rafael’s students, leave a comment anyway... You know you have to ;)

We wish Good Luck and a lot of inspiration to all of the other students!

Let’s get to work people!

Enjoy! ;)

Some of the other Blogs are listed below:

Alejandro and Bianca´s: http://littledreambox.blogspot.com/

Juliana and Priscila´s: http://blondladies.blogspot.com/

Nairana and Gustavo´s: http://www.blog-learners.blogspot.com/

Evelise and Aline´s: http://www.evelise-aline.blogspot.com/

Julia and Nathielen´s: http://www.crazylanguage.blogspot.com

What I expect from this english term

Well, it's a very wide question!
I'm trying to think about it since wednesday!
I could say just that I want to learn many things!
But it's not only that... I also want to make good friends!
I really want to refine my speaking ability, because I know it's not so good...
I hope we can enjoy our time together! I think it's easy to learn when classes are funny!
And I really expect to learn more about english language! I know it's very important to me, because I like reading and I'd like to read in english, and I really want to travel! I want to know many countries, so I need to speak english!
And I expect to have some fun!


Now that it's done, I'm thinking if I answered the question...