Language Making Capacity Language Making Capacity Slobin proposes a ‘language making capacity’ (LMC). Like Chomsky’s Language Faculty, the LMC contains universal principles. Unlike the principles of Chomsky’s Language Faculty, these are ‘Operating Principles’ (OP), i.e., principles specifically for working inductively on the physical acoustic stimulus for a specific language to which children are exposed. The …
Innateness Hypothesis Innateness Hypothesis It must be that the mind/brain provides a way to identify and extract the relevant information by means of mechanism of some sort that are part of its biologically determined resources. In contrast to the behaviorist hypothesis, a second theory, called the ‘innateness hypothesis’ has developed out of generative transformational grammar. …
Second Language Acquisition (SLA) Second Language Acquisition (SLA). An abbreviation for Second Language Acquisition. Second Language Acquisition is the common term used for the name of the discipline. In general, SLA refers to the process of learning another language after the native language has been learnt (Gass & Selinker, 2008). Sometimes the term refers to …
Generative Grammar Generative Grammar According to ‘generative grammar’ proposed by Chomsky, a language is not a system of rules, but a set of specifications for parameters in an invariant system of principles of Universal Grammar (UG). It is believed that humans are able to produce sequences which they have never encountered before. A generative grammar …
Connectionism Connectionism originated in the relativity well-established notion in psychology of ‘parallel processing. This was advanced by the work of the ‘parallel distributed processing’ (PDP) group held by Rumelhart and McClelland. The term “connectionism” refers in general to a form of cognitive modeling wherein cognitive processing is represented in terms that can be implemented by …
IELTS Writing Task 1 | Popular Languages IELTS Writing Task 1 | Popular Languages Instructions: Visual data adopted from https://www.ielts-exam.net/ The table above offers us some information about the most popular languages with the most native speakers. Summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main points. You could make comparisons when necessary. LELB Student: Karim The table …
Humanistic Language Learning Humanistic Language Learning The best introduction to humanistic learning within language education is Stevick (1997, as cited in Nunan, 2003). He believes that particular classroom techniques matter less than establishing the right emotional climate for the learners. According to Stevick (1990), among different language methods and approaches, Community Language Learning (CLL) seems …
Communicative Language Testing Communicative Language Testing The advent of communicative language testing saw a growing preference for face-to-face interaction as the context in which the assessment of spoken language skills would occur. In communicative language testing, the target of test inferences is performance of a set of communicative tasks in various contexts of use. The …
Sociocultural Theory in Language Learning Sociocultural theory is based on work by the Russian psychologist, Vygotsky, and represents a fundamentally different way of looking at language and learning. Sociocultural theory is grounded in the ontology of the social individual. A sociocultural approach considers language and, by extension, second language acquisition as contextually situated and is …
Emergentism Emergentism is the name that has recently been given to a general approach to cognition that stresses the interaction between organism and environment and that denies the existence of pre-determined, domain specific faculties or capacities. Emergentism thus offers itself as an alternative to modular, ‘special nativist’ theories of the mind, such as theories of …