Language Acquisition: Exposure, Form, and Error

Unit 10: Exposure and Focus on Form

What are Exposure and Focus on Form?

• Exposure: Learning a language by hearing and/or reading it, without studying it
  • We then learn the language by picking it up (learn without realizing it) → we learn our first language like this
• Focus on form: Notice how a language is pronounced and written, and how its grammar and vocabulary are formed and used
  • This is how we learn a foreign language

* In order to learn a language, it is necessary to interact

Key Concepts

Main ways in which we learn a language:

1. Language acquisition (picking up language)

• Exposure (inside and outside the classroom)
  • Teachers can use comprehension or language tasks, and graded readers
• Silent period
  • We need to hear and read the language just beyond our level (in order to challenge ourselves), before starting to use the language, unconsciously working out their meaning and form

Interaction with other people

• The process of struggling to communicate forces the learner to try out structures, chunks, and vocabulary

Focus on form

• Learners need to pay attention to the formal features of the language (pronunciation, word order, affixes, spelling, etc.)

Depending on our age and learning style, we learn by different methods, such as:

• Grammar translation method → focuses only on grammar and text translation
• Structural approach → focuses on learning and practicing structures
• Communicative approaches → focuses on using the language fluently

Unit 11: The Role of Error

What is the Role of Error?

Making mistakes allows learners to experiment with language and measure their success in communicating.

Key Concepts

Errors: Occur when learners try to say something that is beyond their current level of knowledge or language processing

• Usually because they are still processing or don’t know this part of the language
• Learners don’t know that what they are saying is wrong
• They are part of the learner’s interlanguage (learners' own version of the second language which they speak as they learn)

Slips: Are the result of tiredness, worry, or other temporary emotions or circumstances

• Learners make them because they are not concentrating enough on what they are saying or writing
• Learners can correct themselves, once they realize they are wrong or with a little prompting from the teacher or other learner

Main reasons why learners second language learners make mistakes:

1. Interference of the learner’s L1
   • Interference errors disappear once the learner learns more of the language
2. Developmental errors
   • Common in all learners, they occur because learners are unconsciously working out, organizing, and experimenting with language they have learned
   • They disappear once the learner learns more of the language
3. Overgeneralization (applying a rule too widely)
   • Occur when learners wrongly apply a rule for one item of the language to another item

Learner’s interlanguage

• It develops and progresses as learners learn more

Main ways of helping learners develop their language:

1. Exposure
2. Interaction
3. They need to focus their attention on language forms

Fossilized errors: Errors which a learner does not stop making and which last for a long time

• Fossilization of errors occurs when the learner doesn’t have a reason to improve his/her language or by the lack of L2 exposure