[Theories of Language and Language Acquisition]

1
[The Nature of Language Learning]

Module 006: The Nature of Language Learning

At the end of this module, you will be able to:

1. know the link of nature and nurture in language development;
2. differentiate acquisition to learning, competence to performance, and use and
usage; and
3. understand the role of natural ability in learning a language.

The Role of Natural Ability

Humans are born with a natural ability or innate capacity to learn language. Such a
predisposition must be assumed in order to explain several facts:
 Children begin to learn their L1 at the same age, and in much the same way, whether
it is English, Bengali, Korean, Swahili, or any other language in the world.
 Children master the basic phonological and grammatical operations in their L1 by the
age of about five or six, as noted above, regardless of what the language is.
 Children can understand and create novel utterances; they are not limited to
repeating what they have heard, and indeed the utterances that children produce are
often systematically different from those of the adults around them.
 There is a cut-off age for L1 acquisition, beyond which it can never be complete.
 Acquisition of L1 is not simply a facet of general intelligence.
In viewing the natural ability to acquire language in terms of innate capacity, we are saying
that part of language structure is genetically “given” to every human child. All languages are
incredibly complex systems which no children could possibly master in their early years to
the degree they succeed in doing so if they had to “learn” them in the usual sense of that
word. Children’s ability to create new utterances is remarkable, and their ability to recognize
when a string of common words does not constitute a grammatical sentence in the language
is even more so.

Nature vs. Nurture

Nature is how we develop as a result of genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Eye
color is a prime example of nature—predetermined genes are responsible. Environmental
influences cannot alter the color of your eyes on a permanent basis; it is an attribute you are
born with.
Nurture is the acquisition of traits through experience and learning after we are conceived.
We may not be born with a love for a particular type of music or religious affiliation, but
through environmental factors, we could develop an affinity for subsects of either. There is
not a pre-coded gene that decides who we choose to worship or the beliefs we develop.

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[The Nature of Language Learning]

Acquisition vs. Learning

25 years ago Stephen Krashen transformed language teaching. He had been developing his
ideas over a number of years, but several books he published in the 1980s received
widespread acceptance. According to Krashen’s acquisition-learning hypothesis, there are
two independent ways to develop our linguistic skills: acquisition and learning.
Acquisition is a subconscious process where we are not aware. We are unaware of the
process as it is happening and when the new knowledge is acquired. This process is similar
to the process that children undergo when learning their native language. Acquisition
requires meaningful interaction in the target language, during which we are focused on
meaning rather than grammar or form.
Learning a language is a conscious process, much like what we experience in school. New
knowledge are represented consciously in our mind.
“Language acquisition does not require extensive use of conscious grammatical
rules, and does not require tedious drill.
Acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language – natural
communication – in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their
utterances but with the massages they are conveying and understanding.” – Stephen
Krashen

Competence vs. Performance

Chomsky separates competence and performance; he describes 'competence' as an
idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property or function and
‘performance’ as the production of actual utterances. Competence refers to a speaker's
knowledge of his language as manifest in his ability to produce and to understand a
theoretically infinite number of sentences most of which he may have never seen or heard
before. Performance refers to the specific utterances, including grammatical mistakes and
non-linguistic features like hesitations, accompanying the use of language.
In short, competence involves “knowing” the language and performance involves “doing”
something with the language. The difficulty with this construct is that it is very difficult to
assess competence without assessing performance.

Usage vs. Use

The distinction between usage and use was first proposed by Widdowson (1979) to facilitate
a discussion of language pedagogy but it is equally applicable to language acquisition.
Usage is that aspect of performance which makes evident the extent to which the language
user demonstrates his knowledge of linguistic rules. We study usage if we focus attention
on the extent to which the learner has mastered the formal properties of the phonological,
lexical, and grammatical systems.
Use is that aspect of performance which ‘makes evident the extent to which the language
user demonstrates his ability to use his knowledge of linguistics rules for effective
communication. We study use if we examine how learners convey meaning through the
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[The Nature of Language Learning]

process of constructing discourse. One way in which this can be undertaken is by studying
pragmatic aspects of language, such as how learners learn to perform speech acts like
requests and apologizing.

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[The Nature of Language Learning]

References and Supplementary Materials

Books and Journals

1. Muriel Saville-Troike, 2006; Introducing Second Language Acquisition; United States;
Cambridge University Press.

2. Rod Ellis 1994; The Study of Second Language Acquisition; United States; Oxford
University Press.

3. Rosamond Mitchell, Florence Myles and Emma Marsden, 2013; Second Language
Learning Theories 3rd Edition; United States; Routledge.

Online Supplementary Reading Materials

1. Is the development of language a case of nature or nurture?;
https://www.yuqo.com/development-language-nature-nurture/

2. Learning vs. Acquiring; https://realpolish.pl/learning-vs-acquiring/

3. Competence versus Performance;

https://sites.educ.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.bilash/Best%20of%20Bilash/competency
performance.html

4. Competence and Performance; http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/COMPET_PERFO.html

Course Module