The Idea of Language Acquisition and Development
TESOL Standard 1b
Back in the 1800’s a man named Francois
Gouin (1880) wrote about his undo hardships of attempting to learn German in Hamburg, Germany.
Gouin’s experience helped him to gained an insight into the complexity of language teaching and learning. He tried heartedly to learn German by studying German grammar books. With his new knowledge of German grammar, he tried talking with German people but subsequently was not
successful in communicating with them. With this failure, he returned back to
France and later discovered how easily his three-year-old nephew had managed to learn French naturally. This intrigued Gouin so he decided to observe his nephew and came to a conclusion that “language
learning is a matter of transforming perceptions into conceptions and then using language to represent these conceptions.”
With these findings, Gouin formed a teaching method called the Series Method. The
series method was created to teach learners directly a “series” of connected sentences that are easily understood. In short, this approach to language learning was short-lived. Richards and Rodgers (2001) writes about a man named Maximilian Berlitz who took Gouin’s approach
a bit further and founded the direct method. Berlitz’s direct method was
that second language learning is similar to first language learning. In light
of this, Richards and Rodgers quoted Berlitz’s statement saying, “the teaching of language should have lots of
oral exchanges, spontaneous use of the language, no translation, and little if any analysis of grammatical rules and syntactic
structures.” The direct method had its popular debut and was short-lived as well.
After a brief period, the Berlitz method was revived with the emergence of the audiolingual method.
The audiolingual method originated from World War II when it was known as
the Army method. The audiolingual method was developed as a response to the grammar
translation method of teaching foreign languages. Skinner (1957) took certain
elements of the direct method and used them to form the new method that became known in the 1950’s as the audiolingual
method. An oral approach to teaching and learning a language was favored during
World War II. The idea of language acquisition and development took on an oral
approach to learning a language. Many teachers focused on teaching students to
understand the concept of language learning with more practice in order to facilitate the acquisition of a primary and a new
language in and out of the classroom setting. Other more basic and fundamental oral and practice approach was developed by
James J. Asher called the Total Physical Response method.
With the TPR method, the teacher says a single action word or phrase such
as “run” or “touch your head” and then demonstrates the action. Lesson plan number two (2) focused
on the TPR approach to teaching and learning the target language. With an oral
prompt, followed by acting out the action word or phrase, the student physically and actually is doing what he/she is told. With this type of approach to teaching a language, students can relate with what is
said easily because he/she is actually doing the action. This activity is grounded
in reality and makes the learning more genuine. This approach should be effective
with newly emerging ESL students, in my view. TESOL standard 1b focuses on the
student’s language acquisition and development in which they will be able to understand and apply concepts, theories,
and practice so that they can facilitate the acquisition of learning a target language.
As we continue to teach ESL students the need to understand language, our
approaches, methods, and techniques will become increasingly versatile and innovative to teaching and learning the target
language. Even more challenging, educators are encouraged to take on a new perspective
to teaching ESL students as evident in the practices of our lesson planning in ED481.
A new trend to teaching and learning incorporates technology with language teaching and learning. This new ideals may help teachers to capture and motivate students’ to learn the target language
with great enthusiasm. Finally, we as educators may hope that our students demonstrate
a high level of competence in the use of the English language in listening, speaking, reading, and writing for both social
and academic purposes.
Work Cited
References
Brown, Douglas H. (1941).
Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. New York:
White Plains.
Gouin, F. (1880). L’art d’enseigner
et d’etudier les langues. Paris: Librairie Fischbacher.
Richards, J., &
Rodgers, T. (2001) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (2nd
Ed.). New
York: Cambridge
