Verbal Frames Now were talking.

1
Verbal Frames Now were talking.

• A guide to additional language acquisition

2
Examples of EAL pupils errors

• Its hurting my back. (Yr 5)
• We havent got much minutes. (Yr 5)
• You can make the interestingest thing with
  them. (Yr 6)
• The alarm came late. (Yr 3)
• Examples of written errors.
• He looked at every, where but there isnt
  anybody in the museum. (Yr 6)
• Mom and dad woke up to see why Sarah was
  shouting for. (Yr 6)
• I did best thing is I did good art and
  literacy. (Yr 5)
• Well you did the right thing that you told me
  and I know you feel. (yr 6)

3
HOW DO WE RESPOND TO ERRORS?

• The majority of EAL pupils are capable of saying
  we broke it we went but also we breaked it
  we goed
• How do we respond to this?
• Answer
• We have to give what Steven Pinker calls
  Negative Evidence

4
NEGATIVE EVIDENCE

• Negative Evidence information about which
  strings of words are not true constructions----or
  as Steven Pinker says-
• Negative evidence (such as corrections of the
  childs ungrammatical sentences by parents).
  Without negative evidence, if a child guesses too
  large a language, the world can never tell him
  hes wrong

5
The Learning Process

• When learning an additional language people
  selectively pick up information at the ends of
  words and at the beginnings and ends of
  sentences, presumably because these are the parts
  of the strings that are best retained in short
  term memory. - THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO
  MEANINGFUL LANGUAGE INPUT.

6
INCORRECT ENGLISH OR NOT?

• By grammatical, linguists and psycholinguists
  mean only those sentences that sound natural in
  colloquial speech, not necessarily those that
  would be deemed proper English in formal
  written prose. Thus split infinitives, dangling
  participles, slang, and so on, are grammatical
  in this sense. Similarly, utterances such as
  Where are you going? answered To the shop
  count as grammatical.S. Pinker
• Language acquisition is driven by a grammatical
  sample of the target language.therefore he be
  walking to school/he bes coming are not
  corrupted versions of standard English to a
  linguist they look just like a different dialect
  S. Pinker.

7
Do we hive off I bees?

• Who has heard EAL pupils say, he/she bees ?
• How do you correct it?
• How should we correct it?

8
Mother Tongue v EAL (speaking)

• For most monolingual pupils, the vast majority of
  the speech they hear during the language-learning
  years is fluent, complete and grammatically
  well-formed.
• The reason bilingual pupils struggle when it
  comes to speaking is due primarily due to the
  lack of input. Even low-achieving mono-linguals
  excel at spoken English, in comparison with EAL
  pupils.

9
BACK TO NEGATIVE EVIDENCE

• The major difference between parents and language
  teachers is shown .. Parents do not
  differentially express approval or disapproval
  whether the childs utterance was well-formed or
  not (approval depends, instead, on whether the
  childs utterance was true).
• Good EAL teachers respond to statements that
  constitute ungrammatical production.

10
Error Correction. How When?

• Not every error is going to be successfully
  addressed.
• The error would have to be addressed many, many
  times too time consuming too inhibiting to
  the flow depending on ability/context

11
So how does the acquisition process take place?

• Humans eventually rule out ungrammatical
  production through-
• Listening (external error correction
  intra-personal correction)
• Speaking (opportunities to use the target
  language) lttest their own hypothesisgt

12
The Process continued

• Children must have some mental mechanisms that
  rule out vast numbers of reasonable strings of
  words without any outside intervention.S.
  Pinker
• In other words error correction is vital, but
  its not the only strategy/input that enables
  language acquisition to take place.

13
The ProcessMotherese

• Many parents expand their childs utterances into
  full sentences, or offer sequences of paraphrases
  of a given sentence, or just answer with positive
  evidence ie. OK
• I want you to me to take me to town.
• How would you correct this/would you correct it?

14
Fluency or Linguistics Student?

• The correct response to this must be where the
  teacher
• repeats what the speaker should have
  said-the
• grammatically correct form-but without
  explaining why
• the sentence is ungrammatical, which would
  be
• boring/meaningless to the majority of
  learners unless
• they are linguistic students. The
  explanation will not be
• remembered, but the phrase/part of the
  phrase, will be.
• Correct response-
• You mean, I want you to take me to town.

15
PROSODY

• Parental speech has a pattern of melody, timing
  and stress called prosody, ie. motherese directed
  to young infants has exaggerated
• prosody which attracts the childs attention,
  distinguishing sentences/questions imperatives
  etc In all speech, a number of prosodic
  properties of the speech wave such as
  lengthening, intonation and pausing are
  influenced by the syntactic structure of the
  sentence..children read the syntactic structure
  of a sentence directly off its melody and
  timing.Gleitman in S. Pinker

16
An ear for language

• Children learn language audio pattern sounds gt to
  the point where they discover sub-consciously if
  a construction is wrong grammatically because
  their internal voice starts to tell them it
  doesnt sound right
• Thats why Mother Tongue pupils are more fluent
  (grammatically) than EAL pupilstheyve had more
  opportunity to internalize the audio flow of the
  target language.

17
The Road to Fluency

• Maximize opportunities for oracy through lessons
  which model practice meaningful communication
  before written production is expected. (The
  writing is always directly based on the oracy)

18
Blocking

• Language is a set of principles, not a bag of
  rules. Understanding of the principles (achieved
  foremost through talking) allows us to block
  incorrect production.
• Example Children who still say breaked instead
  of broke-they fail to block it. As they hear
  broke more often, they learn to block
  breaked-the ed principlegtthey say broke
  reliably.
• This has important implications for the
  teaching/language acquisition of bilingual
  pupils.

19
Golden Rules

• Language acquisition does not require the
  teaching of conscious grammatical rules or
  tedious drillbecause the grammatical structure
  of a language can be too complex and abstract to
  be categorized and defined by rulesrules and
  exercises will only make sense when we have
  already developed solid intuitive control of the
  language in its oral form. the best methods are
  those that supply comprehensible input in low
  anxiety situations, containing messages the
  student really wants to hear.(S. Krashen)
• Low motivation, low self-esteem and anxiety form
  a mental block that prevents acquisition.(S.Krash
  en)
• Trying to learn a language by analyzing sentences
  word by word is language appreciation or
  linguistics, but not good language acquisition
  methodology

20
Words, Phrases Memory

• When we listen we group words into phrases
• The cat in the hat came back the cat in the
  hat..came back. Phrases have to be conciseonly
  a few items can be held in the mind at once
  before fading.
• If you casually slip in a new word like colour
  olive into a conversation with a three year
  old, the child will probably remember something
  about it in five weeks time.

21
Talk fast tracks acquisition

• If you can hear a pin drop in your classroom for
  more than half an hour a dayone of your big
  players in the process of language development.
  (natural communication/the essential facet of
  language acquisition) is NOT being maximized.

22
Planning for Talk Language
Acquisition

• Target Language input must be modelled at the
  beginning , and during the course of, the lesson
• Every lesson should have real communication (for
  a purpose)
• Reading and writing should be based directly on
  the speaking listening