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Lesson 2 Defining Language, Learning, and Teaching

Helps you know what language, learning, and teaching means.

Course

Principles and Theories of Language Acquistion and Learning (ENGL 104)

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South Philippine Adventist College

Academic year: 2020/2021

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Lesson 2:

Defining

Language,

Learning, and

Teaching

This lesson will allow you to explore the definition of language, learning, and teaching and their underlying principles as presented in Brown (2014).

Learning a second language is a long and complex undertaking. Your whole person is affected as you struggle to reach beyond the confines of your first language and into a new language, a new culture, a new way of thinking, feeling, and acting. Total commitment, total involvement, a total physical, intellectual, and emotional response are necessary to successfully send and receive messages in a second language. Many variables are involved in the acquisition process.

Language is a “system of arbitrary conventionalized vocal, written, or gestural symbols that enable members of a given community to communicate intelligibly with one another.”

A consolidation of a number of possible definitions of language yields the following composite definition.

Language is systematic.
Language is a set of arbitrary symbols.
Those symbols are primarily vocal, but may also be visual.
The symbols have conventionalized meanings to which they refer.
Language is used for communication.
Language operates in a speech community or culture.
Language is essentially human, although possibly not limited to humans.
Language is acquired by all people in much the same way; language and language learning both have universal characteristics.

Learning is acquiring or getting knowledge of a subject or a skill by study, experience, or instruction.

Breaking down the components of the definition of learning, we can extract, as we did with language, domains of research and inquiry.

Learning is acquisition or “getting.”
Learning is retention of information or skill.
Retention implies storage systems, memory, cognitive organization.
Learning involves active, conscious focus on and acting upon events outside or inside the organism.
Learning is relatively permanent but subject to forgetting.
Learning involves some form of practice, perhaps reinforced practice.
Learning is a change in behavior.

Teaching cannot be defined apart from learning. Teaching, which is implied in the first definition of learning, may be defined as showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, giving instructions, guiding in the study of something, providing with knowledge, causing them to know or understand. Teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, setting the conditions for learning.

Your understanding of how the learner learns will determine your philosophy of education, your teaching style, your approach, methods, and classroom techniques. If, like B. Skinner, you look at learning as a process of operant conditioning through a carefully paced program of reinforcement, you will teach accordingly. If you view second language learning as a deductive rather than an inductive process, you will

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