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IMPLICATIONS FOR LEARNING A SECOND LANGUAGE: GENERAL DISCUSSION
Author(s) -
Burling Robbins
Publication year - 1981
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1981.tb42022.x
Subject(s) - annals , citation , moderation , foreign language , computer science , library science , psychology , mathematics education , history , classics , machine learning
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: How do you know that the Chinese tones weren’t perceived as nonlinguistic units, such as musical tones, especially if the subjects did not know Chinese? H. WINITZ (University of Missouri, Kansas City, Mo. ) : I did speak to that issue in the paper, indicating that in Snow’s paper the same general findings with regard to age and acquisition were obtained for linguistically meaningful elements. Furthermore, I referred to studies in which comprehension of language was taught and in which adult subjects performed at a high level, as did the adults in my study. Therefore, I believe that the listening capabilities of adults are generally superior to children in the early stage of language acquisition. Although the discriminations I was testing may not be regarded as linguistic events, it is of interest to observe that they are skills that are essential if oral language is to be acquired, and in that regard, adults seem initially to have mare advanced abilities than children have. C. YORIO (University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) : Dr. Belasco, many of the examples that we have heard are fairly traditional, in the sense that you are presenting what one could call a structural syllabus. The point is, what is your feeling about the application of this approach to a functional syllabus? S . BELASCO (University of South Carolina, Columbia, S .C. ) : My remarks pertain to the first semester only. I outlined what the students are able to do in the first semester. Teaching speech acts, illocutionary acts, takes place in the second semester. In the first semester, the emphasis is placed on interpretation and not on production. The goal of these procedures is to improve comprehension and to reinforce comprehension. The purpose of the translation exercises is to teach the student to concentrate on the perception and interpretation of utterances. Exposure to “illocutionary acts” in the form of readings and comprehension exercises must precede the actual teaching of the use of illocutionary acts in conversational situations. C. YORIO: One more quick question about correction and accuracy. You talked in particular about stopping the student when he makes a mistake. If your concern is with comprehension, during the first semester, why stop him if he has communicated? Finally, when you have a trans-