#1

Chapter 1 mainly talks about the three different questions that needed to be answered in the process of SLA (the what, the why and the how) and it points out that one cannot fully understand SLA by using only one perspective. One cannot understand the process of SLA by just using the linguistic approach or the social approach. One has to take into account different perspectives. You have to consider what is being learned, why someone is learning the language, what social or political aspects should be gained etc.

In Chapter 2, it was said that, “bilingualism is present in practically every country…in fact it is difficult to find a society that is genuinely monolingual…” (8). As someone born in the Philippines, I can attest that this is the case. When I was studying there, I had to learn both Tagalog and English for my classes. Not only did we have a grammar class for Tagalog, the school also had an English grammar class. Moreover, celebrities and government leaders also spoke in English (or at least tried to) either to be considered as educated, exotic etc. Aside from English and Tagalog, there are many other languages being spoken in Philippines. One of them was Ilocano—a language in which I didn’t receive any formal learning.

While reading this chapter, I also learned some of the reasons why linguistic information isn’t gathered. Some of the reasons listed intrigued me such as the fact that a government might not gather any linguistic information to downplay the importance of a group and to present a more homogenous front. It saddens me that some people think that the only way to be more united is to ignore the differences from a society rather than in accepting these differences.

Aside from learning why linguistic information may not be collected as much, the chapter also talked about the many capabilities that children had in terms of learning a language. The fact that 6-month-children can already distinguish phonemes from different languages and be able to discard the phonemes that aren’t useful to them is just astonishing to me. Another fact that was interesting was that children already know what is “grammatically correct” even if they aren’t taught how the syntax should be in the first place.

One of the early theories presented in the third reading was the behaviorist theory. According to behaviorism, language acquisition was merely “the acquisition of a new behavior” (19). In this theory, there was no thinking involved when people learned a language. This acquisition was a result of people associating events and from reinforcement or punishment. For example, a person could learn an L2 by imitating others. If s/he learned how to imitate the language, s/he could receive rewards and vise versa. From this cycle of reinforcement/punishment, the individual would be able to learn the language.