Monday, June 11, 2007

Reflection # 5

What is CAH and what are the differences between it and CLI? How can some of the concepts talked about in the Chpater (Brown ch 9) be used in the classroom, e.g., error analysis, CLI, Stages of learner language development, fossilization.

2 comments:

Erika said...

Response to prompt 5.

Sorry, I have to post it here because is not showing in my blog. I don't know what happened,but I already try 3 times and is not showing.

Well what I understood by contrastive analysis hypothesis is that many of the mistakes ELLs make in the L2 are the same mistakes they make in L1, the theory is saying that we don’t leave the bad habits in L1, but we carry them over to L2. On the other hand, cross-linguistic influence says that one language affects the other one in two ways, facilitating or interfering the learning. Well, in the classroom we have to make use of every aspect of students’ language, positive or negative, we have to build on their accomplishments and improvements, praising, reaffirming, step it up to next level, etc. However, we also have to take in consideration their errors or mistakes so we can address their needs and work in the areas that need improvement.
As we saw the different stages of learner language development are very important because we have to plan instruction according to the needs of our children, not only in the individual and group instruction, which most of the time we use to focus on individual needs. During whole class instruction we can also differentiate these needs and create a nurturing and trusting environment where all students feel comfortable with their abilities and perform at their maximum potential. Let me give an example; Reading aloud a book about apples and how a family works in the field planting, picking, and selling them. S1 is in the presystematic stage (beginning), I wouldn’t ask him to tell me the process of planting or how do you grow apples, this would frustrate the students and that would prevent student’s participation. On the other hand if I ask a question that student is able to respond and elaborate on it, this would give student confidence and interest to predict, infer, and participate in the discussion because he knows that we are celebrating his knowledge and not pointing out his faults.
It is very interesting how when we are reading the chapters we see everything so technical, but when we analyze the same information and how we would use it in the classroom everything changes and we center all our learning on providing the best education and how we can serve our students in the best way.

Learning languages 4 life said...

I'm having problems with copying and pasting to my blog, that's why I'm posting here.


Differences between CAH and CLI. How can some of the concepts discussed in chapter 9 be applied in the classroom?

According to CAH (contrastive analysis hypothesis), L1 presents the main barrier to L2 acquisition because many learners’ errors are attributable to their L1. The bigger the difference between L1 and L2, the most difficult it’ll be to learn L2 and the study of their contrastive analysis can be used to predict the difficulties learners will have and how to approach them. CLI (cross-linguistic influence) states the influence between L1 and L2 and even among all other languages a person may acquire, but it differs from CAH in the sense that instead of trying to predict the difficulties based on the contrastive analysis, it uses them after the manifest. This is due to the fact that not all learners from an L1 to an L2 will present the same errors or difficulties. Both CAH and CLI can be useful in the classroom to prepare the teacher about the difficulties learners may encounter and to understand the source of certain errors and the best way to address them. For example, the teacher will know why a Spanish learner whose L1 is English would say “aprendiendo un idioma es importante” and can use contrastive analysis to explain the use of gerund in Spanish.

Chapter 9 helped me clarify the difference between errors and mistakes and the different ways they can be dealt with. Mistakes need the teacher just to redirect students’ attention to their mistakes and they will probably correct themselves and through repetition will eventually get used to the correct form (that they already know), while errors call for the teacher’s intervention to explain or perhaps re-teach a certain topic using different approaches and having students use different strategies.

I also found information about error treatment that I think will be useful for me in the future in the classroom and/or that I can start using in the present with my child, like the clarification request, the metalinguistic feedback, and the explicit correction. I believe in the effectiveness of FFI; I’ve seen it work although I don’t know exactly (and some researchers question this) if it works thanks to repetition and frequency or because of the form instruction, I believe it works, and therefore I’ll use it.
Ana A