UNIVERSIDAD DE PANAM

1. Difference between mother tongue (L1) and Second Language (L2)

In first language acquisition, the basis for learning is universal grammar alone. In
second language acquisition, knowledge of the first language also serves as a basis
for learning the second language. There may be both positive and negative transfer
between languages in second language learning.

In first language acquisition, children spend several years listening to

language, babbling, and using telegraphic speech before they can form sentences.
In second language acquisition in older learners, learning is more rapid and people
are able to form sentences within a shorter period of time.

In formal second language learning in older learners, learners are able to use more
metacognitive processes in their learning. They can consciously analyze and
manipulate grammatical structures, and they can explicitly describe how language
works. This can speed the learning process.

In second language learning in older learners, learners bring more life experience
and background knowledge to their learning. They have more schemata and more
learning strategies to help them learn the second language.

In second language learning in older learners, there may be less access to universal
grammar, and sensitivity to phonological distinctions not present in the native
language will be reduced. Students learning in a classroom setting may also have
fewer opportunities to learn language authentically. These factors may reduce the
likelihood that second language learners will attain native-like proficiency. Firstlanguage learners always attain native proficiency, unless they have a disability that
affects language learning.

In first language acquisition, learners have many chances to practice with native
speakers (especially caregivers). In second language acquisition, learners may or
may not have the opportunity to practice extensively with native speakers.

Almost everyone acquires a first language, but not everyone acquires a second
language. Acquiring a first language happens naturally, while acquiring a second
language often requires conscious effort on the part of the learner.

2. Definition of mother tongue (L1)

Is the language or are the languages a person has learned from birth or within the critical
period, or that a person speaks the best and so is often the basis for sociolinguistic identity.
In some countries, the terms native language or mother tongue refer to the language of
one's ethnic group rather than one's first language. Children brought up speaking more than
one language can have more than one native language, and be bilingual.

3. Definition of Second Language (L2)

A person's second language or L2 is a language that is not the native language of the
speaker, but that is used in the locale of that person. In contrast, a foreign language is a
language that is learned in an area where that language is not generally spoken. Some
languages, often called auxiliary languages, are used primarily as second languages or
lingua francas. More informally, a second language can be said to be any language learned
in addition to one's native language, especially in context of second language acquisition,
(that is, learning a new foreign language).

4. Traditional schools of thought for teaching and learning English as second

language
Since the 1940s, the definitive solution to successful ESL instruction has been
discovered many times. Like bestsellers, pop stars, and ice-cream flavors, second-language
theories and methodologies enjoy a few afternoons or years in the spotlight and then
stumble into the dusk of old age. There is always another tried-and-true methodology from
yet another expert theorist who may or may not have had first-hand experience learning a
second language. Before the late nineteenth century, second-language instruction mirrored
the so-called Classical Method of teaching Latin and Greek; lessons were based on mentalaerobics exercisesrepetition drills and out-of-context vocabulary drills as well as lots of
reading and translations of ancient texts. Brown notes that languages were not being
taught primarily to learn oral/aural communication, but to learn for the sake of being
scholarly orfor reading proficiency. Theories of second-language acquisition didnt
start to pop up until the instructional objective became oral competence.

A. Structuralism
In Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (written by Saussure's
colleagues after his death and based on student notes), the analysis focuses not on the use of
language (called "parole", or speech), but rather on the underlying system of language
(called "langue"). This approach examines how the elements of language relate to each

other in the present, synchronically rather than diachronically. Saussure argued that
linguistic signs were composed of two parts:

A "signifier" (the "sound pattern" of a word, either in mental projectionas when

one silently recites lines from signage, a poem to one's selfor in actual, any kind
of text, physical realization as part of a speech act)
A "signified" (the concept or meaning of the word)

This was quite different from previous approaches that focused on the relationship
between words and the things in the world that they designate. Other key notions in
structural linguistics include paradigm, syntagm, and value (though these notions were not
fully developed in Saussure's thought). A structural "idealism" is a class of linguistic units
(lexemes, morphemes or even constructions) that are possible in a certain position in a
given linguistic environment (such as a given sentence), which is called the "syntagm". The
different functional role of each of these members of the paradigm is called "value" (valeur
in French).
Saussure's Course influenced many linguists between World War I and World War II. In
the United States, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield developed his own version of structural
linguistics, as did Louis Hjelmslev in Denmark and Alf Sommerfelt in Norway. In France
Antoine Meillet and mile Benveniste continued Saussure's project, and members of the
Prague school of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted
research that would be greatly influential. However, by the 1950s Saussure's linguistic
concepts were under heavy criticism and were soon largely abandoned by practicing
linguists:
"Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary
critics and the occasional philosopher. [Strict adherence to Saussure] has elicited wrong
film and literary theory on a grand scale. One can find dozens of books of literary theory
bogged down in signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refer to Chomsky."
The clearest and most important example of Prague school structuralism lies in
phonemics. Rather than simply compiling a list of which sounds occur in a language, the
Prague school sought to examine how they were related. They determined that the
inventory of sounds in a language could be analyzed in terms of a series of contrasts. Thus
in English the sounds /p/ and /b/ represent distinct phonemes because there are cases
(minimal pairs) where the contrast between the two is the only difference between two
distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat'). Analyzing sounds in terms of contrastive features also
opens up comparative scopeit makes clear, for instance, that the difficulty Japanese
speakers have differentiating /r/ and /l/ in English is because these sounds are not
contrastive in Japanese. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for structuralism
in a number of different fields.

B. Behaviorism
As Skinner turned from experimental work to concentrate on the philosophical
underpinnings of a science of behavior, his attention turned to human language with Verbal
Behavior and other language-related publications; Verbal Behavior laid out a vocabulary
and theory for functional analysis of verbal behavior, and was strongly criticized in a
review by Noam Chomsky.
Skinner did not respond in detail but claimed that Chomsky failed to understand his
ideas, and the disagreements between the two and the theories involved have been further
discussed. Innateness theory is opposed to behaviorist theory which claims that language is
a set of habits that can be acquired by means of conditioning. According to some, this
process that the behaviorists define is a very slow and gentle process to explain a
phenomenon as complicated as language learning. What was important for a behaviorist's
analysis of human behavior was not language acquisition so much as the interaction
between language and overt behavior. In an essay republished in his 1969 book
Contingencies of Reinforcement, Skinner took the view that humans could construct
linguistic stimuli that would then acquire control over their behavior in the same way that
external stimuli could. The possibility of such "instructional control" over behavior meant
that contingencies of reinforcement would not always produce the same effects on human
behavior as they reliably do in other animals. The focus of a radical behaviorist analysis of
human behavior therefore shifted to an attempt to understand the interaction between
instructional control and contingency control, and also to understand the behavioral
processes that determine what instructions are constructed and what control they acquire
over behavior. Recently, a new line of behavioral research on language was started under
the name of relational frame theory.

C. Rationalism
Rationalism - as an appeal to human reason as a way of obtaining knowledge - has a
philosophical history dating from antiquity. The analytical nature of much of philosophical
enquiry, the awareness of apparently a priori domains of knowledge such as mathematics,
combined with the emphasis of obtaining knowledge through the use of rational faculties
(commonly rejecting, for example, direct revelation) have made rationalist themes very
prevalent in the history of philosophy.
Since the Enlightenment, rationalism is usually associated with the introduction of
mathematical methods into philosophy as seen in the works of Descartes, Leibniz, and

Spinoza. This is commonly called continental rationalism, because it was predominant in

the continental schools of Europe, whereas in Britain empiricism dominated.

D. Cognitivism
In the late 1950s, learning theory began to make a shift away from the use of behavioral
models to an approach that relied on learning theories and models from the cognitive
sciences. Psychologists and educators began to de-emphasize a concern with overt,
observable behavior and stressed instead more complex cognitive processes such as
thinking, problem solving, language, concept formation and information processing. Within
the past decade, a number of authors in the field of instructional design have openly and
consciously rejected many of IDs traditional behavioristic assumptions in favor of a new
set of psychological assumptions about learning drawn from the cognitive sciences.
Whether viewed as an open revolution or simply a gradual evolutionary process, there
seems to be the general acknowledgment that cognitive theory has moved to the forefront
of current learning theories. This shift from a behavioral orientation (where the emphasis is
on promoting a students overt performance by the manipulation of stimulus material) to a
cognitive orientation (where the emphasis is on promoting mental processing) has created a
similar shift from procedures for manipulating the materials to be presented by an
instructional system to procedures for directing student processing and interaction with the
instructional design system.

E. Constructivism
Formalization of the theory of constructivism is generally attributed to Jean Piaget, who
articulated mechanisms by which knowledge is internalized by learners. He suggested that
through processes of accommodation and assimilation, individuals construct new
knowledge from their experiences.
The philosophical assumptions underlying both the behavioral and cognitive theories are
primarily objectivistic; that is: the world is real, external to the learner. The goal of
instruction is to map the structure of the world onto the learner. A number of contemporary
cognitive theorists have begun to question this basic objectivistic assumption and are
starting to adopt a more constructivist approach to learning and understanding: knowledge
is a function of how the individual creates meaning from his or her own experiences.
Constructivism is not a totally new approach to learning. Like most other learning theories,
constructivism has multiple roots in the philosophical and psychological viewpoints of this
century, specifically in the works of Piaget, Bruner, and Goodman. In recent years,

however, constructivism has become a hot issue as it has begun to receive increased
attention in a number of different disciplines, including instructional design.

5. Definition of school thought

A school of thought (or intellectual tradition) is a collection or group of people who
share common characteristics of opinion or outlook of a philosophy, discipline, belief,
social movement, economics, cultural movement, or art movement.
Schools are often characterized by their currency, and thus classified into "new" and
"old" schools. There is a convention, in political and philosophical fields of thought, to
have "modern", and "classical" schools of thought. An example is the modern and classical
liberals. This dichotomy is often a component of paradigm shift. However, it is rarely the
case that there are only two schools in any given field.
Schools are often named after their founders such as the "Rinzai school" of Zen named
after Linji Yixuan and the Asharite school of early Muslim philosophy named after Abu
l'Hasan al-Ashari. They are often also named after their places of origin, such as the Ionian
School of philosophy that originated in Ionia and the Chicago school of architecture that
originated in Chicago, Illinois and the Prague School of linguistics, named after a linguistic
circle found in Prague, or Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School whose representatives lived in
Tartu and Moscow.

6. Definition of Structuralism
In sociology, anthropology and linguistics, structuralism is the methodology that
elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger,
overarching system or structure. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the
things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel. Alternatively, as summarized by
philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is "the belief that phenomena of human life are
not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and
behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract
culture".

7. Definition of Behaviorism
A school of psychology that takes the objective evidence of behavior (as measured
responses to stimuli) as the only concern of its research and the only basis of its theory
without reference to conscious experience.

Behaviorism (or behaviourism) is a systematic approach to the understanding of human

and animal behavior. It assumes that the behavior of a human or animal is a consequence of
that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment, together with
the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Thus, although
behaviorists generally accept the important role of inheritance in determining behavior,
they focus primarily on environmental factors.

8. Definition of Rationalism
The belief that reason and experience and not emotions or religious beliefs should be the
basis for your actions, opinions, etc.
In epistemology, rationalism is the view that "regards reason as the chief source and test
of knowledge "or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification".
More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion
of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive". Rationalists believe reality has an
intrinsically logical structure. Because of this, rationalists argue that certain truths exist and
that the intellect can directly grasp these truths. That is to say, rationalists assert that certain
rational principles exist in logic, mathematics, ethics, and metaphysics that are so
fundamentally true that denying them causes one to fall into contradiction. Rationalists
have such a high confidence in reason that empirical proof and physical evidence are
unnecessary to ascertain truth in other words, "there are significant ways in which our
concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience". Because of this
belief, empiricism is one of rationalism greatest rivals.

9. Definition of Cognitivism
In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that
gained credence in the 1950s. The movement was a response to behaviorism, which
cognitivism said neglected to explain cognition. Cognitive psychology derived its name
from the Latin cognoscere, referring to knowing and information, thus cognitive
psychology is an information-processing psychology derived in part from earlier traditions
of the investigation of thought and problem solving.

10. Definition of Constructivism

Constructivism is a theory of knowledge that argues that humans generate knowledge
and meaning from an interaction between their experiences and their ideas. It has

influenced a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, education and the

history of science. During its infancy, constructivism examined the interaction between
human experiences and their reflexes or behavior-patterns.