Theories of First and Second Language Acquisition

Essay Paper
Insuasty Cardenas
Andres Guillermo
June 13th, 2016
Acquisition and learning in people
The main idea for this course is to invite students to be leaders instead of students,
teachers have to propose activities that attract students attention and show them the
importance of having a scholarship, in plain words, to teach something important for them
in the future.
In the classroom the teacher should assign different activities to make students feel
involved in the course such as attendance, monitoring, workstations and having a record of
students performance. One idea can be to work on a project in which students express their
needs for the course and what they expect to do during this process, however, it is
important to use Aptis-related materials in order to have our students contextualized. Taking
into account the number of students, teachers can make them work in groups in jigsaw
activities which help students to have a single result but working together as a group. At the
end of the course, students will have the opportunity to talk about their experience during
the course and how they felt.
Of course, to accomplish this project it is necessary to take into account important
factors for example linguistic, contextual and interactive factors. The field of linguistics has

contributed a lot when it refers to the use of language and its different implications in a
variety of contexts, because language itself it is not only utterances expressed by a person
but a complex system of elements which take place in a determined context. Using a
language implies the use of cognitive and social elements which are important to make
interaction possible, on one hand, some cognitive elements are contained in
psycholinguistic studies in which language is produced in the brain and on the other hand
pragmatics studies the use of language in a determined context. Thus, the process of
learning and teaching a language is not as easy as people might think, because talking in a
foreign language has a lot of things to be taken into account.
Social interaction is necessary when learning a language, you need to know about
its origins and how useful that language will be in the city or country you live, some people
might need it to study a masters degree or go abroad. Teachers play an important role in
the instruction process; they need to plan their activities to make sure their students will be
able to use it properly in the future. For this reason, it might be advisable for teachers to
encourage students to take advantage of the media on terms of language teaching, by means
of real context activities such as posting a critical thinking question on a blog that grasps
students attention, posting videos in which students share their ideas about something or
making dialogues on video in order to interact and make use of technological tools.
All of the aspects mentioned above will help students to have a better process of
learning, as human beings is essential to interact to establish links among people and
processing language in our minds can help to make possible the process of interacting and
take our students to get the scholarship.