Language Fundamentals

This is a podcast discussing the fundamentals of language acquisition. It explains how babies learn language through sounds and sign language, progressing from babbling to one-word and two-word phrases. It also highlights the critical periods in language development and the negative effects of language deprivation. The podcast then explores the differences between first language (L1) learning and second language (L2) learning, emphasizing the impact of age, learning context, input, and effective factors. The importance of language development for reading skills is emphasized, as well as the need for explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Two models, the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough's Rope, are mentioned to explain the interconnectedness of decoding skills and language comprehension in reading. Fundamentals of Language, a course that I'm taking in my teaching, 5 plus teaching degree. Here's a podcast about it. What are the fundamentals of language? First off, we learned about language acquisition, so how as babies we learn language. Oral language is a lot easier for us as humans to learn. Our brains are wired to do so in comparison to reading. I'll get into that later. But as babies, we're more attuned to sounds, especially sounds that are language sounds. We're also very attuned to sign language. And we pay attention to things when they're new language sounds compared to sounds that we've heard before. And this allows us to build those language skills. As babies learn language, they first start with babbling. And then they move from babbling to one-word phrases to two-word phrases. And just starting to learn that grammatical structure without actual lessons behind it. There's this idea of the WUG test where babies or toddlers are able to understand that you add a plural onto objects or things when you're talking about more than one of them. An example is when we talk about a WUG. And if there's multiple of these WUGs, it becomes WUGs. Even though WUG isn't a thing at all. Very interesting. And then learning that there's different critical periods in your growth as a baby to a toddler and so on. And you learn different parts of language at those different times. Obviously, there's some variability in that. And then there's also this understanding that if people are language deprived, so they're not given language, it will result in significant cognitive difficulties for the remainder of their lives. This isn't a study that would be ethical because you would never want to succumb a baby to not learn language because of the results of it would be so devastating later in life. So that type of learning of language, oral language, is a lot different than learning how to read as it's just wired within our brains. It's just a natural process that happens within our environment. And that kind of brings us into differentiating between L1 learning and L2 learning, which is L1 learning is language learning as your first language, so as I just spoke of. And then L2 learning is learning your second language. And learning a second language obviously doesn't have the same process where it's just naturally wired in our brains to pick it up. We're obviously in a very different stage of our life and development. So when you're learning a second language, it's more due to your motivation to want to learn and the process and how you are learning. So here, yeah, I'll go into more so the key differences between first and second language learning. And yeah, we call first language learning L1 and second language learning L2. Sorry for all those out there who might not know that difference or those acronyms. I just learned that myself. L1 is language that's learned from birth, and it's relatively effortlessly effortless process and very consistent across cultures and people. L2 second languages are languages that are learned later in life. There's a lot more variability amongst this type of learning between people and within the person themselves. And it results in very different outcomes, how well they're able to speak that language. When we think of our first language, we can speak it very well, very proficiently. Second language, that's not always the case. So we learned in our course that there's four key differences between first and second language learning. And that's the first one is age of acquisition. So that's the age at which you would learn the language. This has a clear impact on your ability to speak the language in the first place. We've kind of already touched on that first language you learn when you're younger. And second language is usually when you're a little bit older, but that also is variable depending on each person because there's kids that learn second languages when they're younger. The point being here is there's evidence to suggest that learning a language when you're younger, you have more capacity to learn that language and you will have more, there's more of a chance of you being proficient in that language. As you get older, that proficiency level decreases. But again, it's a multi-layered process considering a lot of different factors which we'll get into. Second one is learning context. So when you're learning your first language, you're usually at home with your caregivers and your families and at school. Learning a second language can be very differently, can be done very differently. You could be living in another country, you're very immersed in the culture and thus your skills, your fluency skills increase out of most of the different language skills. But you could also just be taking classes at school and you're not immersed, you're actually at home in your native language. So in those regards, your grammar of that language is usually quite proficient. You could also learn a second language through movies and music. And in those cases, it's usual that your comprehension skills of that language are much more proficient than other ways of learning. A third key difference between first and second language learning is the amount of input. Input being the target language a learner is exposed to through reading, listening, or viewing. So this is talking about the amount that you're reading or listening to or watching. Also, not just the amount, but the quality of this language. Are you reading and listening and viewing native speakers or are they second language speakers themselves? That will also determine your proficiency of learning that second language. A final key difference is the effective factors. This is internal factors like anxiety, motivation, inhibition, and self-esteem within ourselves in regards to learning that language. These factors are often a lot less when you're younger. You're less scared to make a mistake, that sort of thing. And as you get older, you become more nervous, worried about making a mistake in front of others, that sort of thing. And all of these have impacts on how we learn first and second languages. This understanding, I believe, is crucial as a teacher to know. It just gives you a better picture of your student if you're knowing what is their first language. Are they an ELL student and learning a second language? It allows you to differentiate based upon this knowledge. Yeah, and it just helps with your language instruction. Alright, so just moving further into language development, why do we even talk about language development? Why is this something that's important as a teacher? It's huge because it's the foundation upon which reading skills are built. As we move from oral language to reading, print, that connection has to be consistent. Here we are. It's that connection of our oral language into reading words on a piece of paper. And those are mutually connected, although our brain is not wired to just be able to do that. We need to be explicitly instructed on how to wire our brain to do that. So this is a crucial skill to be able to have as a student in school, but also as a person in our society. Throughout education, there's the science of reading, which is an evidence-based approach. And it's supported by a lot of research. It focuses on the importance of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. And the fact that you need all of those things to be able to do that. So it's a really important skill to have. It focuses on the importance of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. And the fact that you need all of those things to become a proficient reader. Remember, learning is a really complex process, and we need explicit instruction and practice. Our brains don't just naturally pick up reading. We don't just get a text, and when we think of how we acquired speech, it's a very different process. We need to be taught how to understand the words and how to pronounce them. How to connect these symbols that we see on paper to the sounds that we make with our voices. And so there's different models that are based on the science of reading. One such model is the Simple View of Reading, which was proposed by Gao and Tenmer in 1986. And it is this view that you need decoding skills and language comprehension to give you reading comprehension. And that those skills are interconnected. And if you don't have decoding, your reading comprehension isn't going to be proficient. And if you don't have language comprehension, you won't be able to understand the text. They're both related to each other. Decoding, again, is the ability to translate words into speech using phonics and phonemic awareness, spelling, sight words. Whereas language comprehension uses vocabulary, language structure, background knowledge. And you need both of these to be able to understand a text and to read. To build onto this model was Scarborough's Rope, which was a model just in the 90s, not too much later. Developed by Hollis Scarborough, also very similar. But they created a rope type image. And each one of these strategies that you needed to learn was based on a rope. The strategies that you needed to learn that I just mentioned have to be... So like your decoding skills or word recognition is one strand of the rope. The second strand of the rope is language comprehension. And then each one of those strands are made up of smaller strands, which are those skills that we're trying to build in our readers. The phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition in the one strand. And then in the other strand is that background knowledge, the vocab, language structure, verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge. And those strands are intertwined together. And when you have all of them, then you become a skilled reader. But if one of those skills are weak, you try to imagine that strand being weak and it's going to make the rope weak, which is the reader weak. And it's this idea that we need all of these skills within our reader so that they can become a proficient reader. Again, just even looking at an image of Scarborough's rope or thinking about that. That's a lot of skills to build within a reader, within our students. It's a very complex process, so extremely important. And to even add on to the complexity, it's not just that we need to make sure that we are instilling all of those activities and processes and skills within our readers. We also need to make sure our instruction is using high quality language. We have to make sure as teachers we're using rich vocabulary within the classroom. Using rich language with just everyday language. Thinking about our academic language and how that language varies content based on the content area that you're teaching and making sure you're including all of that within your day. Also making sure that you're using relatable and authentic language with your students. Language that you would actually use. Also pertaining to texts. Using texts and books that are real sentences, not simple stunted sentences, but real, useful, authentic language is being used. I think it's also important to showcase the importance of other language and dialects and how they differ between cultures rather than just showcasing English. That's that idea that thinking of our students who come from different cultural backgrounds and speak a different language at home, we want to make sure that that language is still supported and appreciated and is just as important as English. So I think it's part of our job as a teacher to recognize that and to acknowledge the importance of both those languages. With high quality instruction I think we as teachers also need to ask for and seek out professional development opportunities that support reading instruction. If I think about that, that's the main reason why I'm taking this course through Queen's. I felt my teacher's college training didn't equip me well enough to teach reading and writing to the best of my ability and to make my time within the classroom with my students the most effective that it can be. And considering how important reading and writing is to our learners, I think that that's a skill we as teachers really need. And so learning for those opportunities to become better equipped to do that I think is really important. Again, touching on cultural and background knowledge, it's really important to understand that students come from different cultures and have different cultural experiences. And students, even if from the same culture, have varying degrees of background knowledge and that's also something we need to consider as teachers and how do we include that and build that within our learning experiences. Also when we think of cultural experiences and ELL learners, this idea that their language will influence their understanding of future texts and how they write and read can be very different depending on culture to culture. So it's important to include different texts in our classroom, diverse texts with different people and ideas and cultures and beliefs being represented in them. We read an article that mentioned including texts that act as mirrors so that reflect themselves, the learners themselves, but also to include texts that represent windows so that learners can imagine themselves in a different space, in a different situation, in a different perspective, both of which are really important to have within a classroom. So as a classroom teacher and all of this knowledge, my reading instruction strategies are to include explicit instruction in phonics, to have different vocabulary activities throughout the weeks depending upon different phonemic awareness strategies. I also include morphology lessons and learning about base words and the prefixes and affixes that are attached to those and just kind of the history of words themselves. Making sure that within your comprehension strategies, those strategies are being scaffolded. I really like the reciprocal teaching method and the FAP4. And then I always provide a lot of opportunities for independent reading, always reading every day, sometimes it's silent reading, sometimes it's buddy reading, that sort of thing. There's a lot of read-alouds in my classroom where sometimes I'm just modeling the reading and thinking that goes along with the text, but also there's shared reading, echo reading and choral reading as well. And then I also make sure to include just as much writing practice as we have reading practice because those two skills are very connected and both support one another. I like to give my students a lot of voice and choice. I believe that this relates to their motivation and engagement in wanting to learn. So whether that's through choosing a word game or choosing the text that they're reading or giving a different option of articles to read when doing a comprehension activity. Choosing a topic that they're going to write about in their journals. And allowing them opportunities to showcase their reading ability if they want and their writing ability because I find they're just so proud in most cases to do that. And then I also make sure my learning in the classroom is very engaging, fun, play-based, multi-modal, using our hands, listening to music, feeling things, all to just better the learning experience of our learners. Also, it's really important in the classroom is to formatively assess your students throughout their learning process so that you can monitor their progress and then identify areas of growth. Only by doing that are you going to be able to better instruct them and build upon their reading and language learning. And then making sure that your instruction is differentiated based on the students within your classroom and their individual needs. When you differentiate, your learning outcomes are going to be improved. Students are going to feel heard and seen and they're going to feel supported. I think it also increases their engagement because they feel like they have the ability to do so. And it allows them to have a deeper understanding of their learning. So then to wrap it all up, I think all of this learning has really informed my thinking about the need for language study in teacher education. I think it's crucial for teachers to know these skills and know how important and complex it is for learners to learn how to read and write. If I think about my perspective only a few years ago, I was really under the understanding. I was like, oh, my kids just kind of will learn to read eventually. It's kind of just if they're surrounded by books and people reading books, they'll pick it up. I now know that is clearly not the case. And I think that can be a harmful way to think in the sense of it deterring our learners from learning how to read. I think I've mentioned it already, but it's very important as teachers to know how to do this properly and also to understand, yeah, science changes over time and we do the best that we can with what we know. Just as long as what we know is evidence-based and that we can still be flexible as the science changes and grows and adapts with our learners and within the society that is also changing and growing every year.