What makes language acquisition effortless

In the video clips, Professor Neil Smith tried to demonstrate UG with studies of a savant, Christopher who learned tens of languages. I still doubt the existence of UG. In class, I mentioned the wolf-child, who was abandoned in the forest and raised by a wolf, failed to acquire the language. If he had been born with UG, he should have learned the language. I think it’s more like ‘input’, rather than ‘UG’ in terms of the determiner of the first language.

Some argue that the wolf-child had no chance to utilize UG since he was surrounded by only animals in the forest for years. With the strong existence of UG, wolf-child should have learned the language after he moved to the ‘ordinary’ place where people lived and he started to take language lessons. However, he failed it again.

Considering the fact that he already passed the critical period, UG might sound more plausible, but still, I am not 100% positive that people are born with UG. I don’t think there is such thing as ‘Universal Grammar’ shared by all the people from all around the world. Rather, I think that people tend to have languages that happen to have similar features in common.

When we take a look at languages, they are not that different. People say that English and Korean are such two different languages, however, this is because people cannot see the big picture of the languages. Korean and English are almost identical in that two languages have ‘MATCHING’ grammar and vocabulary. I think UG might be called the same rules that all languages have in common, not all people have in common. Focusing too much attention to different features in languages such as pronunciation or word order, they overlook the similarities. For example, from the last reading article, Schachter mentioned RCF, “one of the biggest different features among languages”. Of course, the order of the relative clause IS different but what I was surprised by is that all of the languages DO have the relative clauses formation.

It might not be UG that enables people to learn the language and it might be not UG parameters that multilingual people utilize. I think it is input that enables people to learn the language and it is the same features in all languages that facilitate multilingual people acquire languages.

My L2 learning autography

When I was staying in Toronto, I studied at an English school. This place is where I met Susanna who was my third English teacher in the school. I noticed her first even before taking her class because she was the only African-American at school. While studying with her, I and all my classmates loved her with time. She always tried to create a learner-centered class environment and let us know that English was a mean to communicate, not the object to accomplish.

Instead of teaching in class all the time, she took us to the real-world at times. We went to the book store, museum, a community center, and her workplace to name a few. She worked for a phone company twice a week and one day, we went on the field trip to her company. Some of her colleagues explained about what kind of work they did and showed us around. It was fun and memorable because it was the first time to have a chance to look around the 'real' company in Canada. She tried to put us in authentic places as many as possible and we were able to put English in practice.

I would say, I can do my best and put the most effort into studies when I know WHY I study and I have FUN with it. The English teacher, Susanna fully satisfied with these two things in that I realized that English was a actual tool to interact with others and I definitely had fun in / out of her class.

I guess I liked the class a lot because it was right after the miserable time for the first 8 months in Canada. For the 8 months, I took ESL classes in the morning, went to KOREAN town with my KOREAN friends, and headed for the library to study. It was exactly the same as the way to study English in Korea. I had been so frustrated with my steady, even, still, immovable English ability that seemed 'stuck forever' in the same level. Then, I met Susanna.

When I was taking her class, we got so close and hung out after class too. I was considering changing my Homestay at that time, she asked me to move in her house. Since then, I lived with her and her parents who were also teachers at public school. The house was located in Brampton which was an hour away from Toronto. There was no single ESL school in Brampton, I was the only Asian there. Actually, I was the only one who is not African-American. Sometimes, people looked at me with eyes wide on the street, some of them talked me first and especially children gazed at me. This is when my English seemed to improve dramatically.

Susanna took me everywhere she went and introduced me to people. Almost every weekend, she and her bunch of friends got together and had a party. All of them were very nice to me. Some of them asked me out :-) and some of them became life-long friends. The most importantly, I was impressed by the way they taught me English. Brampton was unlike Toronto that Korean people overflowed, people thought I was very unique and they were willing to teach me English. I remember that some of them not only corrected my English but also wrote them down on my notebook. Also, they helped me out with wrong pronunciation and broken English. I got these instant and effective feedback while we were sitting on sofa eating popcorn or drinking beer which was in such relaxing and zero-anxiety environment.

For the first 8 months in Canada, I spent most of my time taking classes, hanging out with Koreans, studying at the library memorizing grammar and vocabulary which was the pretty same as I did in Korea. However, after moving to Brampton, I was actually able to put my English into practice with real people in a real-world circumstances. Thanks to Susanna who was my English teacher, I got to 'use' English rather than 'learn'.

1st reading log

This article is mainly about acquiring the mother tongue and learning the second language. One of the inevitable by-product of the process of learning a language is the learner's errors. Corder distinguishes between the errors of performance and the errors of competence. The former refers to 'mistakes' and the latter 'errors' which is respectively 'unsystematic' and 'systematic'. This part was the most interesting but, at the same time, somewhat vague to me. Since Corder didn't provide the concrete examples out of them, it was hard to fully understand the terms. I looked up the Internet to get some help and happened to find the article, 'The Insignificance of learner's errors' by Richard Hamilton. Surprisingly, it also argues that Corder didn't give any examples of a systematic error.

From my understanding, errors of performance are subject to change due to memory lapses, tiredness or strong emotion while errors of competence can define the learners' knowledge of the language to date. Corder mentions that it is significant in that it reflects what the learner has been undertaking a systematic analysis. This process of the 'forming grammar' consists of the certain stages that learners go through over time.
If so, the systematic error related to 'the natural order' which is the common type of learners' errors? If not, how are they different?