NEITHER CROSS- SECTIONAL NOR LONGITUDINAL

I love researches concerning teaching and learning English. What I am curious about is to find out to what extent these researches are right or not in real life. Is what a research says in theory compatible with what happens in real life? Last Friday, I had a good chance to compare what some researches say with what happens while learning English in real life.

I am expected to teach English a girl, aged 4.5, through playing games. I want to list my observations on her language learning process. Besides, I want to add real- life reflections of some researches that I know just in theory.

It is always said that games are influential in facilitating foreign language teaching for young learners since games are already a natural part of young learners’ life. So, they provide a subtle and silent transition from real life to language teaching. I know this fact; however, I have never had a chance to experience this fact in real life until last Friday. When she saw me first, she ran away for fear that I would teach her English. Her mother told her: “She is here to play game with you, nothing else!” The child ended up next to me! I was shocked because I did not expect that it would be so easy.

Total Physical Response (henceforth TPR) is one of the methods I love for young learners while teaching imperatives. This method makes the learner physically active and physical actions, carried out by right hemisphere of the brain, precede left brain language processing. I addressed to TPR many times last Friday, and she was very good at comprehending and taking action after my commands. “Help me, close your eyes, open your eyes, turn your back, give me the red/ yellow/ green… one, come here, find the ball…” are some examples I used the most. Each time I gave these commands, she had almost no failure. In real life, I saw how effective it is on young learners in teaching imperatives.

Critical Age Hypothesis, as it is known, is the name given to the idea that young children can learn second language effectively before puberty because their brains can use the mechanisms that assisted first language acquisition. I think that my sister, aged 11- 12, is good at learning English. Yet, what I saw last Friday is that the little girl is definitely better than my sister in learning English because she is much younger than my sister.

It is always said that younger children pay more attention to sound and prosody in language. This statement is compatible with what I experienced last Friday. She had almost no pronunciation mistake, even I was shocked when she pronounced “giraffe, octopus and another animal.” (I do not remember what it is; however, it is not a common animal.) To be honest, I was not sure how they are pronounced exactly.

A researcher studying negation acquisition divides its development into five stages. The first stage is “no stage” where they make overgeneralization and use only “no” for negation until they reach second stage in negation. I suppose that she is still in the first stage. “No okey, no good, no hot” are some utterences I caught. Yet, this is a developmental error, even for native speakers, and it is the sign of learning.

Lyster (2001) claims that because recasts are generally very ambiguous for especially young learners, children cannot perceive recasts as indicators of their errors when they hear correct utterances. Besides, he finds recasts to be the least effective type of feedback. I think, what I observed last Friday is parallel with this prediction. When the girl said “no okey”, I said “It is not okey” each time both to provide a complete sentence and make her aware of her error indirectly. Yet, I could never correct her usage and she went on saying “no okey!” It may be because there is still time to pass to second stage in negation acquisition. Yet, it can also be accepted to be a real- life reflection of the finding of Lyster.

In linguistics, code-switching is defined as the concurrent use of more than one language, in conversation. She switched a number of Turkish words while we were in any English context. “Ball ları inci gibi dizeceğim, white box ı alabilir miyim” are some sentences I caught. As I know, lack of lexical knowledge in the target language causes code- switching. So, this fact explains why she code- switched.

These are observations relating my theoretical knowledge to real life examples. What I did last Friday is neither cross- sectional nor longitudinal for the time being. Yet, I am planning to record her language process as much as possible and I may turn it into a mini longitudinal study later.

REFERENCE

Lyster, R. (2001). Negotiation of form, recasts, and explicit correction in relation to error types and learner repair in immersion classrooms. Language Learning, 51, 265-301.