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Aportaciones de la lingüística a la enseñanza de las lenguas extranjeras. El proceso de aprendizaje lingüístico: semejanzas y diferencias entre la adquisición de la primera lengua escolar y de la lengua extranjera. CONTRIBUTION OF LINGUISTICS TO FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING. THE LANGUAGE LEARNING PROCESS: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING. According to the Royal Decree 157/2022, 1st of march, one of the objectives for foreign language teaching at Primary level is to acquire basic communicative competence in at least one foreign language. The curriculum also divides the contents into 4 main blocks: Communication, multilingualism, intercultural and syntax-discourse contents. These contents have been related to the four sub-competences of the communicative competence, established by Canale and Swain (1980): grammar, discourse, sociolinguistic and strategic competence. Personally, I believe that understanding more about similarities and differences in first language and second language acquisition can be a helpful tool as teachers in the foreign language classroom. Needless to say, I consider this topic essential. In this essay, I am going to review briefly some of the latest findings on how children learn both their native language and a foreign language. First, I will define Linguistics; then I will move to language learning pointing out different views and finally, I will emphasise the similarities and differences between first and second language acquisition. At the end I will compile the main conclusions and the bibliography I used to develop the topic. 1. LINGUISTICS, grammar and its components. Foreign language teaching has developed along with Linguistics, so if we want to teach in an appropriate and efficient way we need to know about Linguistics. Definition of linguistics: Linguistics is concerned with the study of language as a system of human communication, being communication the process in which one person, the addresser, sends a message to another person, the addressee or receiver, by using a code which is common to the participants. Linguistics studies this message paying attention to words and phrases to see how they are used to communicate information, thoughts and feelings. The linguist tries to see how language works. Saussure, Chomsky, Jakobson or Bloomfield among others, have developed the elements that language teachers use nowadays to teach in an appropriate and efficient way. Definition of Grammar: Grammar describes the speaker’s knowledge of the language. It is a formal device with a finite set of rules that generates the sentences in the language. Therefore, grammar includes how to form grammatically acceptable sentences, knowing what they mean and how to pronounce them. Components of grammar: phonological component, semantic component and syntactic component: • The phonological component represents the sound system of language. It analyses how speech sounds are organized and combined in order to convey meaning. For instance, it studies which sounds are possible in the language; what happens to words in fast speech and possible combinations of sounds. • The semantic component is concerned with the study of meaning in language. The knowledge of semantics can help us, as English teachers, to understand something about the nature of a language. We can observe sentences which are meaningful but ungrammatical (ej. “That man tall is my father”) and other which are grammatically correct but meaningless in content (ej. “The tree fell from the apple”). Wrong sentences like this are uttered by non-native speakers of English. It can also help us understand something about the nature of meaning. We must have the capacity to distinguish between homonyms which can be homographs or homophones. Homonyms, homophones and homographs are words which have different meanings but are easily confused because they look alike or sound alike (or both): o Homonyms: words that sound and look alike; Egs.: Bank: a slope (=cuesta, pendiente, desnivel); a place for money; a bench; Well: I’m well; it´s an adverb /wel/ or a noum /wel/ –a hole in the floor-. o Homophones: words that sound alike but do not look alike, eg. coarse (áspero; vulgar), course; which and witch; Past tense of lead (/led/) and the metal lead (/led/) (plomo); o Homographs: words that are spelled the same –look alike- but dont´sound alike, Egs. “Read” in the present /reed/ and “read” in the past /red/; The verb lead (/leed/) and the metal lead (/led/); “Bow your head”-inclinar la cabeza- and "tied in a bow"-atado en un lazo- • The syntactic component refers to sentence structure. According to Downing and Locke (2002) the moving around of bits of language suggests that language is not a series of words strung together like beads on a string. Language is patterned, that is, certain regularities can be distinguished throughout every linguistic manifestation in a text. A unit can be defined as any stretch of language which constitutes a semantic whole and which has a recognised pattern that is repeated regularly in speech and writing. We can recognise four structural units which can be arranged in order of magnitude on what is called a rank-scale: clause --->phrase ---> word ---> morpheme. Any structure can be considered to be composed of elements which form a configuration of “functions”. Each of these functions is in turn realised by a unit which is itself a configuration of functions having in the final stage abstract categories such as subject, head, modifier, etc. 2. THE LANGUAGE LEARNING PROCESS. Once we have considered the speaker's knowledge of the language, we need to specify the processes through which that knowledge can be translated into performance. We know that the linguistic model is incomplete; we need a psychological model. Linguistics along with psychology work hand in hand to solve the issue of how languages are learned. This psychological model involves three factors: 1. Structural factor: it has to do with how the speaker decodes information. 2. Processing factor: the way we store information. 3. Functional factor: whether what we say is congruent with the existing knowledge. Many different THEORIES try to explain FIRST language acquisition. The most useful and influential views arise from different schools of psychology. If we think of language acquisition as a jigsaw, we can consider each of these views as a piece; each providing useful insights but only partial explanation. Let us briefly examine their main characteristics: • Behaviourists “Say what I say”- (Skinner). Language learning is seen as a process of imitation and repetition (=habit formation). It stresses the importance of positive reinforcement in language acquisition where correct learning behaviour is rewarded and the wrong one corrected. Nowadays, linguists recognise that although imitation and practice are clearly important parts of L.L., they do not provide the complete picture. It does not explain children’s gift for creativity in language. Children are able to understand and apply rules they have worked out in a very logical way but which leads them to produce language they have never heard. From this criticism arose the: • Innatism / Nativism -“It´s all in your mind”- (Chomsky): principles and beliefs of cognitive psychology. Chomsky changed forever the way we think about language. He challenged behaviourists’ views by suggesting an internal or innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD), a black box in the brain now referred to as Universal Grammar (UG), which allows infants to process all the language they hear and to produce their own meaningful utterances. This LAD has some properties that Brown summarised as: 1) the ability to distinguish speech sounds from other type of sounds, 2) the ability to organise language into a system of structures; 3) the ability to construct the simplest possible system based on the linguistic data to which one was exposed and 4) the knowledge of what is and is not possible in any linguistic system. Innatists’ views were another step in the right direction, although there was not enough consideration of communication with real people in real time. Therefore, the 3rd theory arose: • Cognitive view – “Following the steps”- (Piaget): language development was an aspect of general cognitive growth, claiming that certain thinking skills must mature first in order to create a framework for early language development. • INPUT view and Social-interactionist views – “A little help from my friend”-: It argues that the way a baby learns a language is both biological and social. It emphasises the importance of human social interactions, and the role of adult and child relationships in learning. Language is modified to suit the level of the learner. Crystal studied a special way of talking that mothers develop to get the most of their children, coined as ‘motherese’(The input theory). He showed that parental input is adapted in a way that facilitates language acquisition by children. Some characteristics of this specific input are: simplicity, clarity, expressiveness and attention seeking. Vygotsky theorized that a child learns best when interacting with those around him to solve a problem. At first, the adult talks at the child and eventually the child learns to respond in turn. The child moves from gurgling to baby talk to more complete and correct sentences. Bruner argues that children learn language in order to communicate, and, at the same time, they also learn the linguistic code. Meaningful language is acquired in the context of meaningful parent-infant interaction, learning “scaffolded”. The interaction between an adult and an infant, build the structure of language long before the child is able to communicate verbally.