Language Development - Science topic

I have been a father ten months ago. I won't raise my child in bilingual household but as I am an English teacher but my mother tongue is Bangla, I have planned to teach him both languages from the beginning so that he can adopt both languages easily and comfortably.

Thank you Mohialdeen Alotumi .

There are lots of theories on child language development and individual differences are one of the issues these theories have focused on. I do recommend that you refer to Rod Ellis's work on L2 acquisition or even Krashen's Monitor Theory.

You should not select the technology first. You should use an "Educational Engineering" process to first identify your outcome goals for the class, and their measurements of success...and then the kinds of learning activities that can allow students to achieve those goals. Only after that should you select the technology by which those learning activities can be performed. See this book chapter:

I am also searching for the questionnaire. Any luck so far?

Sign language in any country for deaf usually make same sign for one word thatswhy it is going to b good impact for deaf ,therefore deaf people use those signs with deaf people who live in different areas.

Always have a range of follow-up activities for stronger students, who may be paired together, which they can complete while lower level students are still working on initial activities. Stronger students may welcome more autonomy, but they also need to feel they are learning something from the lesson, even while you may be occupied with further explanation to lower level students.

http://www.multilingualliving.com/2010/05/31/does-bilingualism-multilingualism-cause-language-delay/

Usually the finest details of the calculations in validation are not provided in the published articles for the sake of parsimony. Therefore, the best way to find a good description would be looking into a Measurement in Psychology textbook. After being competent with the basics, the articles become more understandable. Having stated that, two examples related to BRIEF-P may be at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/09297041003679344?scroll=top&needAccess=true and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1087054712466439?casa_token=ZK5NHWDCQ3UAAAAA%3AUVKv8IO63j82TDPrK82WijZYwXxL4kfZ8OmEhLe5eN_mEFqkTAf99LREMEgxZRUFnOhXEX4PQ3HI

A book that might help you with some of these issues is Rose, H & Galloway, N. (2019) Global Englishes for Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.

thank you for your reply. I want to prepare the report for only two sets of data for the same students. will ANOVA still be a choice?

Yes, but they consider that (the faculty of) language is syntactically pre-structured, so to say, whereas this part of the activity is plainly neural. Languages disorders come mainly from the (final) motor part of the activity: when biology meets culture, precisely!

You might like to try a variation of the unsolvable tracing task used by Roberts et al (2019). It's more typically referred to as a 'frustration tolerance task' or an 'ego depletion paradigm' than a stress induction per se, but it serves a similar purpose. Other challenging cognitive tests (e.g. serial sevens task) can also be used in the same way.

Source:

Roberts, A. C., Yap, H. S., Kwok, K. W., Car, J., Chee-Kiong, S. O. H., & Christopoulos, G. I. (2019). The cubicle deconstructed: Simple visual enclosure improves perseverance. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 63, 60-73.

May be

Language acquisition is a multi-factorial, multi-dimensional and multi-stratal phenomenon. If you focus on one aspect, the approach is at the expense of excluding other aspects. A big question as is asked entails a vast reply, the whole scholars in the universe are trying to answer just a portion of what is considered as the most complicated faculty of human species_language. Don't dismay. Btw, plasticity is sth that belongs to pre-puberty. After puberty it is claimed that the plasticity vanishes. Man is stuck in a hard shell rather than a flexible all-absorbing ability. They can master lexico-grammar and also discoursal aspects yet for people after puberty acquiring native-like pronunciation is claimed to be very hard, out of reach or impossible. Notions and factors such as the individual psychology, neurology, physiology, internal motivation; social , cultural, historical factors; power distribution; class, age, gender, ethnicity; natural vs classroom environment, authenticity real life example vs artificial classroom exposure, learning styles and learning strategies; input, intake, and output and still a longer list of factors all have an impact on SLA. We are all on the route to know just part of the system or mechanism , yet there is no conclusive answer. We can easily pose a very short question such as "What is the treatment for cancer?" but the answer is neither conclusive, nor utterable. It involves a huge pile of information concerning numerous factors inspected through various perspectives, "signifying nothing." Yet, as human beings we try to quench our curiosity. In this activity, we are fortunate enough to have a collective curiosity; that is, all the thinkers in applied linguistics collectively try to find a way to better understand SLA. From antiquity, Plato, and Aristotle , to F Saussure, Chomsky, Hymes, Halliday, Gass, Ellis, and many other important scholars they have tried to grasp some aspect of SLA and expand human knowledge on the quest for language learning /acquisition. ... you see, this is not yet finished.

Best wishes. Dr Babak Majidzadeh (PhD)

I read the 2011 paper by Atkinson on phonemic diversity in May 2019. It had not occurred to me in 2008 or since that there might be a way to find a rate of phonemic change. So the Atkinson paper is very interesting. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to align Atkinson's ideas with those in the 2008 lexical growth paper and in the 2009 intelligence paper, mentioned in the question above. But I did find a 2015 paper, Detecting Regular Sound Changes in Linguistics as Events of Concerted Evolution (Hruschka et al) and was pretty amazed at some of their data. I have thus added a paper on phonemic and lexical change which might be of interest.

Do you think that people who achieve better results in the IELTS Writing part do actually have a better academic writing experience? Not necessarily. Experience, from a broader point of view, matters.

Psycholinguistics and emotion attached

Hi Angel Tabullo --really neat study design! In our study of typically developing children this same age and slightly older, we had them "read sets of three sentences presented word-by-word with a target word, either real or novel, as the last word in each sentence. Sentences were presented word-by-word with each word appearing for 500 ms and a blank screen between words appearing for 300 ms. The blank screen directly preceding the target word was presented for 600 ms to establish a baseline for analysis of the novel word. The target word was presented for 600 ms" (Abel, Schneider & Maguire, 2018). I would also recommend Hagoort, 2003 "Interplay between Syntax and Semantics during Sentence Comprehension: ERP Effects of Combining Syntactic and Semantic Violations" for guidelines in study design (i.e. start-up and wrap-up effects) that I have found most useful for my own studies of semantic and syntactic processing in 8-12 year olds. Look forward to reading more of your work in the future!

Commonsmlc@gmail.com has a diagnostic tool the says what the developmental state of the child is and where to intervene. At the moment it is free.

Thank you for your answer. 1) Could you please give more details about why Wellcomm can be translated up to 3.5 years, since I would like to know more about this test...2) the PLS is probably is refered to Zimmerman etl al (2002)?

hi. consider the practicality of your project, its generalizability and usefulness. your samples should be the representative of the population. How?

best regards

Hi Haba!

I see connectivism as a kind of constructivism - as also social constructivism is an emphasis under the broader label of constructivism. And do not forget constructionism, which is also highly interesting in relation to ICTs and learning, and something else.

However, I think all kinds of learning theories and connected pedagogies and didactics are in a way rather neutral to the use of both classrooms and ICTs and their possible combinations. Owning Ipads does not implicate constructivism, but Ipads can help design a course in a constructivism manner. You can do very oldfashioned or even evil or stupid teaching / learning designs with ICTs or without. ICTs instead broadens our possibilities to design teaching and affect student learning under varying circumstances of all kinds. No more magic than that (but highly important anyway).

If you only have your own oral voice (no books, paper, blackboard, Ipads, LMSs or other ICTs) and 50 students to teach under the shadow of a tree - you cannot do much adaption or variation to student needs, and the teaching /learning process is probably not very effective (it is hard to even give homework).

See this thought experiment:

and this interpretation of blended learning, focusing on time and process instead of technology or place:

which simplifies thinking of blended leanring versus learning theories.

Thank you all very much!

you can read this file

My simple advice to all non-English native speakers (including me!)  to convert or switch their electronic computers, mobiles, social media accounts, TVs, etc into English mode, I think is the simplest way to gain more vocabularies and be default to communicate by using English language.

Emad

I would rather think towards translanguaging as the guiding concept. I feel the strict view on not using any L1 at all is not up-to-date anymore, but pros and cons would have to be considered carefully for the very teaching situation;

Thank you to all for the answers provided. I really appreciate them

Dear Brett:

You ask for quantitative instruments for analyzing children's writing. I know of no formal and global quantitative instrument for analyzing children's writing, mainly because children's witting may analyzed from several perspectives, such as a morphological, grammatical, and semantic perspective. Note also that children's writing may refer to a six-year-old child, a eight-year-old child, a ten-year-old child and even older children. In addition to this, children's writing may be analyzed, for example, in terms of words per sentence, type of words employed (concrete words, such  as chair, table, desk, and the like, or abstract words such as false, good, beautiful, and the like), sentence structure (correct or incorrect), level of linguistic development (e.g., egocentric language or socialized language) and so forth.  

To count  the total number of written words per sentence and the type óf words employed is a relatively usual and easy quantitative way of assessing children's written fluency and proficiency..

You might appeal also to a qualitative procedure. I am thinking of Piaget's theory of cognitive development and its relation to verbal development. As far as I know, he appealed, for instance, to three types of "Why" children (and leaners)  may employ in their writing and speaking. Psychological whys, physical whys, and logic whys. "Why have  you beard?", a child asks. " Because I like to have beard", an adult responds." "Why do you like this?, and so forth, the child adds.These are examples of the first type of "Whys". As you easily could see, the child at hand is playing with words and, in the end, s/he is not interested in any true explanation. "Why does water freeze in the fridge?, a child may ask. "Because when water is subject to a low temperature it ceases to be lliquid and becomes solid", an adult answers.This example substantiates the second type of whys mentioned above. "Why 2 + 2 makes 4?", a child questions. "2 +2   = 4 because 1 + 1 = 2", an adult responds. This is a simple example of a logic why? 

Contrary to what happens in adults' socialized language (written and spoken), in their egocentric language, writing, and speaking  children under 5-6  years approximately, often use psychological whys, and few, in any, physical and logic whys. The qualitative procedure just mentioned could be applied to other words, such as if, although, and so forth.

Needless to say, a qualitative procedure can be analyzed  in quantitative terms. For example, one might count the number of  times each type of why appears in a written/spoken production.

As language has also a semantic level, which is not the case, for example, of computers. I think that children's writing in any language can also take into account such level. Of course, children's writing may be analyzed in psychodynamic terms. Such analysis can shows us, for example, the extent to which a given child is experiencing a certain affective conflict. This little digression shows us, as Reza says, that children's writing is a wonderful topic for research.  

Needless to say, the more holistic rather than  dualist or reductionist we want to be while analyzing children's writing, the more we should appeal to both qualitative and quantitative procedures. A dualistic and positivistic stance is adopted when, for example, one opposes quantity to quality. Science whatever often appeals to dualistic perspectives, such as nature vs. nurture, social vs. individual, biological vs. psychological, fluency vs. proficiency, and so forth. Fortunately, this sad reality is being replaced  by dynamic and relational systems approaches to action, thinking and felling.

I hope I have got your question(s)  and that my considerations my be of help to you.

Best regards.     

If you are focusing on dyslexic learners, I think then see two aspects. The words they can and they words they cannot recognize. These students have diverse reading problems. So keeping 'can' aspect let them attain maximum speed and recognition and calculate the time. Moreover, you have to sort out the extent and variables involved in this process. Otherwise, it will be leading to a generalization. I hope it helps!

Hope this can be useful;

Have you applied any survery or interview to your participants?

Colonialism plays a great role on these kind of situtions. Globalization has another important part (world Englishes).

No. Iconic symbols must be perceptually similar to their targets (possibly in a broad way) and presumably at least partly understandable out of context. When an abstract symbol takes on a conventionalised meaning it does not change its nature.

Could you send to me that chapter, Isabelle?

Best 

Sonia

In part perhaps because of George Orwell's "1984", and also because I've seen the attempt in East Germany to curtail both the number and the meaning of words in the lexicon of the German language (in the DDR's Eastern Duden Dictionary), I am very very leery of any attempt to limit vocabulary (I am also appalled at the paucity of the 'English' used in many international institutions, which curbs thinking and kills nuances of thought. Even ignorance of simple grammar rules limits meanings - cf. the frequent misuse of the word 'the' in RG discussions, which garbles meanings.)

So-called 'swearwords' usually have great pedigrees, and have become 'swearwords' only through temporary happenstance or even ignorance. Here are a couple of examples:

Toilet - not a word in very high standing these days - was used by the British aristocracy to describe euphemistically a loo - it was a French word meaning 'little cloth'. Of course, the original highborn nature of the word is totally lost today.

'Humanity' - a PC word most often used to replace the supposedly sexist 'mankind' is rooted in slapstick ignorance: 'human' meant specifically a male person (akin to the Spanish hombre or the French homme), whereas man in mankind meant a 'human being', cognate with the German Mensch of the same meaning. Furthermore, the adoption of humanity to mean mankind leads straight to an impoverishment of the tongue - 'humanity' used to mean, and should continue to mean, 'the essence and quaility of being human', or even 'humane-ness'. Mankind is a perfectly good word to express what it means, demolished by ignorant PCness.

Even the worst swearword in the English language has a noble lineage and meant 'to procreate, to generate offspring', as reflected in the modern Dutch word 'fokken', meaning to breed (as in 'breed horses', e.g.)

I say, teach all those words within their historical context, and above all, do not willfully impoverish languages and/or lexicons. 

Some literature on playing, gender, and

some on language development.

Regards,

Joachim

I do not know what you mean by "SVC" but I think that this is just an example of a typographical error, i.e. leaving out "to." 

Because of the extensive sharing online and high work tempo in many places of employment, I am seeing more and more errors on news stories that SHOULD have been caught by proofreading or copy editors.

I suspect it improves their interest in the task, which increases their attention to the stimuli, rather than it reinforcing their discrimination per se. It may be that the timing of those features could be where it detracts, but otherwise increasing attention will probably just be a good thing.

Hope this helps!

Hi,

We have recent data on norming study of Infant communicative development assessed with the European Portuguese CDI short forms. We considered effects of socioeconomic status (SES), which are related to parental profession (and to the fact that the infant has a working mother). We only found a SES effect for vocabulary comprehension in infants (8 to 18 months), with an advantage for infants from medium-qualified families relative to infants from families with lower or higher levels of SES. Given that in most cases the medium and higher levels of SES corresponded to working mothers, this suggests that the mother's working status may not be the only (or even the most) relevant factor. The role of other factors needs to be explores, such as the actual kinds of input the infant is exposed to.

Best,

Sonia Frota

I think all the questions are interesting, BUT your approach is skewed.

First of all, learning process in done in brain and its interaction with environment, So children will adapt to any tool. That's why babies can handle a tablet better than a older citizen, because they see it as a tool. Just like we saw a pencil or a pen.

New Technologies do not change the brain, brain responds to evolution, changes in the environment. Human brain is just one part of the long chain in evolution. Species need to evolve, so brain is not static. It's not something a tool like technology can damage because is dynamically changing in order to keep us alive as specie.

If pencils are not necessary tools, brain won't be damage, it will use that motor information to something else. Brain don't keep in memory something that doesn't use. It's called cognitive economy.

I can add another topic: Reading and writing are NOT programmed cognitive skills in brain. Language is programmed, but not reading and writing, because those are brand new cultural inventions in the cosmic calendar.

Finally, studies about dyslexia, find that children with dyslexia can read better on screens because they see a small amount of information, and they can go up or down slowly or even make the text bigger. 

My idea is: don't think learning based on a tool, but based on brain and how it learns

Dear Robert, I can refer to my personal experience as a multilingual speaker. I find it rather easy to imitate a sound sequence without acquire the phonological system. But this is not acquiring the language. I do not speak Spanish, but I can say Ola and Vale in a way that Spanish speakers continue to talk to me in Spanish and have difficulties to accept that I do not understand them. This seems to be at least related to the phenomenon you are after. Charles

Belinda

I am sending alone a short version of an explanation on how we (my daughter Chana and I) view AAT.

I think this would be better than the chapter, for your purposes.

Stanley

You may consider looking into research on bilingualism and the cognitive and language benefits that come from learning two languages. Sign language does count as another language so looking into research on bilingualism may be a good place  to start.

1. The language organ- proposing the biological genesis of language.

2. Proto-world & the monogenesis of current languages.

Again, as above,  the nature-nurture dichotomy seems to be the predominant strands of thought. One can situate arguments quite reasonably along one of these veins. Citations have been given by some in this forum.

Dear Dr. Bahman,

Thank you very much.

best wishes

ali

I have found the database by Kuperman et al. (2012) to be especially informative for determining AoA in children older than the 30 month age limit provided by the CHILDES.  You can access that database via this website: http://crr.ugent.be/archives/806

To borrow Widdowson’s (2015: 359 - JELF) words, the specifications of the CEFR never question “the old orthodoxy that the objective of learning can only be the acquisition of competence defined as conformity to native speaker norms”.  Baker (2015: 135 - Lang. Teach.), for example, quotes the following specification among many similar ones: “Can sustain relationships with native speakers without unintentionally amusing or irritating them or requiring them to behave other than they would with a native speaker” (Council of Europe 2001: 122).  It may be argued that such specifications make it difficult to prepare students for real-world international and intercultural communication in a multilingual setting.

 Hi Felicia

In general, once any L2 learner gains a certain level of ability in processing the L2, which inevitably depends upon acquired L2 knowledge and skills, we could define them as having "bootstrapped" their language learning. However, I don't think this is often the perspective taken by L2 and SLA researchers and I have never seen any SLA research framed this way.

I am also very interested in this idea of "bootstrapping" in SLA, but am currently taking it from the perspective of language learning aptitude and language learning aptitude enhancement. The research is early days yet.

If you hear anything, please let me know!

Hi Sara,

I'd also recommend this article:

Lu, Xiaofei (2010), Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Complexity. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15(4), 474–496.

It also evaluates English, but discusses 14 different text based metrics and addresses syntactic complexity in particular, which is ignored by vocabulary based measures. For some of the methods you'll need to parse the data, but at least for Italian that should be possible (not sure about the situation for Slovenian, I think there's a dependency parser for it though).

Hope this helps!

Amir

Communication Matrix focuses early communicative skills and has been used in studies Before. https://www.communicationmatrix.org/

Have you checked fx Solomon-Rice&Soto "Facilitating Vocabulary in Toddlers Using AAC A Preliminary Study Comparing Focused Stimulation and Augmented Input" for inspiration?

Good luck

As an English teacher I can list the following reasons:

1)      learners’ different starting point to learn language, which leads to the next reason

2)      Individual differences – ( e.g. I assume for introverts it’s harder to communicate than for extroverts)

3)      Lack of speaking practice

4)      Lack of reading for pleasure/ lack of input

5)      The complex patterns existing in mother tongues different from English

6)      Lack of learner’s motivation, confidence

In fact that, when we talk about "Mông" in Vietnam, it's presented for Hmong people. In other country, they have another name such as Miáo (Chinese) or Maew (Thai). I'm not sure whether Hmong Do is a subgroup of H'Mong or refer to H'mong. However, if you are know that they are live in Ha Giang, Lao Cai and Bac Ha province, Dong Van and Meo Vae district (which province?), then you can look up on the file I gave you. It presented the H'mong people depend on their location. If you have the trouble with Vietnamese, I can help you sort this data.

It is a reference to dog fighting, which was popular in the United States in the mid 19th century. It is tied to the term "top dog". "Top dog" is the winner and "underdog" the loser or the one beaten down by the "top dog". The use of the terms for people probably dates to the beginning of the 20th century when many social movements were fighting opression. These terms lend themselves to such a context and that is an area I would investigate.

POTENTIAL SOURCES ON CHILD-REARING PRACTICES ACROSS CULTURAL BOUNDARIES

Aghajanian, A. (1979). Economic contribution of children and fertility in rural

Iran: An overview. Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, 3,

21-30.

Aghajanian, A. (1988). The value of children in rural and urban Iran: A pilot

study. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 19, 85-98.

Ahmed, L. (1992). Women and gender in Islam. New Haven: Yale

Bradley, C. (1984). The sexual division of labor and the value of children.

Behavior Science Research, 19, 159-185.

Brown, J. K. (1970). A note on the division of labor. American Anthropologist,

72, 1073-1078.

Buckle, L., Gallup, G. G. Jr., & Rodd, Z. A. (1996). Marriage as a reproductive

Day, R. D. & Mackey, W. C. (1986) Children as resources: A cultural analysis.

Family Perspective, 20, 251-264.

Demos, J. (1986). Past, present, and personal.

Hewlett, B. (ed.) (1992). Father-child relations. NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Lamb, Michael (ed.) (2010) The role of the father in child development 5th edition. Wiley

Many individual ethnographies provide information on a specific culture: To wit:

Men will systematically provision their own children. A cross-cultural universal is that men will gather resources — food is an excellent example — from outside the perimeter of their camp/village and then return to the camp/village and share that resource with particular children (the men’s children) as well as with the men’s wives. The pattern is highly predictable (Hewlett 1992, Hewlett & Lamb 2005, HRAF #22 - #26, 1949; Lamb, 1987; Mackey, 1985, 1986, 1996; cf Stanford & Bunn2001) and occurs across societal structures and across ecologies (Murdock, 1957, 1967) viz. the Yanomamo (Chagnon, 1977), China (Chance, 1984), Tibet (Ekvall, 1968), the Tiwi (Hart & Pilling, 1960), the Dani of New Guinea (Heider, 1979), Eskimos (Chance 1966), Japan (Norbeck, 1976), the Ainu (Ohnuki-Tierney 1974), the Yuqui (Stearman, 1989), Australian aborigines (Tonkinson, 1978), the Dobe !Kung (Lee, 1984). The provisioning is not totally exclusive. Systematic food sharing has been ritualized in many, if not all, societies. Rarely can a hunter claim a large kill for only his own family (Coon, 1971; Lee, 1982, Tonkinson, 1978; Chance, 1966).

Essentially none, I would think. There might be a rare exception where anxiety or severe perseverative behaviors are a barrier to language development and Zoloft would treat that specific symptom, but I don't know anyone that would start Zoloft with the specific goal of accelerating language development.

Dear Jessica, there are many different phonological processes, so you have to be more specific in your question to get help from people in RG. 

I think you would need to do a content analysis with a rubric and multiple coders to achieve good inter-coder reliability.

I use rubrics adapted from the 6+1 Traits model developed by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. Attached is a document with their original model for evaluating writing, and an example of how I adapted their model to oral proficiency.

Can you give a little more description about what you are considering when you say "text/genre based approach?"

Hi Hannane,

Yes you can. Minimal contrasts does not mean minimal syllables. Minimal contrasts in phonology are often referred to as minimal pairs. That is, you have two words that are opposed by just a phonological feature, which could be a toneme or a phoneme. In a tone language like the Yoruba for example, /bo/ on a high tone means to peel, but the same /bo/. on a low tone means to cover. At the same time, /ile/ on Mid/High tones means house', but on the Mid/Low tone it means floor or ground. Also, /pako/ on High/High means plank, but on High/Low it means chewing-stick. It is much like /table/ and /cable/ or /bat/ and /rat/. They are rightly minimal pairs or contrasts. 

Perhaps the "Zhuan Zhu" 转注, from traditional "Liu Shu" 六书, could be used  to understand the structure of these characters. There are not necessary to treat the characters as a combination of phonetic and semantic parts. It's kinda like Zhi Shi指事, making difference by adding a stroke, but in Zhuan Zhu, or in the cases you mentioned, the new created scripts are as well phonetically related to the original ones.  

Hi Anton

I am not sure if this is what you want, but given below are two links to a language-cum-mathematical cipher kaTapayadi system, usable only with Malayalam alphabet and originated in Kerala, India

Narayanan Bhattathiri

On the surface it seems like a relatively simple question. But like most ......it begs more questions.

"Digital literacy" like technology itself can really only be considered in its wider socio-technical context. The term is often conflated with "Computer skills", which was current in the 1980s as the PC appeared on every desk. More recently much of the popular debate surrounding the NC PoS has seen "Digital literacy" as the capacity to use "Office software", often to complete work related tasks.

In my view this narrow and anachronistic psudo-definition has failed to accommodate the emerging complexities of the relationship between the individual - society - digital technologies.

If we examine the emerging nature of the above relationship we find that we need to move beyond the narrow vocationally based notion of "digital literacy" to a broader and more inclusive model of what it means to be a "digitally empowered" individual.

In seeking to consider such a complex socio-technical paradigm I try to use a relatively simple PETS framework. This is useful in that it provides a model of engagement which allows us to disentangle the various aspects of the issue - but!! we also have to be aware that the "boxes" of the framework don't entirely do justice to the inextricably entwined nature of the soci-technical realities of our real engagement with technologies.

Four PETS headings are:

Political - e.g. How do digital technologies impact on our political engagement e.g. discursive democracy and the issue of Jurgan Habermass's 'public sphere'.

Economic - e.g. How do digital technologies impact on our relationship with the economic world e.g. the formation of 'human capital' through technology supported education.

Technological - e.g. What is the "nature" of this particular technology in terms of it's capacity to feedback into itself e.g. AI .... which suggests that our "digital literacy" has a moral and ethical dimension.

Social - e.g. How do digital technologies support the formation and realisation of social capital......or we might even conjecture that Castells notion of a "network society" points in the direction of a new sub-divide of "network capital".

So - "digital literacy" can really only be dealt with in a wider socio-economic-political context where our question in relation to the school curriculum is "What is it in this 'digital world' that we need our citizens to know, understand and be able to do? 

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Marek, 

It strikes me, somewhat paradoxically, that idiomatic language is a regular element of any language--the peculiarity being that it is not compositionally regular. So, if in teaching language or the language of some particular field, the idioms are not taught then something important has been left out. This is particularly important in English, I believe. Part of the reason is that the use of language involved in establishing greater intimacy or distance between people in conversation or discussion depends on the frequency of more formal and less formal elements. Often, the less formal elements have greater frequency and carry greater emotional force, while more or less the same thing can be said using more formal language --say Latinate or Greek borrowings--though the point will be less emotionally charged and, apparently, more abstract. Languages which involve an opposition of intimate vs. formal terms of address (as with "tu" vs. "Vous," say) can better afford to be more compositionally regular.

Lacking English idioms, I suspect, the learner will be more regularly "left in the lurch," though there be, as we tend to think, literally no "lurch" about --in which the learner may be left. I'd suggest an analogy. Not knowing the idioms of a language is somewhat like knowing all the regular verbs but none of the irregular verbs. Still, one might get along of a time fairly well in that manner. 

H.G. Callaway

Hi,

Of course there are many theories relating to child language acquisition. However, your question is not sufficiently clear. can you really demarcate acquisition processes for a child between school and non-school at that age? Also, I fail to see why you would think that general language acquisition theories might not be useful here. I do not think the setting matters. Rather, it is the process. Starting from Chomsky's general language acquisition theory through his (LAD), to more sociologically inclined theories of recent years, I am sure you will find something worth looking at. I attach twoi links to resources focusing on child language acquisition specifically. You might find them useful

Cogeco (2002) `Theories of Child Language Acquisition` Internet access @: http://home.cogeco.ca/~monicafitz/theories.htm

Cogeco (2002) `Stages in child acquisition` internet access @:   http://home.cogeco.ca/~monicafitz/theories.htm

See

Strasser, K., & Lissi, M. R. (2009). Home and instruction effects on emergent liter- acy in a simple of Chilean kindergarten children. Scientific Studies of Reading, 13(2), 175-204. doi: 10.1080/ 10888430902769509

The critical period is still a point of debate in language acquisition. According to period, the first few years of life is the crucial time in which an individual can acquire a first language if presented with adequate stimuli. Otherwise, further language acquisition becomes much more difficult. However, research shows early childhood is marked by critical periods — times when the brain is intensely adaptable to new sights, sounds, tastes, and touches. The brain might undergo changes that could everlastingly adjust future functionality.

The use of IWB (Interactive white board) in the classroom is gaining overwhelming popularity in the era of  technology cult.  More and more academic institution are integrating smart board technology despite the fact it is expensive.  Research shows that bringing IWB into the classroom means to connect the learners with the whole world, particularly when internet is used to have an access to the online knowledge and information.  As for English language teaching and learning, IWB function as a catalyst to enhance communicative skill.  Listening, speaking and reading skills are marvelously augmented. Writing at lower level , particularly for small children is also aided by the use of IWBs.  But at higher level, writing skill, is a different phenomenon.  I have also explored research data on the net and I have found very few paper regarding the effectiveness of IWBs for writing skills. So this area needs to be explored and that is why I have put forth this question.

I think Russel Kaschula has a Sarchi research chair on this issue.  You should give him a tinkle.  Also, Kristina Riedel teaches Swahili at Urbana-Champaigne and may be able to give you some pointers: she's very knowledgeable.

Mark

Dear Kaylah;

I'm not familiar with any past McGurk study that was exhaustive in exactly that way. But I  wanted to pass on that, given your interests you might like to check out Norm Erber's work - maybe it can satisfy some of your needs;

Erber, N. (1972). Auditory, visual, and auditory-visual recognition of consonants by children with normal and impaired hearing, JSHR, 15, 413-422. 

Erber presented the consonants /p,t,k,b,d,g,m,n/ under A, V, and AV conditions, to children with varying degrees of hearing loss. The paper includes confusion matrices for all of the stimulus - response pairs.

Hack, Z., and Erber, N. (1982). Auditory, visual, and auditory-visual perception of vowels by hearing-impaired children. JSHR, 25, 100-107. 

Hack & Erber presented 10 AE vowels under A, V, and AV conditions, to children with varying degrees of word recognition skills. The paper also includes confusion matrices for all of the stimulus-response pairs. 

I realize that these were not McGurk studies, per se, but thought that they might be interesting to you given the question you posted. Along the same lines, I wonder if you would like Lynne Bernstein's work. If you find a paper that is a McGurk study of all AE consonant pairs please let me know!

Best regards,

Carrie

Stephanie,

Unfortunately we cannot avoid ideology. If I say for example Gutten tag or hola, or Shalom I am actually giving information about my social status ( accent ) my character ( am I social or anti social for example) and even my gender. The point is that homo sapiens , in general, are ideological by nature.  Actually, the great semiotician  Jacob von Uexkull makes a nice differentiation between the animal world which he calls Umwelt  wherein  the interpretation of objects is either  desirable (+), undesirable (–), or “safe to ignore” (0). And what he call the lebenswelt whereby humans add this subjective/cognitive  side to the environment around them. In other words, ideology makes us human and language ( in the sense of being dually patterned , creative and pragmatically oriented) is the very essence of our humanity.

Trying to find an apolitical way for language promotion is political in itself.

The best way, to my mind, to ensure the highest level of objectivity is in eclecticism. The more the educational plan is open to all competing theories the more it is likely to be close to the impossible ideal of neutrality.

I feel that most courses, masters, etc., related to second/foreign language teaching are centered in Grammar (not a bad thing) and classic teaching skills (e.g. how to apply the communicative approach). However, in an autonomous approach the teacher needs to be a coach too to encourage the students and know how and when take an active role and when the teacher needs to wait and let the P2P work so that it builds strong dynamics in the classroom.

I myself don't really like how coaching is "sold", but it's the way to understand and learn the skills needed in a more free and autonomous learning environment. Maybe we need a more serious approach to coaching (or I am the one who needs to learn who is a quack and who is a professional -I admit that) and integrate this discipline in teacher training courses to develop the required skills.

I think that it's -and will be- important not only in classic (physical) classes, but also in online courses, MOOCs, etc., where the students are not only autonomous but mostly alone and independent or without the positive & direct feedback of a teacher and their colleagues. In this kind of teaching it's even more important to build dynamics between students and to know when to take an active role without breaking those dynamics but also not letting students get too loose or let an error spread between them.

Archer, D., Aijmer, K., and Wichmann, A. (2012). Pragmatics: An Advanced Resource Book for Students. London and New York: Routledge would be a recent and a good source of info

This has been a focus of linguists and biologists since systematic study of language and organisms began in the 19th Century.

It is difficult to conceive of a process of language change that is has not been considered in relationship to biological change, from language (or language family) to species (or genus) down to phonemes to codons.

This difficulty is apparent in the very nature of the discussion. The proposition that diverse languages were related to each other by a formerly existing language came as early as the late 16th century, when Europeans in India noticed resemblances among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. From the beginning, this was conceived of using biological terminology: the languages were part of a family, with parent languages giving birth to child languages through the same basic processes that would later become processes by which speciation was believed to occur. Primarily, geographical barriers to continued communication, linguistic or sexual, especially founder effects in previously uncolonized areas; and the development and/or exploitation of niches within a geographical area with no practical physical barriers to continued interchange of words or genes.

In addition to the language used, the graphical representations were very similar. Tree diagrams with an arrow representing time from trunk to branches to stems and leaves. Which of course were correspondent to family records of ancestry and inheritance. And, in turn, the oldest of these family records of ancestry and inheritance themselves provided the data regarding how the language used to record them and the names used within the population changed over time.

This was not unnoticed by scholars. Early linguistics innovators Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm devoted attention to the relationships. Early biology innovators such as Charles Darwin did the same from their side of the tree of knowledge.

Iceland is the ultimate example. There were nearly no inhabitants prior to the Norse colonization in the 10th century, and those who were there were Irish monks not prone to breeding. This resulted in a double founder effect.

The colonizers of Iceland were literate, and their naming system was directly dependent on ancestry - a child was given a personal name and a patronym, there were no family names as in many other cultures. Thus, our most famous living Icelander is named Björk Guðmundsdóttir. Her father, a prominent politician and author of textbooks on electrical engineering, is named Guðmundur Gunnarsson, whose father was named Gunnar Guðmundsson. This requires careful record keeping.

Iceland was also a very poor place in economic terms until the 20th century, with almost no immigration and a low population. This has resulted in having detailed records of the ancestry of nearly everyone who ever lived in Iceland, and texts recording this history that exemplify the changes in the language over the past 1000 years.

The questions that remain unanswered are the extent to which apparent similarity in structure, whether the language used to discuss two things, to graphically represent two things, or to mathematically represent two things, indicate that the phenomenon underlying these observations and representations by humans are in physical reality similar in such ways, or if they are a complex system of metaphor and analogy.

Note that no one really knows what "physical reality", "metaphor", or "analogy" refer to in such a way that they have successfully convinced other highly relevant parties that they that are correct.

So you have your relatively accepted analogies, such as comparisons of models of genetic drift to phoneme change in the form of glottochronology being used to date the divergence of two language populations in the same manner as changes in codons in areas of genetic material believed to be not under evolutionary selective pressure are used to date the divergence of biological populations.

You also have comparative analyses of islands as nature's experimental laboratories to study both language and genetic divergence (as well as use of mountains and rivers as similar barriers to exchange of information).

And there are serious investigations of historical records of language over time being calibrated with known or inferred population changes and movements. One prominent theory connects the spread of Indo-European languages from Anatolia into Europe and through western Asia into India with the spread of agriculture. On the other hand, another theory links the spread of Indo-European languages from the area north of the Black Sea in connection with the domestication of horses, which creates a huge change in military matters whenever cavalry are introduced to areas where no domesticated horses exist.

Note that both of these theories link the divergence of the Indo-European languages with changes in biological species, that of domestication. And it was analysis of the process of domestication that was one of the major sources of inspiration and argumentation for the theory of biological evolution.

A major question for the past several decades has been whether there is, in humans at least, another form of inheritance analogous in critical ways (i.e., a meaningful unit of information that can be replicated with less than perfect accuracy that is under selective pressure that impacts the likelihood of survival) that functions on a linguistic or cultural level. Also of major concern is whether this "second replicator" can act in ways that have a negative effect on likelihood of genetic replication and transmission.

Lucca Cavalli-Sforza, Robert Boyd, and Peter Richerson are prominent among those who provide more robust methods of investigation and evidentiary standards to support their theories that there is such a second replicator. There are others as well.

They tend to be trained in genetic and/or evolutionary biology or anthropology rather than linguistics or the life science areas that directly and traditionally focus on the brain, its contents, and the impact of those contents on behavior (the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences). Linguists and brain/behavior researchers are generally more skeptical of this process of analogy.

There is also a large population of academics and enthusiasts who more or less assume that this second replicator exists and engage in speculation about what that means for various aspects of human culture and thought.

So there is about 200 years of studies of various aspects of the relationship between language change and biological change, including much research on the language-species level of comparison.

Thank you for your answer. I will look into the relevant litterture you are suggesting and see if I can ger closer to the answer of my question.

This is why the DSM IV criteria for Asperger's Disorder were problematic: They were exactly the same as the criteria for Autism, minus the language impairment section (and disallowing any cognitive disability). Even people who don't like the blending of Asperger's into the DSM-5 diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis know that there are differences in the social use of language in Asperger's.

Differences and difficulties include: pragmatics such as how to enter a conversation and have it go back and forth and repair misunderstandings; difficulty integrating verbal and nonverbal strands of information during a conversation (and over time, developing general difficulty with nonverbals such as body language, tone differences that indicate sarcasm, and facial expressions), There are more differences, in each of the categories of social, expressive, and receptive language. Look to some of the literature on Autism, because some of the information you seek might not necessary carry the label of "Asperger's" but instead might be in research for "high-functioning autism" because language issues by definition preclude some researchers who were using the DSM IV, from applying the Asperger's label to their research subjects. That has of course changed with the publication of the DSM-5

I am concerned that your research might be sticking with DSM IV-TR thinking and information, so I'll make sure you consider: Because there is the new diagnosis of Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder, if we are talking about someone with Asperger's/Autism Spectrum Disorder, we should make sure we are talking about someone who also has the second category of symptoms, the restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviors (which now includes sensory issues missing from the DSM IV). In the latter case, you're more likely to have the Theory of Mind and central coherence features, due to different brains or different preferences, diverted many kids in the Asperger's region of the autism spectrum from following the neurotypical path of development in the use of language.