Second Language Essay, Research Paper

There is no best way to master a second language in a day but there is an effective way to acquire it. That is the reason why a teacher’s role is so important, especially for the second language learners. There are many theories and hypotheses experimented and claimed by many scholars, but among many, there is no doubt that the best learning condition for students is to provide the massive comprehensible input and the low affective filter. However, output can be considered more important for learners to stretch their interlanguage ability. In addition, it stimulates learners to move from semantic processing to syntactic processing, so that they can notice what they do not know. In this way, learners can generate new linguistic knowledge or consolidate their existing knowledge. Therefore, this paper is going to mainly identify these two big theories, Input(roughly tuned input and caretaker speech) and output(noticing), and explain why and how these theories are instantiated.

My unit theme is language. Even though massive input will be provided for four days lesson, which are Esperanto, The early history of the English language, Middle and modern English and Examining sources of English vocabulary, all lessons are logically connected each other, so students wouldn’t get lost but would remain comprehensible. Furthermore, students could build up their competence gradually by comprehending input in addition to their performance throughout practice of the input in given activities. In order to make input more comprehensible, visual aids, caretaker speech, questioning and answering, summarizing were mainly used as a teacher’s technique in the lesson. Showing the students a picture about the origins of the English language in warm-up stage and giving them the questions about the text on the board in presentation stage to give them some hints about the text before reading it could allow students to predict what the text would be like and then to read the text three times by themselves by means of reading skills, skimming, scanning and the last reading for getting familiar with language function mainly used in the text, the passive voice and comparison without specific explanation about them, which are more likely to be the roughly tuned input that casts a net to make students understood and connect their understanding to the next stage, that is, the students are able to focus on comprehension rather than the form or structures of it throughout these readings and to be ready to deal with new coming content by understanding given input containing i+1. Next, reading together with a teacher with a variety of reading skills such as summarizing, inferring, previewing, Q&A and techniques to identify students’ understanding would make input more comprehensible. In addition, caretaker speech was mostly used during the lesson. It is especially shown in the methods mentioned above preparing the students to comprehend the text in warm-up and presentation stage.

In order to make the students’ interlanguage stretched, the teacher designed the post activities to notice the gap between their interlanguage and communication goals that achieve language functions, passive voice and comparison mainly used in the text by talking each other in groups about the history of Korean focusing on who, when, how, why it was created and the differences between English and Korean focusing on how they make you feel. In this activities, the students surely notice problems as they speak, which can make them aware of something they need to do to solve the problems. After talking each other about the given topics, the teacher made them write at least two sentences using passive form and comparison as much as possible to give them a chance to consolidate their knowledge gained from the first stage of activities, talking each other about the given topics. In this way, students moved from semantic processing in which the students read the text three times to comprehend as well as to get familiar with the structures mainly used in the text to syntactic processing by speaking and writing.

These two big theories, Input and Output, seems to be very different but the result of them for learners are pretty much the same to make leaners internalize or develop their competence. Considering these theories pretty well as teachers, making learners acquire a second language will be a lot more effective.