Why Do We Talk?
Well, we already know why, don’t we? But just to make sure, an MIT professor called Deb Roy made
his baby son a study of irst language acquisition in the Human Speechome Project5 and it is amazing to watch him acquire language in huge detail, but for me the most important conclusion of the programme
comes towards the end.
he inal conclusion is that language is a social, real world inspired phenomenon in humans and this
is just what we at English Out here have believed all along and it is what our courses are based upon.
Below is the professor’s TED talk: Deb Roy: he Birth Of A Word 6
Watch a Youtube trailer for a programme about the MIT professor’s study here:
You might be able to ind the entire BBC programme on an international network’s video on demand
service, just search on ‘Why Do We Talk, Horizon BBC ’.
How We All Learn to Speak
A new view of language acquisition7 talks about how infants acquire language and how early learning is
achieved in a purely social context. he evidence suggests social learning shapes the neural framework of
the brain for language and communication. Using brain imaging bilingual babies oten show up activity
in two overlapping areas, one for each language. I saw mentions of ‘social interaction’, ‘mapping’ and
‘multiple listenings’ in infants and then second language acquisition was mentioned towards the end.
Another paper by Dr. Kuhl and Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola, Neural Substrates of Language Acquisition8
contains a whole section on ‘social learning’. At the end of ‘Neural substrates…’ Dr. Kuhl asks this question:
“Why are adults, with their superior cognitive skills, unable to learn as well as young infants?
Can techniques be developed to help adults learn a second language?”
Dr. Kuhl’s experiment with infants, helping them to acquire Mandarin, is very similar in execution (as
it is described by her) to what we do using our English Out here materials with adult English learners.
Well, we already know why, don’t we? But just to make sure, an MIT professor called Deb Roy made
his baby son a study of irst language acquisition in the Human Speechome Project5 and it is amazing to watch him acquire language in huge detail, but for me the most important conclusion of the programme
comes towards the end.
he inal conclusion is that language is a social, real world inspired phenomenon in humans and this
is just what we at English Out here have believed all along and it is what our courses are based upon.
Below is the professor’s TED talk: Deb Roy: he Birth Of A Word 6
Watch a Youtube trailer for a programme about the MIT professor’s study here:
You might be able to ind the entire BBC programme on an international network’s video on demand
service, just search on ‘Why Do We Talk, Horizon BBC ’.
How We All Learn to Speak
A new view of language acquisition7 talks about how infants acquire language and how early learning is
achieved in a purely social context. he evidence suggests social learning shapes the neural framework of
the brain for language and communication. Using brain imaging bilingual babies oten show up activity
in two overlapping areas, one for each language. I saw mentions of ‘social interaction’, ‘mapping’ and
‘multiple listenings’ in infants and then second language acquisition was mentioned towards the end.
Another paper by Dr. Kuhl and Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola, Neural Substrates of Language Acquisition8
contains a whole section on ‘social learning’. At the end of ‘Neural substrates…’ Dr. Kuhl asks this question:
“Why are adults, with their superior cognitive skills, unable to learn as well as young infants?
Can techniques be developed to help adults learn a second language?”
Dr. Kuhl’s experiment with infants, helping them to acquire Mandarin, is very similar in execution (as
it is described by her) to what we do using our English Out here materials with adult English learners.
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