1、Reading ReportEllen TCSL 09 After reading this book-The Bilingual Edge (I call it Book1), I find thats a real useful book for parents. Although, I dont have any child, I hope my one-year-old nephew will be a bilingual. Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 in this book draw my attention mostly. In chapter 5, it i
2、ntroduces the influence of individual differences like birth order, gender, personality, aptitude, and learning style. The book named Understanding Second Language Acquisition (I call it Book2) also provides some details about individual learner differences.First, as we all know, nowadays, most fami
3、ly have only child, so we dont need to concern about the birth order. How about the gender? There are also interesting languages and learning differences between girls and boys that parents need to understand. Generally speaking, girls grow up more quickly in general; therefore the differences might
4、 be due to the fact that girls mature more quickly than boys do in general. Second, the aptitude seems to be the important factor in SLA. In Book1, it descried aptitude as a fuzzy concept, while the Book2 cite Carroll and Sapons idea to identify three major components of aptitude: (1) phonetic codin
5、g ability (2) grammatical sensitivity (3) inductive ability. It seems that aptitude is something we born with and influence the rate of SLA development, however, there is no evidence to suggest that aptitudes has any effect on the route. Also, we always say “practice makes perfect”, even if the apti
6、tude is limited.Third, we are going to talk about the age. Both of these two books agree that age does not alter the route of SLA but strongly influenced the rate. There is a commonsense that “the younger the better”, and younger learners do better in success in pronunciation, because the longer be
7、exposure to the L2, the more native-like L2 proficiency becomes. Even when it comes to morphology and syntax, the older are better. In my opinion, I hope my nephew can do well in communication in stead of examination. Its good for him to be exposed to the L2. I believe both number of years of exposu
8、re and starting age affect the level of success.Whats more? In order to help my nephew, its necessary to know how we can best promote language learning at home. Children learn language through daily contacts, emotional bonds, and everyday interactions with their caregivers. Language learning happens
9、 all the time. “As Hatch(1978c: 404) puts it: One learns how to do conversations, one learns how to interact verbally, and out of this interaction, syntactic structures develop.” He suggests that the interaction and helps a lot. However, theres no big surprise here-childrens own language development
10、 is closely linked to their parents language, as a majority language family, my sister and her husband are not worry about teaching Chinese, and they are trying to introduce their son, my nephew, to English. From Book1, I think they shouldnt worry too much about speaking the language absolutely perf
11、ectly or with a non-native-like accent, because language learners can benefit greatly from interaction in the second language even if its not coming from the mouth of a native speaker of that language. I still remember we have a discussion about foreigner talk. There is a conclusion that “children n
12、on-native speakers receive a simpler input in a more supportive atmosphere”. Maybe I can say while there is a interaction there is a input. Therefore, for majority language families, use of second language can begin in the first months of infancy. Young babies love the sound of human voice, so mothe
13、rs or fathers can sing the same nursery song in the same second language over and over. Additionally, patents can read simple board books with their children in that language. These books can be read over and over. Young babies can learn basic vocabulary in this way, become familiar with different s
14、tyle of language.From these two books, I am not worry about my nephews learning of L2. I have downloaded many English nursery rhymes, and pursued my sister to playing even to learning to sing those songs before her son sleep everyday. Meanwhile, I decide to buy some books with magnetic tape thats easy to read as a present for my nephew, I believe it will help a lot.
