Language Learning Acquisition Personal Experience

Language learning acquisition personal experience

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Thomas Carlyle once said “Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak”. Learning a new language is not easy. Most of the people need to spend a lot of time before becoming proficient in a second language. During this time many studies have been carried out in order to try to find a method that can ease the process of learning foreign languages. However, no conclusive conclusion has been reached yet.

The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis formulated by Robert Lados states that people transfer the information from their native language to a second language, making mistakes (Lightbown & Spada, 2013, p.42).. I still remember my first contact with English Language. My first word was “one”. I did not know that in contrast with Spanish Language the words were pronounced different as they were written. I was made a crossword and the question was “uno en ingles”, immediately I asked to my sister the answer and she said “one”, of course I wrote “wan” because if I want to write down “guan” the word was too long. So, when I finished my crossword, I realized that I made a mistake, “wan” should be written “one”. In this way, my first contact was a mistake but it also was my first lesson. I stand behind this theory because most of the mistakes were a result of transferring my native language to English language.

Research by R. Gardner says that it is not easy to determine if motivation in a second language learning is an important factor to be successful, but many researchers have found that teachers can influence students in order to make them feel interested in learning a second language (Lightbown & Spada, 2013, pp.87-88). In my personal experience, I can say that my high school English teachers did not have a real influence in my objective to learn English language because all of them were really boring and they were not proficient users of the English language. They only came to classes and the only activity my classmates and I did during their lessons, was the translation of paragraphs. Perhaps, what really motivated me was music in English. During my adolescence, I listened to a lot of English Rock Classic songs which are my favorite type of music. I assume that my stimulus was integrative motivation because I decided to learn English language for cultural enrichment and personal growth.

According to the Innatist perspective, developed by Chomsky, it is important to have contact with a language as young as you can in order to have a better proficiency in your target language. Furthermore, others researches have shown that adults also can acquire an excellent knowledge of a second language (Lightbown & Spada, 2013, p.92).