fossilization (summary)

by  Rebecca Scudder            Language fossilization refers to the process in the learning of a secondary language in which the student has more and more difficulty furthering their fluency in the language, until eventually, the student can learn no more. The language, for all intents and purposes, has been set in stone in the mind of the learner at this last point. Some potential for learning small superficial aspects of the language might still exist, such as vocabulary, but conceptual understanding of the material will not develop any further. Fossilization, thus, is a sort of stagnation in secondary language acquisition that cannot be overcome.

Why Does Fossilization Happen?

There's no real rule determining when certain users may begin to fossilize. It varies widely by the individual and by the environment in which the language is learned.

Fossilization most often occurs in an inadequate learning environment. This usually means learning a language in a classroom, as opposed to learning it in the country where it is natively spoken. Many aspects of a language simply cannot be taught in a classroom, where one generally learns a highly academic version of the tongue, as opposed to the colloquial language.

However, fossilization can still occur despite complete immersion in a foreign language environment for decades, a well documented phenomenon amongst, for example, immigrants. Clearly, this is not the only issue at stake.

Fossilization often means that certain aspects of the language were learned incompletely or incorrectly, such as grammatical features like conjugating verbs in the wrong fashion or using the wrong vocabulary, in such a manner that they cannot be unlearned and replaced with correct usage.

Fossilization may also consist of a sort of subconscious clinging to aspects of the learner's mother tongue, for instance, with syntax and phonology. This may reflect an inability to similarly “unlearn” characteristics of a mother language for the purpose of learning another; the native language so deeply hardwired into the brain that its paradigms cannot be replaced when attempting to learn a new and foreign language.

Critical Period Hypothesis

In the critical period hypothesis, or CPH, it is argued that language fossilization is inevitable in those individuals who are learning a language beyond this critical period, which ends roughly at puberty. CPH as generally accepted allows for virtually unlimited learning of superficial elements of a language such as grammar and vocabulary, but fossilization will still occur when it comes to the more intuitive aspects of a language, such as cadence, pronunciation and idiom.

However, language fossilization has been noted to varying degrees amongst those still well within the critical period in certain individuals. A minority of individuals, yes, but it proves that those within the CPH are not universally invulnerable to the effect.

The Risk of Fossilization

Fossilization is, again, not well understood, and therefore your risk to develop fossilization is also not understood. The current understanding is that those who are learning the language within a native environment are less likely to fossilize, and at a minimum have a higher threshold at which they fossilize. Learning a language at a younger age, following the CPH, also seems to reduce the risk of fossilization. Still, the debate goes on amongst psycholinguists: keep an eye out for further developments!

Read more: http://www.brighthub.com/education/languages/articles/63102.aspx#ixzz1FB3VGros

Summary

Fossilization is a problem in which a language learner gets stuck with some structures and it is difficult for them to get further. There is not a specific rule that says why this happen, however what seems to be one of the causes is learning English in an inadequate environment, like a classroom, where this problem is bigger. However, it can also occur when the learner is immerse in a foreign language environment. Fossilization means that some aspects of the language were learned incompletely or incorrectly, and the people keep repeating those wrong phrases, although they know they are incorrect. There is another theory that says that fossilization can happen when a person is stick to his/her mother tongue, and it gets difficult to “unlearn”, so that person can’t avoid using the same  structures all the time. It is argued that language fossilization is inevitable in individuals who are learning the language beyond the critical period which ends at puberty, but it does not mean that people under that age can not suffer this problem. (175 words)

Summaries

Session 3

Schenker in her article says that in the future, houses will be networked making people’s life easy and comfortable. The electronic devices will be connected to internet and will have special chips to control different activities like housework, communications, shopping bills or people’s social life. The disadvantages of having a networked home do not seem to be significant. People will have to pay some extra dollars for the chips, the connection to internet and the security measures to protect the system against cyber pirating. People will not afford the maintenance because the services will repair themselves. The author concludes that the money will not mean much considering all the benefits of having a smart house.

Session 4

This study went through over 1,600 marginal and end comments written on 110 first drafts of essays by 47 ESL students considering both the pragmatic and the linguistic features of each comment. Drafts of each individual essay were examine to observe the influence of the first draft commentary on the students’ revisions and assess whether the changes that were made in response to the teacher‘s feedback improved the essays. The author thinks that a proportion of the comment led to student revision, and that there were types of commentary more helpful than others. The results are suggestive of several implications for L2 writing instruction and for the future studies on a vital but neglected topic.

How to write an abstract?

To write an abstract is a complex process, because in an abstract the information should be reduced but this should remain complete, given that it is going to be use to entice people to read the whole paper. In order to create a good abstract the writer must follow a checklist consisting in motivation, problem statement, approach, results, and conclusions. Following this checklist, the writer can get the attention of his/her audience.

An abstract must include these sections.

Motivation, in here the writer must explain how important the topic and the problem are. It must include the importance off the work and how difficult it can be; Problem statement, this section deals with the explanation of the problem and why it was selected; Approach, in the approach section of an abstract the writer say what were the strategies he/she used in order to solve the problem; Results, they should be specific, and the writer must avoid words like “very” “almost”, because these words are considered vague; Conclusions, The final part, how the results of the investigation affect the real life.

Other points to consider are that the abstract must contain a word limit of 150 and 200 words and  key words in order to help the reader to look for your work.

To watch the whole text, check the website

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/essays/abstract.html

Imagination

The first word that comes to my mind when I see these clouds is "imagination". Because when you look at the sky, most of the time,  you don't see more than blue and clouds, but with imagination the view can be something else (it can be a dolphing, a house, or maybe a monster ). Asking a kid what they can see just by watching at the sky is really relaxing, and sometimes funny. I remember that my sister used to make up really funny stories using the clouds as reference, it was really nice to hear them, and I used to laugh a lot with them.

Now that she is older she might be still thinking about those stories, but she keeps them to herself, as we all do when we look at the sky. I'm pretty sure that each one of us has a different perspective of it.