"Child acquisition of a specific language involves a process of selecting from among the limited parametric options in UG those that match the settings which are encountered in linguistic input."
I think this statement rings true when many children are learning a different language. Growing up, I mostly speak Korean because my parents were born in Korea and only moved to the United States a few years before I was born. It was not until my dad began reading to me, making me read to him and giving me spelling tests that I truly began to understand the difficulty of learning English.
In Korean, there is no "th" sound; everything becomes an "s." For example, the word "something" would become "someSing." This was one of the more difficult sounds that I had to learn when I was learning English. Today as a fluent English speaker, I find it interesting that because my mom and my dad were born in Korea and mainly speak Korean, that they still pronounce the "th" sound as an "s." It is definitely true that it is easier to learn another language as a child than it is to learn as an adult.
I find it interesting, and I'm guilty of it myself, that pronunciation is the main focus for analyzing students and looking at language. Unfortunately in a teaching situation, most pronunciation lessons will turn out much like this one.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ZoHhvQgjU
However uttered, I believe there is some benefit to making student aware of the "teacher talk" and the standard variety of English and leave them up to motivation to correct their own errors (if they even need to be corrected). Error correction is a thin red line that we will have to walk with our students as we take into consideration their maturity and motivation levels as a result of too much error correction.