Second language Acquisition process

This blog entrance is a homework in our Language Fundations class about how we, second language learners, have acquired our second language. To analyze our own process and make a comparison using the theories we saw in classroom.

I do not recall my first memory. I do recall my mother’s voice. She spoke all the time, unstoppable and without any restriction. My father was a very quiet man. I am the last of five siblings, but they did not share a lot of time with me, even my sister, with whom I am from four years apart in age, I do not remember spending time with her during my first years.

My mother liked to read, I remember her laughing when she was reading “Don Quixote”, her vocabulary was old fashion; she was born in 1933. Sometimes comes to my memory, some of the words she used to say, because I have never heard them again. When somebody was low life and poor educated or rude, she used the word “tipejo” or “ordinario” or even worse, “mequetrefe”. She really had something against uneducated people.

I am not saying that she was the kind of mother that read to her children or that spent many hours teaching me words. No, it was nothing at all. I use to say that I grow as a wild flower, without many restrictions; I am very sure that she did not say to me the word “No”, as we, mothers say to our children to protect or to warn them. I think that, was a very positive influence, because I never felt a restrain in doing things, or feel fear to do things, and I am certain that comes from not hearing No, thousands times in my childhood.

In other hand, my son Enrique, his first word was: No!, because he was very restless all the time.

My vocabulary was very limited when I got into elementary school, and I flunked the first year. I now understand I did not have enough cognitive development to be in a school. I did over the first year and from that year, I have always been an outstanding student in every class I have been. I did not understand what was flunking, but I suppose it was shame in it, because I remember swearing myself that I would not flunk ever again

I cannot tell at what age I got this learning: I started to notice how I learned and started analyzing about it, for example: what helped me to memorize and that was very effective to connect a new learning with an old learning. Now, I know that this is metacognition. I have applied it since my childhood. 20 years later, I learned this was called scaffolding in learning

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When I was like 8 years old, my father contracted cable T.V. system at home, so I started watching American T.V. all day long, I arrived at home at 12:30 p.m. from school, and for 11 hours I spent my days watching all kind of series, cartoons, musicals, and movies. Suddenly I was immerse in this new language and I loved it. I repeated the words and the expressions in order to imitate them.

My sister had an English-Spanish dictionary because she was in her first English class in her secondary school, (I must have been 9 years old), and I started learning English by myself, learning the words and pronunciation. I was highly motivated, I just loved to master them. I did not have any contact with the language, just T.V. and that dictionary.

I have this theory: that little Webster dictionary had aside in every word the advised pronunciation and I repeated them over and over, without knowing if it was okay, but now, even today, I swear that pronunciation still emerges in me, when I speak.

By 10, I have read all the few books in my house, and my father bought me two encyclopedias, one that was for children and about all kind of information, I read it to the last word, the second was a 24 dictionary encyclopedia volumes I used to read and research for facts. (Of course I still have it!)

Then at 13, I started attending English classes like most Mexicans do in public schools, 3 years in Secondary and 2 years in High School. It was easy for me, and I tried to learn all the grammar tenses I could. When I finished my degree as a Public Accountant I started English classes, luckily for me in the language school, they still used the drilling and imitation approach, so I answered hundreds of worksheets.

Since then 1992, I have not stopped learning English since that time. In 2014, I took 13 different MOOCs in edx.org, about writing skills, business English, poetry and different ones.

I am trying to figure out about the theories we saw in Language foundation classes, when we read about the 2 years period when children can organize their first language, when I started my second language acquisition I was 9 or 10, but as Asher ( 1977) and Krasen (1982) implied in the Input theory, I acquired language at that time, because of the huge amount of input I received daily, and I also was not forced to speak, because I did not have any social interaction with native speakers and I did not need the language to communicate to others, but I was extremely motivated just by my own need of learning.

What it has to be pertinent in my experience, it is from Pettito’s research (2003) about children being exposed to more than a language, they produce more neuronal paths, it seems to me now, that when I started acquiring my second language, I also started developing metacognitive skills about how I learned and how to relate and connect new learnings, words and facts.

Far away is the time when it was said that being bilingual was adverse in education, now studies have found people who speaks several languages have more neuronal paths and their brain connects more information and in a faster speed.

I just know that I love to use words in other language and I would love to speak more than the two I do.