UNIT 10. EXPOSURE AND FOCUS ON FORM

UNIT 10

EXPOSURE AND FOCUS ON FORM

This unit is very important and useful for those people who want to understand how differently a language can be learn. According to the book it says that some authors believe that the most accurate and efficient way of learning a second language is by exposure, it means for example through experiencing it as when children we pick up our first or also called mother language but on the other hand there is the focus on form, this has the main focus on the form, as the name says, of the language being learnt, but the key factor in this part whether a person is exposure to the language or focusing on its form is important that to learn a language it requires to use it to interact with others.

In my case, when I was a child I start by acquiring English instead of learning it by focusing on the form, because I remember I was 6 when my American cousins came to live with us, so they did not know Spanish therefore they always talked in English and I was exposed to it every time and I unconsciously was working out the meaning after have had the silent period, which took me no more than one month because even though we, my cousins and I, knew different languages we build a pidgin in order to interact with each other. That experience I had was the start of my professional life because since there on I start loving English, so then I decided to study English in order to become a teacher so then I start by focusing on the form of the language when I learn the structures of the different tenses, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, word order, affixes, spelling and all formal features.

By applying this knowledge in a real teaching situation, the teacher must be aware of what the students interest are, because personally speaking I do not consider that children can have exposure only interacting in a natural environment out of a classroom and with the help of nobody, actually what I will be doing when teaching to my students is, firstly  children from 4 to 8 just expose them to language through videos, movies of their preferences and little by little motivate them to talk with their classmates with the things they have learnt through those videos or movies. And with younger students, those who probably were already exposure to the language, I will make them focus on form but in an implicit way and then they will notice the forms by their own experience with the target language.

Useful Extra Material:

1. Savignon, S. (1991). Communicative language teaching: State of the art. TESOL Quarterly, 25(2), 261–277.
2. Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: mediating acquisition through collaborative dialogue. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 97–114). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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4. Williams, J., & Evans, J. (1998). What kind of focus and on which forms? In C. Doughty, & J. Williams (Eds.), Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (pp. 139–155). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.