《英语教学法》Language and Language Learning.doc

Language and Language Learning Before talking about language teaching, an understanding of the nature of language is of primary importance, since language teachers clearly need to know generally what sort of entity they are dealing with (and how the particular language they are teaching fits into that entity (Brown, 1994a)). Therefore, the first question we are going to talk about is “what is language?” Ask Ss “what is language?” Present the definition which is accepted by most people:? Language is a system of arbitrary verbal symbols used for human communication. (Wardhaugh, 1972:3) Since it is not easy for linguists to give a concise and authoritative definition of language, people settle down to talk about Views of language. In the past century, language teaching and learning practice has been influenced by three different views of language, namely, the structural view, the functional view and interactional view: textbook,P3. When people talk about language learning, they usually consider the two aspects, one is the psycholinguistic and cognitive processes involved in language learning, the other is the conditions that need to be met to activate the learning process. Some might put more stress on the first while others on the later one. Therefore, theories can be roughly divided into two categories: Process-oriented theories are concerned with how the mind processes new information, such as habit formation, induction, making inference, hypothesis testing and generalization. ? Condition-oriented theories emphasize the nature of the human and physical context in which language learning takes place, such as the number of students, what kind of input learners receive, and the learning atmosphere. According to Richards and Rodgers(1986), the theories about how people learn their first and especially second languages can be divided into two main groups. process oriented theories: These emphasize the mental processes that a learner goes through when learning an