Second Language Learning Data Analysis - Softcover

Gass, Susan M.; Sorace, Antonella; Selinker, Larry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805832661 ISBN 13: 9780805832662

Publisher: Routledge, 1998

Synopsis

The purpose of this workbook is to provide students with practice in analyzing second language data. For the student of second language learning, "hands-on" experience with actual data is essential in understanding the processes involved in learning a second language. Working through exemplars of the kinds of interlanguages that learners do and do not create brings about a clearer understanding of the principles underlying these interlanguages, as well as the universal principles of language learning (those that are independent of particular languages and interlanguages).

The goal in this workbook is to present data organized in such a way that by working through pedagogically presented data-sets, students are led to a discovery and understanding of theoretical and/or methodological issues. In addition, they acquire the ability to interpret data and to begin to draw conclusions from them. The authors intend that students should go from the data to a conclusion that includes a 3-part statement:
*what else you should want to know about these data;
*why this, specifically, and not something else; and
*how one can empirically research what you want to find out.
This sequence of questions forces students to constantly keep in mind the important question of falsification: What kind of data would it take to falsify the particular conclusions the students come to?

As with the earlier edition of this workbook (Sorace, Gass, & Selinker), two audiocassettes provide language samples for use in the exercises. These cassettes and the teacher's manual are offered free of charge on adoption of the workbook for classroom use; a three-part set (workbook/manual/tapes) is also available.

About this title

Synopsis

This pack encourages the reader to consider the young child's signed language acquisition and subsequent reading development. It proposes that theories of language acquisition and reading development must account for signed languages to understand the universal, the modality-specific, and the language-specific characteristics of language acquisition and the learning mechanisms that account for reading. Theories of language acquisition and reading have traditionally been derived from studies of spoken language and unintentionally excluded signed languages. This produces theoretical principles based on the psycholinguistic mechanisms related to hearing and the articulation of speech, principles that do not necessarily apply to seeing and the gesticulation of signs. By presenting a new set of signed language studies for consideration, this book advances language, research and theory. "Language Acquisition by Eye" is written in two parts, anchored in the toddler phase and the school-pupil phase. The development path between these two phases trace out the routes that deaf children follow from one to the other.

Many critical landmarks occur along the way - achievements of morphological, syntactic and pragmatic master - all in the framework of the oral-visual modality and the special typological characteristics of sign language. Part 1 deals with the role of hand and eye in the signing of mothers and the perception and early acquisition of such signs by their babies. Part 2 takes us ahead to the time when signing children are faced with the task of acquiring another visual symbolic system - that is, the mastery of literacy in the national language of the country. In all, this book is part of a continuing international endeavour to more deeply understand the structure and functions of sign language, as well as the processing connections between the signed language and the spoken language with which it corresponds.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0805832661
• ISBN 13: 9780805832662
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 80