Why did children make the sentence like "I goed to school today"? Why did I made words like "There are a lot of laughness here" before? I think these are common phenomena in language learning. As Freeman & Freeman says, language learners are trying to recognize the rules of language, hypotheses these rules and use these rules in the language that they develop. As they become more capable in dealing more complex rules, they modify their hypotheses and say "I went to school today" instead of "goed". This reminds me of something we language teachers should be very careful in our teaching---error feedback given. Confronting language errors like "goed", "laughtness" actually is a good thing, because it shows that learners are acquiring the language by using it---constructing meanings they want to express. Therefore, proper feedback is crucial because we want this meaning construction in language learning.
Using Cloze Procedure to access syntactic cues does sound a good method. How well language learners could do in cloze procedure depends on their knowledge on surface syntactic structure, deeper syntactic structure. i think semantic knowledge is also important. I remember when I was teaching, cloze was always a part of the any English quiz or exam.However, I don't think I did it well on those parts when explaining the answers. Freeman and Freeman indicates that "Getting the right word is not important. What is important is developing a strategy to be used later during silent reading". I guess I just stopped at the surface level--explain the answers and how to get them. As for how to enhance the skills in doing cloze up to strategies in silent reading, I definitely need to know more about it.
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2 comments:
Good point, Ling! The children always imagine the paradigm to be regular and thus erroneously produce the structure as goed and laughtness. Meantime they are in need of exact guidance then there will not be any hindrance to learn the proper structure.
Since I am a native speaker I always like to see the differences in learning styles between native speakers of English and non-native speakers. I think the interesting thing that you've said when referring to cloze passages is that "I don't think I did it well on those parts when explaining the answers". My question is: Did you still come up with the correct answers though?
I ask this just because many native speakers are also unable to explain why one word is more grammatically correct when compared to another. They have a subconscious understanding of the deeper structure. Also, do you think a subconscious knowledge of the deeper syntactic structure is enough for non-native speakers because it is for native speakers? Or do you think they need to have this knowledge in the front of their minds?
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