Language Learning vs. Language Acquiring
8th grade today featured the lesson that I do on language learning vs. language acquisition. I try to explain a fairly complex topic in the terms of that which one does without thinking (acquisition) and that which is done purposefully through grammar, vocabulary and language study. (learning) I try to use real world examples to tie together the ways that acquisition affects them in their native langauge as well as foreign language study. It’s amazing how low the confidence level of my students is, even though I can draw so much acquired German out of them with little effort. I finished with some examples of language acquisition from Nora. It made it real (and cute.)
7th graders had two long days — first period played catch up and jammed a TPRS mini-story in with the reading and transslation of the text story. It was, all in all fairly successful. In the next class I spent nearly the entire time on the reading of the story, embellishing the storyline, adding wierder and wierder contents to the girl’s backpack (17 million pens, 17,000 German books, a cat named fluffy who does Sabine’s homework in the backpack, a dog who wants to eat the cat.) At the end of all of that, the translation of the story was a no-brainer. The kids intuitively knew what the German text meant, including the ‘bizzare’ terms like denn, dadrin (Was hast du denn dadrin. AND die ist aber schwer!)
