How Languages are Learned Quotes.

11. "They were divided into four categories that are described below along with examples of the motivational behaviours included within each. 1     Teacher discourse: arousing curiosity or attention, promoting autonomy, stating communicative purpose/utility of activity 2     Participation structure: group work/pair work 3     Activity design: individual competition, team competition, intellectual challenge, tangible task product 4     Encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation and activity design: effective praise, elicitation of self/peer correction session, class applause. In each lesson, the learners’ motivation was measured in terms of their level of engagement. The proportion of students who paid attention, who actively participated, and who eagerly volunteered during activities was calculated. A three-level scale was used to measure engagement in each observed lesson: very low (a few students), low (one third to two thirds of the students) and high (more than two thirds of the students). Learners also completed a questionnaire about their motivation levels specifically related to their EFL class. The researchers found significant positive correlations between the teachers’ motivational practices, the learners’ engagement behaviours, and the learners’ self-reports on the questionnaire. The researchers acknowledge that correlation results do not indicate cause–effect relationships. Nevertheless, the findings are important because this is the first study to provide ‘any empirical evidence concerning the concrete, classroom-specific impact of language teachers’ motivational strategies’ (Guilloteaux and Dörnyei 2008: 72)."
- Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

12. "For proficient speakers, choosing words, pronouncing them, and stringing them together with the appropriate grammatical markers is essentially automatic. Furthermore, much of what these speakers say is drawn from predictable patterns of language that are at least partly formulaic. That is, fluent speakers do not create new sentences by choosing one word at a time but rather by using strings of words that typically occur together. This use of patterns applies not only to idiomatic expressions, but also to much conversational language and written language in a specific genre (Ellis, Simpson-Vlach, and Maynard 2008)."
- Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

13. "Another aspect of automaticity in language processing is the retrieval of word meanings. When proficient listeners hear a familiar word, even for a split second, they cannot help but understand it. Such automatic responses do not use up the kind of resources needed for processing new information. Thus, proficient language users can give their full attention to the overall meaning of a text or conversation, whereas less proficient learners use more of their attention on processing the meaning of individual words and the relationships between them. The lack of automatic access to meaning helps to explain why second language readers need more time to understand a text, even if they eventually do fully comprehend it."
- Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

14. "The information processing model suggests that there is a limit to the amount of focused mental activity we can engage in at one time."
- Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

15. "most learning, including language learning, starts with declarative knowledge, that is, knowledge that we are aware of having, for example, a grammar rule. The hypothesis is that, through practice, declarative knowledge may become procedural knowledge, or the ability to use the knowledge. With continued practice, the procedural knowledge can become automatized and the learner may forget having learned it first as declarative knowledge."
- Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

16. "all teachers in the content-based French immersion classes they observed used recasts more than any other type of feedback. Indeed, recasts accounted for more than half of the total feedback provided in the four classes. Repetition of error was the least frequent feedback type provided. The other types of corrective feedback fell in between. Student uptake was least likely to occur after recasts and more likely to occur after clarification requests, metalinguistic feedback, and repetitions. Furthermore, elicitations and metalinguistic feedback not only resulted in more uptake, they were also more likely to lead to a corrected form of the original utterance. Lyster (1998) has argued that students receiving content-based language teaching (where the emphasis is on meaning not form) are less likely to notice recasts than other forms of corrective feedback, because they may assume that the teacher is responding to the content rather than the form of their speech. Indeed, the double challenge of making the subject-matter comprehensible and enhancing knowledge of the second language itself within content-based language teaching has led Merrill Swain (1988) and others to conclude that ‘not all content teaching is necessarily good language teaching’ (p. 68). The challenges of content-based language teaching will be discussed further in Chapter 6."
- Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

17. "Since Lyster and Ranta reported their findings, many more observation studies of corrective feedback in second or foreign language classrooms have been carried out. Some of them report similar results—that recasts are the most frequently occurring type of feedback and that they appear to go unnoticed by learners. However, others report that learners do notice recasts in the classroom. Below, two studies are described in which learners were observed to notice and to respond to recasts provided by their teachers."
- Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

18. "According to this perspective, once skills become automatized, thinking about the declarative knowledge while trying to perform the skill actually disrupts the smooth performance of it. Think, for example, of trying to drive a car or skate while intentionally thinking about and preparing every move. With enough practice, procedural knowledge eclipses the declarative knowledge, which, in time, may be forgotten. For this reason, fluent speakers may not even realize that they once possessed the declarative knowledge that set the process in motion."
- Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

19. "the features of the language that are most frequent are not always learned first. For example, virtually every English sentence has one or more articles (‘a’ or ‘the’), but even advanced learners have difficulty using these forms correctly in all contexts. Finally, although the learner’s first language does have an influence, many aspects of these developmental stages are similar among learners from different first language backgrounds."
- Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

20. "example, it has been observed that Japanese students are often reluctant to speak English in communicative lessons despite high levels of motivation to learn the language. Furthermore, when students with high levels of English language proficiency do communicate they often speak with a strong Japanese accent and intentionally produce grammatical errors for fear that they might be perceived as considering themselves to be superior (Greer 2000)."
- Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned