Describing Language: Understanding what language learning implies

Taken from http://www.language-exchanges.org/

Describing Language

Understanding what language learning implies

By Angie Fabiola Obando-Brenes

Pre-Service Teacher, School of English

Faculty of Social Sciences

Universidad Latina de Costa Rica

Monday, April 5, 2016

Post 249

Learning a second language implies time because it has many important details to be able to produce it correctly .This is why, in English, the student has to learn the four skills, listening, writing, speaking and reading. To manage the four skills, the instructor should teach and the students should learn several topics that describe the language.

To learn a second language, you should cover many topics that describe the language. Students should  understand the meaning of phrases  or word in context specially in reading and listening. Grammar is important because the element of a sentences must be in the right order to work well. Moreover, students should learn what part of the speech a word is because depending on the part of the speech the meaning and the pronunciation change. To be able to speak correctly .it is important to use the intonation and the pitch of ur voice; furthermore, pronunciation includes the sound of vowels and consonants.

         Regarding vocabulary words could have many meanings and there are different forms to express an idea. There are a number of parts of the speech to be taught, for example nouns, prepositions, and conjugations .There are also verb phases within auxiliary verbs and main verbs. Besides, English has different verb forms such as present, past, simple, continue, participle, regular and irregular. Also it is important to learn modal verbs, conditional sentences, collocations, lexical chunks, idioms. To speak and write a second language should take into account lexical cohesion  and coherence. To teach and learn a second language is a big matter that implies responsibility, commitment and practice.

To be successful in managing a second language, the individual should learn all the details that the language involves. I think the people who achieve to produce the language are the ones who go to good English institutes or to bilingual schools. In normal education, like public institutions in Costa Rica, it is hard to develop all the topics mention above because the time is limited and students sometimes do not care about learning English.

The reality is that some teachers do not move on and always see the same topics like verb tenses in MEP (Ministry of Public Education). The main idea is to be engaged with the learning process that takes many years, so people should be able to study what the language entails .

Reference

Harmer, J. (2007). "Learners." how to teach english. Person Longman.