Teaching Philosophy

                                    Non Verbal Skill Acquisition

The nature of language is already inside of us, is innate. It’s like we are previously programmed to communicate with other people. We have a language that is the non verbal communication, this can be seen when we are just mere babies and the way we communicate what we want, need and/or desire at the moment is by laughing, crying or use our body to express ourselves to our families. After a while we start to talk and to communicate better with the people around us by non-verbal and verbal communication.  We can see this clearly with Piaget’s theory of development that says that our development is divided in stages. (Lefrancois, 2006, p.48)We also use non verbal communication when we are in another country and don’t know the language at all or just a little but not enough to communicate verbally. Just like verbal communication we have to be careful because some signals can change from country to country. We have to remember that there are various characteristic to the non verbal skill: non-verbal messages primarily communicate emotions, attitudes, non-verbal cues substitute for contradict, emphasize or regulate verbal message, are often ambiguous, are continuous, are more reliable and are culture bound. (Ritts and Stein)Another way of using this non verbal skills can be communicated through gestures and touch, by body language or posture, by facial expression and eye contact.

This can be explain by the school of thought known as cognitive psychology that says it’s the study of mental processing including how people think, perceive, remember and learn; also that the mental structures stand in a casual relationship to our physical actions.( Zhong-Lin Lu and Barbara Anne Dosher, 2007) It is component of the nativist theory of language that asserts that humans are born with the instinct or innate facility for acquiring language. “The term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of language aroud us, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of language.” (Brown, 2007, p.28)

Cognitive psychology is a sub discipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes. It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems. It’s from the 1960’s and 1970’s and some theorist are Noam Chomsky with his Language Acquisition Device theory and David Ausubel with his Meaningful Learning theory. (Muskingum, 1997)  These two theorists are the ones that I’m going to be using to explain my theoretical model.

Like Chomsky says we have a Language Acquisitions Device (LAD) inside of us, that little box inside our brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic language, the concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language.( Brown, 2007, p.28) “The notion of linguistically oriented innate predispositions fit perfectly with generative theories of language: children were presumed to use innate abilities to generate a potential infinite number of utterances.”(Brown, 2007, p.29) This show that we come with a predisposition for language but not one specifically. 

There is also Ausubel’s theory that:

“…learning takes place in the human organism through a meaningful process of relating new events or items to already existing cognitive concepts or propositions- hanging new items on existing cognitive pegs.”(Brown, 2007, p.91) One of his discoveries was the rote vs meaningful learning that happens to us all. “Ausubel noted that people of all ages have little need for rote, mechanistic learning that is not related to existing knowledge and experience. Rather, most items are acquired by meaningful learning by anchoring and relating new items and experiences to knowledge that exists on the cognitive framework.” (Brown, 2007, p.68)

Another thing we have to consider when we are learning a language, first or second, is that we are emotional creatures. “At the heart of all thought and meaning and action is emotion. As “intellectual” as we would like to think we are, we are influenced by our emotions. It is only logical, then, to look at the affective (emotional) domain for some of the most significant answers to the problems of contrasting the differences between first and second language acquisition.” (Brown, 2007,  p.68)

Non verbal communication is mostly used with the art of speaking. As we grow up a lot of us become more aware of the importance of non verbal skill for communication. One of the most known non verbal communications is the sign language. More and more population is getting to know the importance of this skill, another language and another way of communicating. We are getting more aware that sing language is in fact another language like English, Spanish, and Italian. We also have to be aware of the personality, the way we learn and socio-cultural factors that affect the person that is studying this language because these are some of the reasons why we all learn in a different way.

The personality is one of the things that affect the learning of a person because it all depends of what they are interest in, how well is their self esteem, how willing they are to communicate, etc. Bernard Weiner has an attribution theory that focuses more on how people explain their own success and failures and that this is represented by 4 factors, ability and effort (internal) and task difficulty and luck (outside). () In another side we have Keller with more emphasis on the individual’s decisions that says “the choices people make as to what experiences or goals they will approach or avoid, and the degree of effort they will exert in that respect”(Keller, 1983, p.389)

The way we learn affects how we actually learn what they teach us in school because all of us don’t learn in the same way. We have Ausubel’s rote vs meaningful learning that says that if what the student is learning is meaningful to the material he already knows and it’s not just memorizing and writing the student will actually learn. () There’s also Gagné’s 8 types of learning and one of this is the verbal association, “The fourth type of learning involves Gagné’s distinction between verbal and nonverbal chains, and is not really therefore a separate type of language learning.” (Brown, 2007, p.101) Another thing that affects our way of learning is our emotions; this can be explained with Krashen’s Affective Filter Theory.  This theory says that there are some emotional variables that affect our way of learning. These variables include: motivation, self-confidence and anxiety. Krashen claims that learners with high motivation, self-confidence, a good self-image, and a low level of anxiety are better equipped for success in second language acquisition. Low motivation, low self-esteem, and debilitating anxiety can combine to 'raise' the affective filter and form a 'mental block' that prevents comprehensible input from being used for acquisition. In other words, when the filter is 'up' it impedes language acquisition. On the other hand, positive affect is necessary, but not sufficient on its own, for acquisition to take place. (Brown, 2007, p.293-299)

The socio-cultural aspect is a little bit more complicated because we have to be aware of the cultural and social aspect of the student. There’s a cultural shock that Edward Hall talks about that says that this “Cultural shock is associated with feelings of estrangement, anger, hostility, indecision, frustration, unhappiness, sadness, loneliness, homesickness, and even physical illness. Persons undergoing cultural shock view their world out of resentment and alternate between self-pity and anger at others for not understanding them.” (Brown, 2007, p.194) Also there’s Wallace Lambert’s work on attitudes that says that “As individuals begin to lose some of the ties of their native culture and to adapt to the second culture, they experience feelings of chagrin or regret, mixed with the fearful anticipation of entering a new group.” (Brown, 2007, p.195)

This is why the cognitive psychology model is concern with internal mental states and focuses on topics such as attention, memory and problem solving. (Zhong-Lin Lu and Barbara Anne Dosher, 2007) All of our past experiences and how well we dealt with them and how we are feeling at the moment of the learning is going to affect positive or negative the way we are going to acquire the new language we are studying to better ourselves. Also how we view the world we are living in, the way we adapt to other cultures and how we adapt to all the changes that happens every day.