Lexicon and Morphology:
I found the topic really interesting and for the first time easy to understand Finegan.
To know a word for child or adult they should have four different kinds of information such as Phonological, semantic, syntactic and morphological in any languages. There are different types of lexical categories. For the native speaker of any language even the child could understand the different categories of words such as noun, verb, or adjectives, it is like an unconscious knowledge. But it is not the same case with the child of the second language. For an instance if I need to teach English in y country then learning about the different categories of word is not implicit knowledge or they cannot acquire it but they have to learn it explicitly, because it is not something which is implied. Thus it is essential to let them know the ways to identify the lexical category of a word.
Again English speaking child knows that verbs have a set of related forms and it is implicit knowledge for the but the child who has English as a second language must learn it again explicitly. I remember, Back home it was hard time for me to teach about the irregular form of verb. Such As some verb has the form such as, walk-walked-walked, both past and past participle have the same form but in other word, come-came-come, here the present and past participle have the same form. So in this way these irregular forms create difficulty in teaching at second language classroom.
Another toughest part to teach is preposition in my country. The first thing we have very prepositions in my language other thing is we have also the postposition in Nepali language. So it is very hard to give the concept of preposition to the student of my country.
For example: A cat sat on the mat.
In Nepali we say, A cat the mat on sat.
So preposition comes as postposition. Thus students make many mistakes regarding the preposition.
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Wow, that's a very interesting entry Binki. I assumed that since children have better language acquisition abilities than adults then they could pick up on a language's structure subconsciously until the age of 12 or 14, but I think that's not entirely true since many younger students have difficulties like you pointed out. So maybe there is a large difference between when a language is learned in an EFL context as compared to in an immersed ESL setting such as in a native English speaking country? Of course adults have the most difficult time with these sorts of things, even when they are immersed in the culture of their L2.
ReplyDeleteYes Aaron, It is hard time for even the child to acquire the language, if they are non native speaker of the target language, but if we do comparison between adult and children to learn or acquire the language then it might be easier for the children to learn than to the adult.
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