Saville-Troike's Chapter 4

             I found chapter four of Saville-Troike very interesting, in that it explores Language acquisition from a neurological perspective. It is most often that we hear about the actual methods of teaching, or the culture that we are exposed to when learning another language, but not too often do we focus on the brain, and what contributions it makes to the learning. It is interesting to note that L1 and L2 are stored and learned in different areas of the brain. Perhaps further research on the area that is most responsible for L2 could enhance learning methods and teaching strategies. Something that I especially found interesting was the research that indicates that different elements of language are located in separate parts of the brain (72). I was able to relate to this idea because I have a friend who can fully comprehend and understand Filipino or Tagalog, but cannot speak it. Actually, he can barely put a sentence together. I always found this to be very odd, and could not believe that he understands every bit of it without actually speaking the language. However, with these explanations of different areas of the brain controlling different parts of a language, I can now understand how his situation is not so unordinary.

             Aside from the insights on brain research and findings in L2 learners, I found the section on age interesting. There definitely are advantages and disadvantages with age, but from personal experience, it seems more common that somebody who studies another language at an older age ends up being able to retain more of the vocabulary and has a better sense of grammar. When I was in sixth grade, I took private Spanish lessons, however I retained almost none of the information because I was using memorization as opposed to comprehension. For example, I didn’t understand why I had to conjugate verbs. In high school, I once again took Spanish, but was a lot more successful at the comprehension part of it. I was old enough to understand why I had to conjugate my verbs, but I struggled with the comprehension of a subjunctive tense; but my freshmen year of college, I was able to understand the concept fully. Thus in my case, since I had started learning Spanish around the age of 11, the older I got, the more I was able to learn.