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Language Learning and Teaching

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Languages are learned mainly through imitation. At first I strongly agree with this statement. I knew that imitation is an important and useful strategy when you are learning a language. I have experienced this idea with young children; they tend to imitate several structures and words. But as it is pointed out in the first chapter of the book, they also produce sentences that they have not heard before and that their imitation is selective. Imitation is not equal in every student, some of them rarely imitate; but this is not an impediment to learn as quickly as the ones that are constantly imitating. This does not mean that imitation it is not important in language learning, but t is not a universal characteristic of language learners. Probably, some students can benefit from it more than others. Parents usually correct young children when they make grammatical errors. Correction depends on the child's age and partly parent's social, linguistic and educational backgrounds. From my personal experience, I have seen parent's correction as something variable. They normally correct children when the errors can cause a communicative breakdown or when they are related with politeness; that is they are only focusing on meaning. As I see it, correction should be done carefully in order to avoid children's frustration and affect their self esteem. Probably echoing back corrected mistakes can be a good option. Among second language learners giving feedbacks is considered important because without them some errors may persist for years. People with High IQs are Good Language Learners Intelligence is measured in general by IQ tests. People with a high result in those tests use to show their proficiency in some areas. Even these results can be used as a prediction of success, they are not always reliable. Based on experience, some people score really high in IQ tests but they are only good at some skills and abilities, and I believe that it is really difficult to prove, for instance, your level of oral communication by means of these tests. So intelligence estimated with these tests can show that a person has a good knowledge of English grammar but it cannot determine if a student is a good language learner because language learning involves a wide variety of skills and abilities. So learners with a huge variety of intellectual abilities and without a brilliant intelligence level can be successful in language learning. The Best Predictor of Success in Second Language Acquisition is Motiv

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