Implicit and Explicit knowledge in the acquisition of L1 and L2:A cognitive perspective

SONIA SUÁREZ CEPEDA; ESTELA N. BRAUN

Hacia una didáctica del Inglés para niños en escuelas primarias

Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de La Pampa (EDULPam)

Lugar: Santa Rosa, La Pampa; Año: 2010; p. 97 - 117

When we refer to language acquisition, we have in mind a process, that , as Slobin described it, accounts for the ?emergence of language? which is actually a grammar ?the mental system that allows people to speak and understand a language. Which are the basic requisites or underlying conditions that a child needs to acquire in order to become a speaker of a language? First of all, they need to acquire a grammar of the language, that is, an internalized system of rules and constraints that allow him to encode and decode information. Secondly, these rules provide clues that the child can use to predict what is acceptable and what is not valid within a given grammatical system or grammar. To study the emergence of this grammar, linguistic and psycholinguistic studies have to focus on the components of this system, that is, phonology, syntax, semantics and morphology. For the purpose of this chapter, our analysis will refer briefly to the developmental sequences observed in the acquisition of English as a first language (L1), which involve semantic and morphosyntactic processes. We will refer to the notion of chunking as a cognitive process in acquiring a first and second language (L2). In the last section we will relate the notions of implicit and explicit knowledge to chunking, providing evidence of the role of these processes in the design of tests for young learners.