(Advanced) Language Acquisition

The second language acquisition theories of Dr. Stephen Krashen hold that the best way to help students develop both fluency and accuracy in a language is to expose them to large amounts of comprehensible input. This is the so-called the "comprehension hypothesis" where exposure to input naturally and logically leads to the development of the language skill (so forget about pronuciation drills and grammar analysis). Krashen advocates free voluntary reading and teaching techniques such as TPR Storytelling to provide this input.

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Dr. Stephen Krashen

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

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Deb Roy: The birth of a word