Victor -The Wild Child

As I watched this movie, I realized I had seen it before. This time though, I was able to watch it through a new lens. The questions that really got me thinking were the questions "do you think the video is evidence of a critical period?" and "how do people treat Victor?"

Critical Period Evidence?
My answer for this is undecided. I think that in some respects, it does, but in others, it doesn't. Some people may say that it does because Victor didn't learn to speak a language. However, in the beginning of the movie, one of the characters said that it takes 18 months for an infant to learn a few words. In Victor's case, he was only with the doctor for half that. And, I'd like to point out, even if he couldn't carry on a conversation like other 10-12 year old boys, he still understood and could react appropriately to many of the complex commands and utterances made by the doctor. I think that people were too quick to judge Victor and expected too much of him too soon. The doctor had just about given up on Victor at 7 months of work. If we gave up on babies at 7 months, no one would learn to speak at all. What this movie does seem to provide evidence for is that learning a language is difficult - even if it seems easy at times.

As I watched, I was appalled by the reactions of the people who saw Victor. He was like a circus animal - only there for people to gawk at and wonder over. I wonder if people today ever feel this way. I have friends and relatives that will talk about immigrants and their "need" to learn English. They may say something like "This is America, learn our language." It strikes me much differently now. I wonder if this attitude isn't the same as the staring at Victor. People wonder, question, and fear what they don't understand. There must be another more tolerant and understanding way to react, but I think people forget that these people are people too. Not to mention, it's hard to learn another language!

Saville-Troike's Chapters 1 and 2

This reading has me thinking about a couple of things. First, one of the final questions of chapter one asks, "Do you think that you are (or would be) a "good" or a "poor" L2 learner? Why do you think so?" This question got me thinking about my own experience with learning languages which seems to have changed over the years. In high school, I took two years of Spanish. I really liked it... Well, most of it. My first year, I had an awesome teacher. The class would sit around and talk with the teacher in Spanish. He would introduce new words and encourage us to attempt to figure them out. It was a lot of fun, and I learned quite a bit. My second year, I had a different teacher. She would provide us with stories of elephants that ate peanut soup, and monkeies that fell from trees, and made us retell the stories in different tenses many times. I quickly began to feel that I was wasting my time and didn't sign up for another year. I realize now that what I lacked was the interaction, which Muriel Saville-Troike says is necessary for learning a language.

Many yeas later in college, I took a semester of Japanese. Though we barely made it through the basic characters and beginning vocabulary, I still felt that I learned a lot. This time though, I had to put in more conscious effort to learning. Perhaps this stems from the fact that I couldn't transfer my knowledge of the alphabet because the Japanese characters look totally different from anything I'm used to. At least with Spanish I didn't have to re-learn how to read and my thinking about what a letter is. I wonder if other languages are like this...

The second thing that this reading made me think about is who constitutes as a second language learner? On page 9 of chapter two, for example, provides a chart of people learning a language as a first or second language. What measures are enabling them to qualify someone as L1 or L2? Would I be considered a L2 for Spanish and Japanese even if I am not actively learning the languages? Also, if learning a language never fully stops, what age is the cutoff to be able to say "This many people are learning X language as L1?" Perhaps the only way for me to find these answers is to look up and read the original source.