Language acquisition. It is a requirement of the program that students study at least one subject from group 2. The main emphasis of the modern language courses is on the acquisition and use of language in a range of contexts and for different purposes while, at the same time, promoting an understanding of another culture through the study of its language. NSCS currently offers Spanish SL and Spanish ab initio courses. In prior years Japanese ab initio was also offered. The school reserves the right to offer alternatives as the program grows and matures. Group 3: Individuals and societies Students are required to choose one subject from each of the six academic areas, including one from Individuals and societies. They can choose a second subject from each academic area except the arts. Studying any one of these subjects provides for the development of a critical appreciation of: human experience and behavior the varieties of physical, economic and social environments that people inhabit the history of social and cultural institutions. In addition, Group 3 studies are designed to xxxxxx in students the capacity to identify, to analyze critically and to evaluate theories, concepts and arguments relating to the nature and activities of individuals and societies. NSCS currently offers IB History. In prior years, NSCS has offered IB Geography. The school reserves the right to offer alternatives as the program grows and matures.
Language acquisition. Insights from Linguistics and Psychology Recent empiricist approaches to language acquisition (cf. Xxxxxxxxx 2003 and Xxxxxxxx 2006 for surveys) have amassed considerable evidence that natural languages may be learnable without the aid of substantial language-specific cognitive hardwiring (‘Universal Grammar’). Key findings of this ‘usage-based’ approach to language acquisition relate to: • the crucial role of general cognitive skills of cultural learning and intention reading; • the grounding of language in both sensorimotor embodiment and social interaction; • the significance of statistical learning and the distributional structure of children’s linguistic input; • the item-based nature of early child language; • the gradual emergence of grammatical abstractions through processes of schematization. Given a sophisticated capacity for statistical learning (cf. Xxxxx 2007 for a recent review) as well as the peculiar structural properties of the specialized linguistic input that they receive (Pine 1994; Snow 1994), children are assumed to acquire complex compositional grammars through piecemeal schematizations over a massive body of memorized and categorized chunks of linguistic experience. Grounded in a set of specifically human skills of social cognition (‘shared intentionality’; cf. Xxxxxxxxx et al. 2005) and closely interwoven with aspects of general cognitive development, the emergence of grammar is thus described as a slow and gradual transition from rote-learning lexical formulae (holophrases) to increasingly abstract (pivot schemas, item- based constructions) and ultimately fully schematic grammatical resources (abstract constructions, i.e. maximally generalized morphosyntactic rules). Syntactic categories of adult language (e.g. ‘determiner’, ‘verb phrase’, ‘infinitival complement clause’ etc.) are assumed to have no correlate in early learner grammars but only to arise during ontogeny (contrary to the ‘continuity assumption’ of nativist linguistic theories; cf. Xxxxxx 1984). Strictly speaking, it is in fact not assumed that the learning process ever reaches an unchanging ‘final state’ at all – instead, linguistic knowledge is seen as constantly adapting to experience, and it is not assumed that speakers will always extract the highest conceivable generalizations from the data (Dabrowska 2004; Zeschel 2007). The co-existence of massive regularity and likewise massive residual idiosyncrasy in the system points to a cognitive architecture that redund...
