Summary of Language Acquisition Course

Left and right-brain functioning
Left and right brain dominance is significant issue in second language acquisition. As children grow up, their brains develop gradually and various functions become lateralized to the right and left hemisphere. Each hemisphere has characteristics. The right hemisphere perceives and remembers visual, tactile, and auditory images. While the left one is associated with logical, analytical thought, with mathematical and linear processing of information.
Although the hemispheres are different, but actually they operate together as “team”. Through corpus collosum, messages are sent back and forth so it is the way the both hemispheres are involved in most of the neurological activity in human brain. While the both hemispheres operating together optimally, it is the best solution to problems.
In learning second language, it is undeniable that the right and left hemispheres have important role to the success. Left-brain-dominant second language learners preferred a deductive style of teaching, while right-brain-dominant learners appeared to be more successful in an inductive classroom environment. Stevick (1982) concluded that the left-brain-dominant second language learners are better at producing separate words, gathering the specifics of language, carrying out sequences of operations, and dealing with abstraction, classification, labeling and reorganization. Right-brain-dominant learners, on the other hand, appear to deal better with whole images, with generalizations, with metaphors, and with emotional reactions and artistic expressions.

Left brain dominance
Intellectual
Remembers names
Responds to verbal instructions and explanations
Makes objective judgments
Planned and structured
Analytic reader
Prefers talking and writing

Right brain dominance
Intuitive
Remembers faces
Responds to demonstrated, illustrated, or symbolic instructions
Makes subjective judgments
Fluid and spontaneous
Synthesizing reader
Prefers drawing and manipulating objects


Ambiguity tolerance
Ambiguity tolerance is related to willing to toleare ideas and propositions that run counter to your own belief system or structure of knowledge. It is a style when people face anything outside them that contradict theirs. Then, we can see two type of human; open minded or close minded. For open minded people, accept ideologies and events and facts that contradict their own views is fine. But for close minded one, they tend to reject items that are different with their existing system.
Advantages and disadvantages may appear in each style. For person who is tolerant of ambiguity are not easily distrubed cognitively or affectively by ambiguity and uncertainty but they are more creative and inovative. In second language learning, learners may meet the fact of contradictory information; words, rules or even culture that are so much different with their native language. Therefore, successful language learning requires tolerance of such ambiguities. However, too much tolerance of ambiguity can have disadvantageous effect. Such tolerance will influence people to accept any proposition they encounter, without consider efficiently the fact of their cognitive organization structure. Then it will prevent meaningful consideration of ideas. Linguistic rules, for instance, will be gulped down in meaningless chunks learned by rote but not effectively integrated into a whole system.
Intolerance of ambiguity has also advantages and disadvantages. It may guard against wishy-washiness of accepting harmful ideas, to reject entirely contradictory material, and to deal with the reality of the system that one has built. However, intolerance is easily to close mind; especially if the ambiguity is perceived as a threat; the result is dogmatic and brittle mind that so far from the creative and successful in second language learning.
Based on a few research findings, we can suggest, though not strongly so, that ambiguity may be important factor in second language learning. It is hard to imagine that person who always sees everything in black and white with no shade of gray can be successful in second language learning.