Abstract
Language learning is the teaching about a language (its use, its speaker, its structure), with the hope that the student will learn enough to actually be able to speak the target language. Language acquisition, in its current sense, tries to expose the student to the target language in meaningful ways so that he or she acquires the language’s structure through actual use. Language learning follows from the official language model, whereas Native American languages are taught as foreign language in their own native community. This helps to commodify the heritage language; makes studying it an artificial exercise; and occupies the time, money, and effort of the population that could be better spent in doing language acquisition and achieving real results of the revitalization of their heritage language.
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”
—Nelson Mandela
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Shaul, D.L. (2014). Language Acquisition vs. Language Learning. In: Linguistic Ideologies of Native American Language Revitalization. SpringerBriefs in Anthropology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05293-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05293-9_3
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