The Egg and What's Inside

About the egg.

I funded English Laboratory in 2008. The egg was laid, incubated and hatched there. The fertilization process was very long and drawn out (make of that what you will).

The egg is a model for learning English that repeats the mother tongue process. Like I've said, I learn a lot from kids. It's great to watch them put sounds together, matching tone of voice with visual support to understand that this or that particular sound or sounds mean something; that they cause all those big, hairy people to react. I haven't consulted any studies on this, but my hypothesis is that the first two sounds that most babies use as words are the name for the mother (this could change, gentlemen) and milk or what ever receptacle it comes in.

The baby then starts uttering peripheral words; one here, two there until one day: Zoom! Faster than you can roll up the sleeves of your vest, that baby's mouth takes off and you can't shut it up.

The baby never stresses about mistakes and the adults around it think the quirks are  hilarious; 'I don't wanna wear dat! I wored dat yesterday!' They don't even correct the kid! The kid corrects her or himself when s/he's ready! It's amazing!

Can the process be repeated for L2? There are many issues here, but the two main contenders are socialization and references. 

Socialization can seriously get in the way of 'speaking like a native' with particular cultures. I submit that along with geography and climate, language really is the basis of the socialization process. The way a languages treats the combinations of gender, respect, empathy, authority and space in time with different constructions can reveal deep-rooted cultural spins. 

For example, in English we use the 'ing' rarely to describe something we're doing right now but very frequently for something that causes an emotional reaction. 'I'm having lunch with my friends tomorrow' means my heart is filled with joy 'cos me and my peeps will be eating chicken wings on a patio in less than 24 hours. This using of verbal tenses to express something other than a verbal tense is part of the meritocratic anarchy that is English. It makes Anglos gregarious and this is frightening and/or stupid to some cultures. In these cases the hard shell of socialization has to be cracked in order to get to the malleable, fun part . Why did the comedian cross the road? He didn't get the yoke.

References on the other hand are just plain good. 

I learned Spanish in el Mercado de Sant Antonio, Barcelona. Being Canadian, my references were English and French. Thanks to the French I had no problem understanding the concepts of verb conjugations,  feminine & masculine or  backwards adjectives. With vocabulary I started recognizing patterns in the ten dollar word category (metaphor, philosophy). I learned the normal words (table, chair) just by repeating them so many times.

Even something that's not the same or opposite is a good reference, comparing, for example my bicycle with your pogo-stick. 

So, it all goes back to the beginning of an ever-pending story. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Cool!