Question 29
Over the years, language teachers have alternated between favoring teaching approaches that focus primarily on language use and those that focus on language forms or analysis. The alternation has been due to a fundamental disagreement concerning whether one learns to communicate in a second language by communicating in that language (such as in an immersion experience) or whether one learns to communicate in a second language by learning the lexicogrammar – the words and grammatical structures – of the target language. In other words, the argument has been about two different means of achieving the same end.As with any enduring controversy, the matter is not easily resolved. For one thing, there is evidence to support both points of view. It is not uncommon to find learners who, for whatever reason, find themselves in a new country or a new region of their own country, who need to learn a new language, and who do so without the benefit of formal instruction. If they are post pubescent, they may well retain an accent of some kind, but they can pick up enough language to satisfy their communicative needs. In fact, some are natural acquirers who become highly proficient in this manner. In contrast, there are learners whose entire exposure to the new language comes in the form of classroom instruction in lexicogrammar. Yet they too achieve a measure of communicative proficiency, and certain of these learners become highly proficient as well. What we can infer from this is that humans are amazingly versatile learners and that some people have a natural aptitude for acquiring languages and will succeed no matter what the circumstances.
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Question 30
Ecology is the study of interactions of organisms among themselves and with their environment. It seeks to understand patterns in nature (e.g., the spatial and temporal distribution of organisms) and the processes governing those patterns. Climatology is the study of the physical state of the atmosphere – its instantaneous state or weather, its seasonal-to-interannual variability, its long-term average condition or climate, and how climate changes over time. These two fields of scientific study are distinctly different. Ecology is a discipline within the biological sciences and has as its core the principle of natural selection. Climatology is a discipline within the geophysical sciences based on applied physics and fluid dynamics. Both, however, share a common history.
The origin of these sciences is attributed to Aristotle and Theophrastus and their books Meteorological and Enquiry into Plants, respectively, but their modern beginnings trace back to natural history and plant geography. Seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century naturalists and geographers saw changes in vegetation as they explored new regions and laid the foundation for the development of ecology and climatology as they sought explanations for these geographic patterns. Alexander von Humboldt, in the early 1800s, observed that widely separated regions have structurally and functionally similar vegetation if their climates are similar. Alphonse de Candolle hypothesized that latitudinal zones of tropical, temperate, and arctic vegetation are caused by temperature and in 1874 proposed formal vegetation zones with associated temperature limits.
