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Reflection On Wild Child

The document discusses insights from the film "Wild Child" about feral children and language acquisition. It notes that feral children acquire language from their environment through stimulus and response, imitating the sounds around them. As language teachers, we can learn that children learn best what they hear most and words for things that interest them, as the environment "feeds" feral children. However, feral children are constrained by their abusive context. Teaching language requires understanding both cognitive and social aspects of learning, as well as empathy.

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manuel radislao
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723 views3 pages

Reflection On Wild Child

The document discusses insights from the film "Wild Child" about feral children and language acquisition. It notes that feral children acquire language from their environment through stimulus and response, imitating the sounds around them. As language teachers, we can learn that children learn best what they hear most and words for things that interest them, as the environment "feeds" feral children. However, feral children are constrained by their abusive context. Teaching language requires understanding both cognitive and social aspects of learning, as well as empathy.

Uploaded by

manuel radislao
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Wild child : the story of feral children: A Reflection

On hindsight, the movie/film provides a lot of interesting insights into a lot of


issues that society tends to dismiss, ignore or efface. However, this writer though
inexperienced in the intricate discipline of psychology attempts to “read” the text from the
lens of a second language teacher from a developing country like the Philippines.

The films explores a myriad of issues not only in the realm of psychology but more
importantly it also problematizes how people like those feral children acquire and learn
language from their context.(wrought and shaped by their hostile environment)

Central to my discussion here is my personal take on second language teaching vis-


a-via the traumatic and mangled experiences of feral children who were abused and
abandoned in a world bereft of human kindness. Seeing the spectacle of their plight -- the
aberration and erratic behavior displaying their animalistic tendencies --animalistic sounds
and utterances that mimic nature, walking on all fours like four-legged animals display
how nature could have a powerful influence of shaping their behavior and their “model of
the world”

As a framework to contextual my own reading of the text.i.e. Wild child : the story
of feral children, I will limit my discussion on how teachers of language can objectify and
learn from the principles of second language teaching vis-a-vis the context of feral
children.

First, I believe that children learn what they hear most. One immediately is appalled
by the spectacle of a very young child who walks on four mimicking the sound of a dog or
that inscrutable sound of an animal from the wild.The child's peculiar behavior might seem
incongruous to us but the feral child simply is a living manifestation of how children learn
best from what they hear most. This form of adaptability to their environment becomes
the child's primary learning environment. This stimulus -response actuation propels the
child to mimic what he hears and sees around him. Bereft of human contact, the child
directly absorbs and imitates the stimuli from his immediate environment. (Anthony,
2019) ,This also reminds me of the important concepts and inputs on Pyscholinguistics
especially on how language is produced and processed in the brain.This reader-writer here
is also concerned with the position or stance of the language teacher on what constitutes
language learning. Though, the first principle might be interrogated by other disciplines
who are also involved on how humans learn language but it is also ancillary to how
teachers design and strategize methods and techniques for students to learn language
through varied forms. Applied linguistics, though might not be an absolute science to
explain the aberration in the behavior of feral children vis-a-vis language acquisition.

Second, children learn words for things and events that interest them. The same can
also be said with how feral children absorb things from their environment. The recurring
stimulus from their immediate environment serves as their fuel to respond and to act on
their immediate environs. For us teachers, we still cling to an age-old axiom that says: what
is learned with pleasure is learned full measure. This axiomatic and etiological premise has
been hammered to us since time immemorial by our former teachers and autocrat
pedagogues and those Deweyian practitioners in education. Children learn best in an
environment where they live-where they find comfort and where living becomes learning
too in an experiential context (a smack of Deweyian philosophy which others find OA i.e
over-acting) .Honestly, this writer believes that those feral children simply gobbled up
anything that their immediate environment feeds on them. The idea of "interest" is
incendary to the scientific circles who scoff at the idea without any empirical evidence to
back up those claims. Feral children who display those tendencies i.e animal-like behavior
are what behaviorist psychologists claim as operant conditioning. The environment "feeds"
on those impulses that propels those feral children to act as a response to the stimulus they
see in their environment. As a second language teacher and practitioner that idea is now
problematized as there are varying modes of how "content" can be introduced and not just
simply dictated and influenced by the external environment. The law of readiness and the
law of exercise can be a flimsy excuse to explain this phenomenon of language acquisition
which as a reader I find abominable because it reminds me of the "audio-lingual" and the
drill methods which are akin to how people in the military schools are taught! --follow
what i do, repeat what I say ( it smacks of tyranny and fascist rule!)

Third, the documentary shows feral children imprisoned by the context where they
see themselves in -- helpless and devoid of human rationality-- a complete opposite of what
progressivist advocates on the idea of language learning context which is both Interactive
and responsive rather than passive.

Feral children are constrained by their immediate environment and the latent form
of abuse that they experience cripples and mangles their cognitive development to acquire
language. With the extent of damage wrought on their cognition, it would be a hard climb
for experts both from the medical and educational institution to stem the tide of cognitive
decline among those children. It would take a lot of spunk, patience and scientific training
for caregivers, speech therapists and language teachers to reshape if not to stem those
tendencies back to normalcy. Teachers, especially those in the languages department is
doubly challenged to understand the cognitive and social aspects of learning of those feral
children. Though , a hard and difficult climb towards recovery; but, that is basically the
vocation we have come to embracet. And teaching, is undeniably a vocation.

The insights drawn from this exercise is an impetus for us language teachers to be
cognizant of how our learners learn language. The film interrogates for us how our
environment can also be a powerful shaper of our identities and development. More than
this knowledge of how to teach language is also the capacity of human understanding and
empathy that should likewise be taught in the classroom.

Reference

Anthony, Dan (2019) What is adaptation theory?


https://sciencing.com/examples-natural-selection-animal-species-3667.html. Accessed last
October 17, 2021

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