Jiang Meng Homework#1

Discuss the difference between learning and acquisition in reading and use my own experiences.

Jiang Meng(Eve)   WRT103 Homework#1

The author use large amounts of hypothesis and examples to illustrate the difference between acquisition and learning. After reading so many words, I have more ideas of these two kinds of getting knowledge. In my point of view, the main difference is rationality and sensibility. According to paragraphs, all kinds of learning behavior is some kind of rational model. While acquisition is all from our feelings, thinking and any other personal ideas. It’s just like the usage of our two parts of brain—learning is using left brain and acquisition is using right brain. Left brain control logics and all things with model. And right brain controls all about emotions and feelings. We are not born to be logical but we are born to be emotional. So, acquisition is a natural and innate behavior while learning is a forced behavior. Then because of this nature of the two kinds of study behavior, they must lead to different results.

All the ideas above is just the conclusion and my personal assumption of passage. We can understand in details by the different experiments and hypothesis. Like one person learns how to read, he may recognize the word which means translating it to first language or use his subconscious feeling of the sentences and background to study a foreign language reading. It’s easy to find out that word recognition is just a model thing. We memorize each word individually by our first language and use it to piece up an essay in our brains. Instead, the second view of reading is all about comprehension. We use our own feeling to guess the meaning of words according to the sentence or paragraph or even the whole passage. So the word in the sentence will be differed between us because of our different feeling and knowledge backgrounds. That’s OK to remain that difference. As long as we understand the passage, there is no need to give one word an exact meaning. Also, the meaning of word is not always same in several passages. The first view is that we learn the word to get points of the passage and the second view is to use passage to understand the word. The same thing works with writing. Learning is writing everything by models and acquisition is done by innate subconscious feelings.

Nowadays, in my country, left-brain learning is the most supported and popular style of education. We may sit in the classroom for about ten hours a day to listen to what the teachers are talking about. Then we memorize them and use the models in the questions. I am an optics major student now but one of my friend said about me that “physics guy is nothing but put some data to the formula to get results.” I will not blame her about that kind of negative comment to me.  In China, we just put numbers into the formula to learn physics. That is nothing about thinking of why the formula is this or deeply understanding. What about essay writing in China? Here is an example from myself. I get zero point in one of my Chinese exams during high school. The reason is that my essay only contained four paragraphs but the model needs five. I missed the first one which is introduction. It’s quite interesting that everyone write in the same model. Because of our everyday life is also very similar, the result is overwhelming. Every time when the teacher give a topic, the essays get from fifty students will be similar both in content and model.  I personally hate that kind of model which make everyone become same. “Chinese education is like Chinese industry which will produce same goods with good quality.”--said by a critic. We all have strong knowledge background. We can do so many exercises and get good grades in exams. We can write a full-point essay to match the model perfectly. But we are same. “Same” will not make the world better, also will not create innovation. That’s the reason of depression of Chinese technology. That’s also why I am here in America to study abroad. I want to be different.

In daily life, we always say “trust your original option before logic thinking”. We are now depending too much on rational thinking. Logic is same to anybody while subconscious feeling is different. We can get same output by learning but we will not get the same result by acquisition. In general, what we force ourselves to memorize will not last in our memory for very long time but what get by personal experiences will last very long. That is because one is artificial and the other is natural. The successful study process will be natural and personal-willing. The point is that all the logic model is artificial and all the subconscious thinking is natural. If we explore the right brain more, we can find more fantastic ideas. 

The world now needs difference, model will not make difference. What we have to do is just leave more time to our feelings instead of sitting in front of computer to calculate the answer to questions. We may find that we can also use emotional thinking to study science or humanities, there will not be model any more. There will be different problems and answers by different us.