Delta Module One Revision Course

Innate abilities emerge naturally.
Other abilities are learned.
Innateness theory states that the ability to acquire language emerges naturally without explicit teaching or conscious learning.  The ability is qualitatively different from:
the abilities to use a word processor or play chess (which are learned)
and similar to:
the abilities to walk or grasp objects (which emerge naturally)

The U-shaped learning curve refers to the fact that children (and older language learners) will acquire the correct form and then, applying a newly-learned rule, will start using the wrong form before going back to the correct form.
For example:
A child may learn to use sheep as a plural noun in, e.g.:
   The sheep are eating in the field
and then, having learned how to inflect plural forms, begin to say
   The sheeps are in the field
before going back to the correct form.
A learner of English may learn a chunk of language such as:
   Would you like to ... ?
and then, having learned about verb structures after like, may begin to say:
   Would you like going tonight?
before reverting to the correct form.

Children's speech is different from adults' speech.
Children do not produce fully formed sentences.  They progress from 1-word utterances and then go on to more complex utterances with longer sentences.
The U-shaped learning curve.
If imitation were all there was to acquiring language, then the U-shaped curve, going from correct production of irregular forms to overgeneralisation of the rule to recognition of the irregularity, would not occur because a child would very rarely, if ever, hear the incorrect form in order to imitate it.
Innovation:
Both children and adults are capable of forming utterances they have never heard.  A child might, for example, say Cow river fall even though no adult has ever said it to her.

Reinforcement is a concept in behaviourist theory which refers to the response to what someone says or does.  If the response is positive, the action will be reinforced.  If the response is negative, the behaviour will not be repeated.  This is called operant conditioning.
For example, if a learner says:
    I go yesterday
and the teacher frowns or ignores it, the habit will not be reinforced, but if the learner says
    I went yesterday
and the teacher shouts
    Terrific!  Well done!
then the habit of using went for the past tense will be reinforced.

This refers to the theory that learners of any language will try to form hypotheses and theories about how the language is structured and they will refine and change their theories in response to what they hear or read.
It is a cognitive theory of learning.

Inductive learning is based on working out a rule from a set of correctly formed examples.
Deductive learning refers to using a given rule to determine the correct form.

Some researchers believe that the ages between approximately three and thirteen years constitute the time when people can acquire their first languages and native-speaker competence in a second language.

Performance is what is actually said by speakers of the language.
Competence is the underlying knowledge of a language which allows people to generate correctly formed utterances.

This is supposed to be a set of categories and rules common to all languages, no matter what their individual grammatical structures are like and no matter what sorts of languages they are.  Example include pluralisation, noun phrases and verb phrases, determiners and more.

Signification refers to the basic meaning of an utterance.  This is language usage.
Value refers to its communicative function.  This is language use.

Interlanguage refers to where the learner's current knowledge lies on a continuum from knowing nothing about the target language to its full mastery.

This is based on Krashen's Input Hypothesis and refers to input which is just above the learner's current competence and knowledge.  It is comprehensible input.

Uncertainty avoidance refers to people's unwillingness to take risks and tolerate ambiguity.
Collectivist societies are those in which the individual's needs are easily subordinated to the needs of society in general.