Second Language Acquisition in Children Essay Example

Second Language Acquisition in Children Essay Why is it so difficult for some children to learn second-languages in school and why do some children, who seem to have learned the language, nonetheless do poorly in their academic work? These questions have long puzzled educators, but they have become more salient in many parts of the world as millions of children enter school each year with limited knowledge of the language of instruction. In Europe and the United States alone it is estimated that ten million children come from families where the language of the home is different from the language of the country in which they live. In many parts of Asia and Africa it is assumed that an educated person will know one or more languages beyond the language of the home. Yet learning a second language in school is a slow and tedious task for most children some of whom never succeed in becoming bilingual (Eckman 21). One reason why children find learning second languages in school difficult may be that they are taught in the wrong way. This is a perennial argument made by educational innovators who periodically announce some new technique that will revolutionize language teaching in school. Indeed, the teaching of second languages is a long and fascinating tale. A brief review of various developments will be presented in this paper. Another reason why children fail to learn second languages well in school relates to understanding of what it is that they have to learn. There may be more to learning a second language in a school setting (especially when that language is the language of instruction) than simply learning how to speak the language well. In addition to the question of what must be learned (the product of learning), there is the question of how learning takes place (the process of learning). The paper will deal with the cognitive and linguistic processes that the child uses in learning a second language. The demands of the classroom What is it that children from minority language backgrounds learning a second language in school need to learn? What language skills are needed for school? What is it that the school demands of the child? How can one characterize the language of the classroom (whether it be a bilingual or a monolingual classroom), and how does this language differ from the language the child has learned to use in natural communication settings? We will write a custom essay sample on Second Language Acquisition in Children specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on Second Language Acquisition in Children specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on Second Language Acquisition in Children specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer When the six-year-old child comes to school, he or she has mastered the task of learning to communicate in the first language. The child has learned to use language to express needs and feelings within the social context of the everyday life of the home. The classroom presents a new complexity: In some sense, all formal education is bilingual, since the forms and ways of expression of written language never reflect the spoken language exactly. Words, ways of speaking and forms of discourse are used in the school setting which are not used in ordinary conversation and in other nonschool settings. The first aim of formal education since its beginnings in the third millennium B.C. has always been to teach the pupils a written form of language (Ferguson, Houghton, Wells, 1977, p. 159). Just what are the ways of speaking and forms of discourse used in the school? There have been a number of discussions of this issue and different authors have somewhat different terminology to distinguish the language of the home and the language of school. What of children who have to learn ‘the language of school’ in a second language? When the language of instruction is different from the language the child speaks, the child has a dual task. It is not simply a question of learning the formal, academic language of school; the child has to do this in a second language. Some children seem to have no trouble with this dual task; others find it very difficult. One particularly influential hypothesis as to why children succeed or fail in a school where instruction is in a second language is the ‘linguistic interdependence hypothesis,’ proposed by Jim Cummins (1980). According to this hypothesis, the level of competence a child attains in a second language learned in a school context is a function of certain competencies attained in the childs first language. In particular, Cummins suggested that the use of certain functions of language and the development of vocabulary and concepts in the first language are important determinants of success in a school situation where instruction is in a second language (Eckman 78-80). In elaborating on this position, Cummins (1980) suggested that there are three general aspects of a childs knowledge of language that are closely related and that constitute the basic skills that children need to realize positive benefits from a bilingual school experience. The first is what Becker (1977) has called vocabulary-concept knowledge specifically, the childs understanding of the concepts or meanings embodied in words. Obviously, if the child does not have any understanding (or a very limited understanding) of the concepts represented in the words on a printed page, reading comprehension is impaired. A second basic skill involves metalinguistic insights, especially two specific insights: (a) the realization that print is meaningful, and (b) the realization that written language is different from spoken language. The first insight is necessary for the child to be motivated to read; the second helps the child give structure and predictability to written language: Unless the child realizes that written language is different from spoken language, predictions about the meaning of text are likely to be inaccurate. The third prerequisite is the ability to decontextualize language. That is, the child must be able to take language out of its immediate context. This capacity relates to a considerable extent to experiences the child has had before coming to school. Children who have had the experience of being read to are aware that written language is different from spoken language. The processes of second language acquisition What are the mental representations that underpin second language acquisition (SLA)? What is the nature of the mapping processes involved in learning them? To what extent are these representations learned unconsciously? And to what extent are explicit learning or explicit instruction necessary in order to attain native-like competence, fluency, and idiomaticity? SLA in children is the learning of constructions that relate form and meaning. Some constructions and interpretations are much more frequent than others. Fluent speakers of a language implicitly know this and their processing systems are tuned to expect them accordingly. Every element of surface language form is multiply ambiguous in its interpretation, just as every meaning can be expressed in a variety of ways. Fluent language learners are tuned to these mapping strengths: They know implicitly the most likely interpretation of a linguistic cue as well as the relative likelihoods of the range of alternatives and how these ch ange in differing contexts. Their language processing is sensitive to input frequency at all levels of grain: phonology and phonotactics, reading, spelling, lexis, morphosyntax, formulaic language, language comprehension, grammaticality, sentence production, and syntax. Thus, SLA must involve acquisition of the strengths of these associations. The influence of the first language The evidence from research on second language learning in children is that connection between languages is not as inevitable or ubiquitous as was once supposed. Contrastive analysis, in its traditional form, was not able to account for the vast majority of errors that second-language learners made; in fact, learners from quite different language backgrounds appeared to make the same types of mistakes in the target language. Research in the early 1970s (especially Dulay Burt, 1973) suggested that regardless of their first language, children learning English as a second language made similar kinds of mistakes. If, as contrastive analysis supposed, first-language structures were the major source of a second-language learners errors, one would expect that children from such structurally dissimilar first languages as Chinese and Norwegian would make dissimilar mistakes in English. However, the research seemed to indicate that they did not, but instead made the same kinds of errors error s that were similar to those made developmentally by children acquiring English as a first language. Subsequent studies (e.g., Wode, 1978) revealed that transfer from the first language does occur in the speech of children from certain first-language backgrounds and at certain times in the learning process. It is an exaggeration to say that transfer from the first language is minimal and unimportant. The acquisition of phonological, syntactic, and morphological structures in a second language involves an interplay of both developmental and transfer factors. Transfer errors do occur and are extremely interesting for the researcher because of what they reveal about the learners strategies. Nonetheless, the influence of the learners first language is more indirect and restricted than was once supposed. The evidence suggests that preschool children approach the task of second-language learning in much the same way they approached the task of learning their first language. Some authors speak of the reactivation of childrens facility for language acquisition (Corder 76-90) or of a creative construction process (Dulay Burt 89). The idea behind these notions is that children seem to be guided in second-language learning, as in first-language learning, by strategies that cause them to formulate certain types of hypotheses about the language system being learned. They reconstruct the rules for the speech they hear on the basis of these hypotheses, until the mismatch between the target language they are exposed to and their own speech productions is resolved. SLA is the learning of constructions relating form and meaning The task of the language learner is to make sense of language. Understanding is built, or falls, depending on the adequacy of the learners construction set for meanings. Language construction sets are as infinitely combinatorial and creative as are Lego and Meccano, and as limiting also. Without the right piece, the support buckles and the structure crashes. Without preparatory organization and practice, activity focuses on searching for the right block rather than the process of building itself. Less tangible than plastic or metal, the language learners kit consists of constructions that map forms and meanings—the recurrent patterns of linguistic elements that serve some well-defined linguistic function. They may be complex structures, like Lego arches, trucks, or houses. Some frequent, smaller structures, like generic Lego arches, walls, and wheeled axles, are abstract patterns—the noun phrase, the prepositional phrase, and so forth. Others come preformed, like Lego w indows, doors, and beams (where kit frequency inversely relates to beam size)—formulas like â€Å"how are you?†, â€Å"I think Ill†¦Ã¢â‚¬ , â€Å"a great deal of†¦Ã¢â‚¬ , and â€Å"survival of the fittest.† A construction is part of the linguistic system, accepted as a convention in the speech community, and entrenched as grammatical knowledge in the learners mind. Constructions may be complex or simple. Hence, â€Å"morphology, † â€Å"syntax, † and â€Å"lexicon† are uniformly represented in construction grammar, unlike both traditional grammar and generative grammar. Constructions are symbolic: In addition to specifying the defining properties of morphological, syntactic, and lexical form, a construction also specifies the semantic, pragmatic, and discourse functions associated with it. Constructions form a structured inventory of a speakers knowledge of language, in which schematic constructions can be abstracted over the less schematic ones that are inferred inductively by the learner in acquisition. A construction may provide a partial specification of the structure of an utterance. If language is represented as a community of constructions, induced from exemplars and evidencing classic prototype effects, then the understanding of language acquisition can be informed by classic psychological research on category formation, schema learning, and classification. Construction-based theories of child language acquisition (Tomasello 2000) emphasize the piecemeal learning of concrete exemplars and widespread lexical-specificity in LI grammar development. A high proportion of childrens early multiword speech is produced from a developing collection of slot-and-frame patterns based around chunks of one or two words or phrases (e.g., I can + verb; wheres + noun + gone?). Children are very productive with these patterns and both the number of patterns and their structure develop over time. They are, however, lexically specific: A child who consistently uses two patterns, / can + X and / don 7 + X, will typically show little or no overlap in the verbs used in the X slots of these two constructions (Tomasello 2000). Second and foreign language acquisition is different from LI acquisition in numerous respects. First, it differs in conceptual development: In child language acquisition, knowledge of the world and knowledge of language are developing simultaneously, whereas adult SLA builds upon preexisting conceptual knowledge. Moreover, adult learners have sophisticated formal operational means of thinking and can treat language as an object of explicit learning, that is, of conscious problem solving and deduction, to a much greater degree than can children (Ellis 1994). Second, it differs in language input: The typical LI pattern of acquisition results from naturalistic exposure in situations where caregivers naturally scaffold development (Tomasello 2000), whereas classroom environments for second or foreign language teaching can distort the patterns of exposure, function, medium, and social interaction (Ellis 1994). Third, it differs in transfer from LI: Adult SLA builds on preexisting LI knowl edge. Phonotactics People are very good at judging whether or not nonwords are native-like and young children are sensitive to these regularities when trying to repeat nonwords. Phonotactic competence simply emerges from using language, from the primary linguistic data of the lexical patterns that a speaker knows (Bailey Hahn, 2001). Bailey asked native speakers to judge nonword stimuli for whether they were more or less like English words. The nonwords were created with relatively high or low probability legal phonotactic patterns as determined by the logarithm of the product of probabilities of the onset and rime constituents of the nonword. The mean wordlikeness judgments for these nonword stimuli had an extremely strong relationship with expected probability (r .87). An emergentist account of phonotactic competence is thus that any new nonword is compared to the exemplars that are in memory: The closer it matches their characteristics, the more wordlike it is judged (Eckman 87). The gathering of such relevant distributional data starts in infancy. Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1996) demonstrated that 8 month old infants exposed for only 2 minutes to unbroken strings of spoken nonsense syllables (e.g., ‘bidakupado’) are able to detect the difference between threesyllable sequences that appeared as a unit and sequences that also appeared in their learning set but in random order. Phonological Awareness Childrens awareness of the sounds of their language, particularly at the segmental levels of phoneme, is important in their acquisition of literacy. It is an awareness that develops gradually. De Cara and Goswami (2002) show that 4- to 7- year-old children are better able to identify the word with the odd sound (e.g., â€Å"bag, rag, jack†), rather than when the stimuli came from sparse ones (e.g., â€Å"pig, dig, lid†). The children were also better in short-term memory span tasks at remembering nonword triples from dense phonological neighborhoods like â€Å"cham, shen, deek† than triples like â€Å"deeve, chang, shem† derived from sparse ones. These phonological neighborhood density effects are driven by vocabulary age, not by chronological age. Schmidt (1990) proposed a Lexical Restructuring Hypothesis of these effects whereby, as vocabulary increases, more and more similar words are acquired. Context and Second Language Acquisition One incontrovertible fact that scholars in the field of second language acquisition can agree on is that language is not learned in isolation. What is not clear is what the role of context is as learners move forward to learn forms, to leam meanings, and to make the necessary connections between those forms and meanings. Nearly 22 years ago Gass Madden (1985) published the first book dealing with input in second language acquisition. Given the history of the field of second language acquisition, the role of input had never received much attention until that time. In the following years, the role of input, which is of course central to any discussion of context and form-meaning connections, has endured and yet is still not entirely clear. Todays research world is dealing with greater theoretical and methodological sophistication and a greater focus on psycholinguistic aspects of form-meaning relationships than in the 1980s. Conclusions Researchers argue that input is necessary for acquisition, defined as the development of an underlying mental representation. Certainly, input is necessary, but interaction plays an important role for acquisition because it facilitates the attentional link that is crucial to understanding how learners extract information from the environment and use it in the development of their second language grammars. This is very similar to conclusion about the roles of input and of output. Acquisition is input dependent. As stated earlier, there can be no acquisition without input. Output is similarly important, but is not a sine qua non. However, as shown in the study described here, the combination leads to greater learning than either one alone. What seems to be emerging is that there are numerous factors that guide second language acquisition. They can be investigated in isolation and their significance can be determined, but they should also be investigated as interacting and converging fa ctors to truly see how they operate in the learning of a second language for children. As many have said before, selective attention is a crucial mechanism in the development of second language knowledge. Importantly, it is what links the context with internal learning mechanisms. But part of the controversy as to whether it is essential for learning may be obscured by the fact that no one has looked carefully enough at the contributing factors to attention of which there are many. To just take the examples, it is necessary to understand the what of attention—that is, what parts of language can be attended to and can benefit from focal attention—and to pay attention to the when of attention. For example, is it in conjunction with large doses of input, the socalled input-flooding with regard to positive and negative evidence? Is it the same at all proficiency levels? What sort of input is necessary? Is input through interaction necessary? Is input through specific explanation necessary? But, this too, is only a drop in the bucket. In sum, this paper consid ers the questions of whether or not context is relevant and begins to examine the nature of the role of the environment. An initial attempt was made to understand what internal mechanisms are necessary for linkage with the linguistic context.

Professor Essays

Professor Essays Professor Essay Professor Essay Calculate the present value of the following cash flows discounted at 10 percent: a. $1,000 received seven years from today. B. $2,000 received one year from today. C. $500 received eight years from today. 2. A firm has an estimated pension liability of $1. 5 million due 27 years from today. If the firm can Invest In a risk free security that has a stated annual Interest payment of 8 percent, how much must the firm invest today to be able to make the $1. Million payment? 3. You have the opportunity to make an investment that costs $900,000. If you make this investment now, you will receive $120,000 one year from today, $250,000 two years from today, and $800,000 three years from today. The appropriate discount rate for this investment is 12 percent. A. Should you make the Investment? B. What is the net present value (NP) of this opportunity? C. If the discount rate is 11 percent, should you invest? Compute the NP to support your answer. 4. Given an Interest rate of 10 percent per year, what Is the value at date 5 (I. E. , the end of year 5) of a perpetual stream of $120 annual payments starting at date = 9? 5. You have $100,000 to Invest for six years. You can Invest this at a rate of 7. 67% compounded annually, at a rate of 7. 52% compounded quarterly, or at a rate of 7. 35% compounded monthly. Which of the three alternatives would give you the highest amount in six years? 6. The Wendy Group Is a construction firm that specializes In building educational facilities. It has been approached by a large university concerning the construction of a library. Construction of the library is expected to take 3 years. The university will pay $40 million for the library in 4 yearly payments of $10 million each, the first of which Is paid immediately and the last of which Is paid three years from now when the library is completed. The Wendy group has two different construction plans it can follow. Under plan A most of the costs occur in the early stages and under plan B most costs are delayed. The following table shows the costs under the two plans. Plan A Cost Year 1 OFF 2 3 Plan B cost 17. 5 5. 0 6. 5 9. 5 2. 0 1. 2 7. 0 32. 5 Payment Received 10 (A) Calculate the NP of each plan using discount rates of 5%, 10% and 12%. (B) Which plan has a higher AIR? Is an AIR comparison meaningful for choosing between plans A and B? Explain your answer

The Relationship between Culture and Technology Research Paper

The Relationship between Culture and Technology - Research Paper Example The topic is based on the development and forms of old media which indicates the technological development in the old era. This will be compared with the temporary social network technologies such as the Facebook. This will be developed with the intention to observe the technological development along the time and the cultural change relied on the technological development. Furthermore, this paper will provide the understanding of cultural changes such as what individual’s daily life changes along with the technological development. This will examine the individual’s lifestyle in today’s world and what has changed and their relations with technologies. Thus, this current study will summarize the media development and the relationship between technological and cultural change. Overall, this present study is based on the relationship between old and new media technologies and their associated cultural practices. According to Mesch (2009), new media shapes many ways to communicate and interact with each other. It is identified that interactivity is considered as central to new media which include letters to the editor, radio and television talk shows, computer and technological programme and listener participation in such programs. In accordance of Pinchot, Paullet, and Rota (2010), it is identified that old media interactivity was less as radios, television and newspapers did not measure the preferences and opinions of people as communication was considered as conversation. Grossman (2008) argues that people were provided what the media idea and thought is right for them but in today’s world, the interactivity degree has enhanced that does not necessarily mean. This means that every media has few interactivity components or elements which mostly do as it is examined by computers which can converse back these days.

Financial analysis of Zest Spa Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Financial analysis of Zest Spa - Essay Example This research will begin with the statement that Zest Spa is planning to provide express services at one or more of three chosen international airports in India. The process comprises a significant amount of fixed and variable investment on the part of the company and therefore it was considered necessary to evaluate the project from financial as well as non-financial aspect. In a business plan or a new venture, financial analysis and projection are considered as an essential aspect thereof. The success and controlling of the business significantly depend on financial projections of a firm as quantitative control is equally important for a firm besides qualitative control. The financial analysis primarily consists of important aspects such as budgeting, investment appraisal, profit and growth projection and ratio analysis. The other measures that are also considered as useful are a determination of weighted average cost of capital and comparing the same with return on investment and internal returns and sensitivity analysis. Profit and loss analysis is essential in a business so that for an accounting period (commonly a year), the profit or loss incurred by a company is determined. The Profit and loss statement is one of the essential financial statements that present profitability of a firm. Determination of profit or loss is necessary so that an estimate of costs and earnings can be determined. The statement is also useful for the calculation of various margins.

Sino-Japanese relations Essay Example for Free

Sino-Japanese relations Essay Sino-Japanese relations are destined to have a profound impact on Southeast Asia. After all, as noted by Stephen Leong, For Asia to be secure, Japan and China have to be getting along† Otherwise the security architecture of Asia will change. China, Japan and the US may not enjoy the most comfortable of partnerships, considering each nation’s competitive streak and occasional differences over trade, global governance and security issues. But the partnership works and is improving, with the potential for resolving many regional and global problems, explains Morton Abramowitz, former US ambassador and senior fellow at the Century Foundation. In analyzing major issues confronting the three nations, Abramowitz also offers specific recommendations: Japan and the US should refrain from forming â€Å"values† alliances against China; China should end opposition to a seat on the UN Security Council for Japan; and East Asia should form more consultative forums for planning and integration. Ongoing integration and consultation can only improve the relationship, according to Abramowitz, creating a multilateral policymaking model for the century ahead. China grows rapidly, deriving significant clout and thereby assuming a new world role. Despite a recent leadership transition, Chinese leaders remain preoccupied with mitigating massive distortions of growth, ensuring a successful Olympics and preventing regime change. Its military modernization arouses American. Yet China continues to be out of step with the political morality of leading countries. China has a long way to go in exercising international leadership. Japan is a major world economic player, but wants to be a â€Å"normal† nation without its postwar defense limitations. It remains fearful of China’s competition, even as both economies become more entwined. Japan and China have one major concrete dispute – maritime claims. The US and Japan each value their alliance, influence in Southeast Asia –but the absence of which was clear when most East seat. In recent years, China has increased its assertiveness in pursuing territorial claims in the South China Sea. This development can most likely be traced to Chinas need to find sources of oil since China switched from being an oil-exporting nation to an oil-importing nation a few years ago. While Southeast Asian nations have essentially agreed to disagree by postponing resolution of their territorial disputes, China continues to insist on its rights to drill for oil on these islands. These actions exemplify the need to establish a multilateral resource development regime whose prerequisite for admission could be the resolution of territorial disputes. . 6Devout Muslims, particularly in Indonesia and the Philippines, saw themselves marginalized by secular (Indonesian) or Christian (Filipino) governments. This produced a sense of victimization that meshed with the message from Osama bin Laden and others. Money from the Persian Gulf (particularly Saudi Arabia) has flowed into Southeast Asia, propagating a strict, doctrinaire version of Islam through schools and mosques. Mujahideen were indoctrinated into a militant jihadist returned to Southeast Asia ripe for recruitment into local terrorist organizations dedicated to the destruction of non- Muslim communities, Western influence, and secular governments. There are three types of international terrorist groups- al Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), whose agenda includes attacks on U. S. interests and the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate; and traditional Muslim separatists, such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the southern Philippines and the Pattani National Liberation Front in southern Thailand, that seek a separate Muslim state. One of the questions affecting the security future of Southeast Asia is whether the predominantly Muslim societies in the region can find a way to neutralize and absorb the militants into a moderate body politic. The picture is greatly complicated by linkages between groups including JI and al Qaeda, between Abu Sayyaf and al Qaeda, and between JI and the MILF. Further complications arise from alleged links between elements of the Indonesian 8 military and Laskar Jihad and another similar group, the Islamic Defenders Front. In short, terrorism in Southeast Asia would depict interactive networks with multiple agendas. The October 2002 bombings in Bali forced Jakarta to acknowledge the reality.

Philosophy of Education :: Philosophy of Teaching Statement

Philosophy of Education â€Å"Be all that you can be. Find your future- as a teacher.† No, joining the army is not what Madeline Fuchs Holzer had in mind when she said this quote. Being all you can be in life requires dedication, responsibility and a desire to do what you love. Teaching is a profession that requires 110% from a person. I have the drive and ability to be the best that I can be as a teacher. There is not anything else I would want to do with my life besides teaching. I want to be a reflection to my students that they can be all that they can be. Another quote by Henry Adams, â€Å"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.† To be that type of teacher has been a lifelong goal for me. I want to make my mark in the world and this is my way of doing it. To have the ability to affect a child’s life for an eternity is something that not everyone can say they have accomplished. Teaching definitely is a profession that will affect eternit y. The main reasons for wanting to become a teacher would be my love for children, my family inspirations; God’s calling for me, and my love for learning. All my life I have enjoyed being around children. They have great spirits about them that makes me feel free spirited. Their innocence, undying energy and their love for life makes me take these characteristics and apply them to my own life. Another motivation for me is the inspirations of my grandfather and my father. My grandfather died when I was very young and the one thing everyone has always said about him is his love of flying and teaching. His life was spent on teaching others and when he passed away he was remembered as being a great teacher devoting himself entirely to his family and his students. My father spent the first thirty years of his life going form job to job since he had not finished his schooling younger in life. At middle age he decided to go back to college and earned his degree in education. He felt that becoming a teacher he would be a testimony to children to continue their education to better their future.

“Of Mice and Men” A comparison between the book and film Essay

The similarity between the book and the film â€Å"Of Mice and Men† is most evident. Even so, there are a few differences, some insignificant and other crucial. However, in the majority of the scenes, the dialogs are taken literally from the book. The first difference appears in the introduction of the film. The book starts by describing the surrounding landscape of the Salinas Valley where Lennie and George spend the night by the river. We learn that Lennie is mentally challenged and how this affected their stay at the farm where they previously worked. The film starts, however, by showing Lennie and George escaping from this farm and their journey to Salinas Valley. Another difference that I noticed is concerning Curley’s wife. In the book there is a scene where Lennie, Candy and Crooks are gathered in Crooks’ room. After a while, Curley’s wife emerges and the atmosphere becomes unpleasant. Crooks finds the courage to stand up against her, and when he does, she verbally breaks him down. In the movie this scene never takes place, and by eliminating this incident Curley’s wife’s destructive nature stays unrevealed. The scene where George is about to shoot Lennie is also different in the film than in the book. In the book this episode is long and George has a hard time shooting Lennie. I get the impression that George is hesitating and unsure if this is the right thing to do. In the film the scene is much shorter and George appears considerably more secure . The movie ends with a scene where George and Lennie work together on the little farm that they where planning to buy. This is not in the book at all. Other scenes that were left out in the movie:The scene where Lennie has hallucinations about a giant rabbit and his aunt Clara. The scene after George has killed Lennie. In the book Slim comforts George by taking him for a drink. And the scene where Candy comes into the room when Lennie and Crooks are talking about the little farm they are buying. In the film Crooks never finds out about the little farm. In my opinion both the film and the book has its flaws. In the film some crucial scenes are removed, but I thought that the characters in the movie were better than in the book. In the book, I liked neither George nor Lennie. I got the impression that George was a sensitive and kind man. He always watched over Lennie and tried do the right thing. In the film George is everything he is in the book, but he is also a wise man who people can seek advice from. He has an inquisitive and contemplating look about him. I also liked Lennie better in the movie. In the book he was just a mentally challenged character, but in the film he becomes a person with real feelings and I understand his actions on another level. I believe that this would be a better film if they had shortened it. It seems to me that the film is an unnecessarily prolonged version of the book. On the other hand, taking to many liberties when adapting this modern classic into a film would not be a smart thing to do.. Even so, I still think that the filmmakers should have left out some insignificant scenes. The story however, is brilliant; the irony in the end where George kills Lennie out of love, how the story is composed of four major issues,(the value of dreams and goals, moral responsibility, social injustice, and the bond of friendship and loyalty,) and how loneliness is one of the main emotions. The story is brilliant and genius, and only an outstanding writer like John Stenbeck can create a masterpiece like this.