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Language Acquistion

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28 views3 pages

Language Acquistion

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girls.gang126
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Language Learning and Language Acquisition

1.Defintions

Field (2004) states that the term is used for infants acquiring their native language (first
language acquisition) and for those learning a second or foreign language (second
language acquisition). The use of the terms is still unproblematic. Some experts use the
term ‘language learning’ and some use the term ‘language acquisition’. Chaer (2015)
explains that term ‘language learning’ is used because some experts believe that second
language can be master by learning the language intentionally and consciously. This is
different from the first language and mother tongue which is acquired naturally and
unconsciously without a formal setting. The term of language acquisition is used
because it is believed that second language or third language is acquired either formally
or informally.

There are two types of language learning; naturalistic language learning and formal
language learning. Naturalistic language learning is learning a language naturally,
unconsciously, and unintentionally. This usually occurs in bilingual or multilingual
society. Otherwise, formal language learning takes place in the classroom with teachers,
materials and learning aids.

2.Theories of Language Acquisition

Over the last fifty years, several theories have been put forward to explain the process
by which children learn to understand and speak a language. They can be summarised
as follows

1.Behaviourism

The behaviourist psychologists developed their theories while carrying out a series of
experiments on animals. They observed that rats or birds, for example, could be taught
to perform various tasks by encouraging habit-forming. Researchers rewarded desirable
behaviour. This was known as positive reinforcement. Undesirable behaviour was
punished or simply not rewarded - negative reinforcement. The behaviourist B. F.
Skinner then proposed this theory as an explanation for language acquisition in humans.
In Verbal Behaviour (1957), he stated: "The basic processes and relations which give
verbal behaviour its special characteristics are now fairly well understood. Much of the
experimental work responsible for this advance has been carried out on other species,
but the results have proved to be surprisingly free of species restrictions. Recent work
has shown that the methods can be extended to human behaviour without serious
modifications." (cited in Lowe and Graham, 1998, p68) Skinner suggested that a child
imitates the language of its parents or carers. Successful attempts are rewarded because
an adult who recognises a word spoken by a child will praise the child and/or give it
what it is asking for. Successful utterances are therefore reinforced while unsuccessful
ones are forgotten.

2.Innateness

Noam Chomsky published a criticism of the behaviourist theory in 1957. In addition to


some of the arguments listed above, he focused particularly on the impoverished
language input children receive. Adults do not typically speak in grammatically
complete sentences. In addition, what the child hears is only a small sample of language.
Chomsky concluded that children must have an inborn faculty for language acquisition.
According to this theory, the process is biologically determined - the human species has
evolved a brain whose neural circuits contain linguistic information at birth. The child's
natural predisposition to learn language is triggered by hearing speech and the child's
brain is able to interpret what s/he hears according to the underlying principles or
structures it already contains. This natural faculty has become known as the Language
Acquisition Device (LAD). Chomsky did not suggest that an English child is born
knowing anything specific about English, of course. He stated that all human languages
share common principles. (For example, they all have words for things and actions -
nouns and verbs.) It is the child's task to establish how the specific language s/he hears
expresses these underlying principles. For example, the LAD already contains the
concept of verb tense. By listening to such forms as "worked", "played" and "patted",
the child will form the hypothesis that the past tense of verbs is formed by adding the
sound /d/, /t/ or /id/ to the base form. This, in turn, will lead to the "virtuous errors"
mentioned above. It hardly needs saying that the process is unconscious. Chomsky does
not envisage the small child lying in its cot working out grammatical rules consciously!

3.The Cognitive Theory

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget placed acquisition of language within the context
of a child's mental or cognitive development. He argued that a child has to understand
a concept before s/he can acquire the particular language form which expresses that
concept. A good example of this is seriation. There will be a point in a child's
intellectual development when s/he can compare objects with respect to size. This
means that if you gave the child a number of sticks, s/he could arrange them in order of
size. Piaget suggested that a child who had not yet reached this stage would not be able
to learn and use comparative adjectives like "bigger" or "smaller". Object permanence
is another phenomenon often cited in relation to the cognitive theory. During the first
year of life, children seem unaware of the existence of objects they cannot see. An
object which moves out of sight ceases to exist. By the time they reach the age of 18
months, children have realised that objects have an existence independently of their
perception. The cognitive theory draws attention to the large increase in children's
vocabulary at around this age, suggesting a link between object permanence and the
learning of labels for objects.

4. Input or Interactionist Theories

In contrast to the work of Chomsky, more recent theorists have stressed the importance
of the language input children receive from their care-givers. Language exists for the
purpose of communication and can only be learned in the context of interaction with
people who want to communicate with you. Interactionists such as Jerome Bruner
suggest that the language behaviour of adults when talking to children (known by
several names by most easily referred to as child-directed speech or CDS) is specially
adapted to support the acquisition process. This support is often described to as
scaffolding for the child's language learning. Bruner also coined the term Language
Acquisition Support System or LASS in response to Chomsky's LAD. Colwyn
Trevarthen studied the interaction between parents and babies who were too young to
speak. He concluded that the turn-taking structure of conversation is developed through
games and non-verbal communication long before actual words are uttered.

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