Principles & Theories of

Language Acquisition and

Learning
Let’s Pray
 Thank you for today.
Thank you for ways in which you provide
for us all.
For Your protection and love we thank You.
Help us to focus our hearts and minds
now on what we are about to learn.
Inspire us by Your Holy Spirit as we listen
and write.
Guide us by your eternal light
as we discover more about the world
around us.
We ask all this in the name of Jesus
Amen.
The Functional
Approaches
Functional Approaches
- Functional approaches in language
acquisition are functions that are meaningful,
interactive purposes within a social
(pragmatic) context that we accomplish with
the forms.
Cognition and Language Development
- Lois Bloom (1971) cogently illustrated the
first issue in her criticism of pivot grammar
when she pointed out that the relationships in
which words occur in telegraphic utterances
are only superficially similar.
Cognition and Language Development
For example, in the utterance "Mommy sock,"
which nativists would describe as a sentence
consisting of a pivot word and an open word,
Bloom found at least three possible underlying
relations:
Cognition and Language Development
agent-action (Mommy is putting the sock on),
agent-object(Mommy sees the sock)
Cognition and Language Development
possessor-possessed (Mommy's sock),
by examining data in reference to contexts,
Bloom concluded that children learn
underlying structures, and not superficial
word order
Cognition and Language Development
depending on the social context,
"Mommy sock" could mean a number of
different things to a child. Those varied
meanings were inadequately captured in a
pivot grammar approach.
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a Swiss
developmental psychologist known for his
pioneering work in the field of cognitive
development in children. His theories and
observations have had a significant impact on
educational psychology and continue to
influence the study of child development.
Social Interaction and Language Development

Holzman (1984, p. 119), in her

"reciprocal model" of language development,
proposed that "a reciprocal behavioral system
operates between the language-developing infant-
child and the competent adult language user in a
socializing-teaching-nurturing role"
Regulatory
- Language used to influence the
behavior of others. Concerned with
persuading / commanding / requesting other
people to do things you want.
Interactional:
- Language used to develop social
relationships and ease the process
of interaction. Concerned with the phatic
dimension of talk.
Personal
- Language used to express the personal
preferences and identity of the
speaker. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Here I
am!’ function – announcing oneself to the
world.
Representational
- Language used to exchange
information. Concerned with
relaying or requesting information.
Heuristic
- Language used to learn and explore
the environment. Child uses language to learn;
this may be questions and answers, or the kind
of running commentary that frequently
accompanies children’s play
Imaginative
- Language used to explore the
imagination. May also accompany play
as children create imaginary worlds, or may
arise from storytelling.
Learning and Training
PAVLOVS CLASSICAL BEHAVIORISM
For Pavlov, the learning process consisted of
the formation of associations between stimuli and reflexive
responses. All of us are aware that certain stimuli
automatically produce or elicit rather specific responses or
reflexes, and we have also observed that sometimes that
reflex occurs in response to stimuli that appear to be
indirectly related to the reflex.
AUSUBEL'S SUBSUMPTION THEORY
David Ausubel contended that learning takes
place in the human organism through a meaningful
process of relating new events or items to already existing
cognitive concepts or propositions. It is this relatability that,
according to Ausubel, accounts for a number of phenomena:
the acquisition of new meanings (knowledge), retention, the
psychological organization of knowledge as a hierarchical
structure, and the eventual occurrence of forgetting.
Rote vs. Meaningful Learning
Rote learning refers to the things that can be, or
memorized, usually by continued repetition, and does not
require/involve understanding.

Meaningful learning refers to learning with understanding

attached; it is the ability to relate new information to prior
knowledge.
SYSTEMATIC FORGETTING
Ausubel provided a plausible explanation for the
universal nature of forgetting. Since rottenly learned
materials do not interact with cognitive structure in a
substantive fashion, they are learned in conformity with the
laws of association, and their retention is influenced
primarily by the interfering effects of similar rote materials
learned immediately before or after the learning task. It is
this second stage of subsumption that operates through
what cognitive pruning procedures (Brown, 1972).
ROGERS'S HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY
Rogers's humanistic psychology has more of
an affective focus than a cognitive one, and so it may
be said to fall into the perspective of a constructivist
view of learning. In his classic work Client-Centered
Therapy (1951), Rogers carefully analyzed human
behavior in general, including the learning process,
by means of the presentation of 19 formal principles
of human behavior
Issues in First Language
Acquisition
Competence and Performance
Chomsky separates competence and
performance; he describes 'competence' as an
idealized capacity that is located as a psychological
or mental property or function and 8performance9
as the production of actual utterances. In short,
competence involves “knowing” the language and
performance involves “doing” something with the
language.
Comprehension and Production
Comprehension is the words and word
combinations that children understand. Production
is the words and word combinations that children
use.
Nature vs Nurture
Nature is how we develop as a result of
genetic inheritance and other biological factors.
Nurture is the acquisition of traits through
experience and learning after we are conceived.
Systematicity and Variability
One of the assumptions of a good deal of current
research on child language is the systematicity of the process of
acquisition. From pivot grammar to three- and four-word utterances,
and to full sentences of almost indeterminate length, children exhibit a
remarkable ability to infer the phonological, structural, lexical, and
semantic system of language. But in the midst of all this systematicity,
there is an equally remarkable amount of variability in the process of
learning. Researchers do not agree on how to define various "stages"
of language acquisition, even in English. Certain "typical" patterns
appear in child language.
Imitation
It is a common informal observation that children
are good imitators. We think of children typically as
imitators, and then conclude that imitation is one of the
important strategies a child uses in the acquisition of
language. That conclusion is not inaccurate on a global level.
Behaviorists assume one type of imitation, but a deeper
level of imitation is far more important in the process of
language acquisition.
Imitation
Types of Imitation
1. Surface-structure imitation - In foreign language
classes, rote pattern drills often evoke surface imitation:
a repetition of sounds by the student without the vaguest
understanding of what the sounds might possibly mean.

2. Deep structure imitation - children perceive the

importance of the semantic level of language, they attend
to a greater extent to that meaningful semantic level.
Practice and Frequency
It is common to observe children and
conclude that they "practice" language constantly,
especially in the early stages of single-word and two-
word utterances. A behavioral model of first language
acquisition would claim that practice—repetition and
association — is the key to the formation of habits by
operant conditioning. Children's practice seems to be a
key to language
acquisition.
Discourse
While parental input is a significant part of the
child's development of conversational rules, it is only one
aspect, as the child also interacts with peers and, of
course, with other adults. in order for successful, first
language acquisition to take place, interaction, rather
than exposure, is required; children do not learn
language from overhearing the conversations of others
or from listening to the radio, and must, instead, acquire
it in the context of being spoken to. .
First Language Acquisition
Insights Applied to
Language Teaching
Grammar Translation Method
In grammar-translation classes, students learn
grammatical rules and then apply those rules by
translating sentences between the target language and
the native language. Advanced students may be required
to translate whole texts word-for-word.
Direct Method
The basic premise of direct method was that
second language learning should be more like first
language learning: lots of active oral interaction,
spontaneous use of the language, no translation
between first and second languages, and little or no
analysis of grammatical rules.
Gouin and the Series Method
Francois Gouin went to Hamburg to learn German
purely through memorization, reading, and translation.
However, he was repeatedly frustrated by his inability to
speak and comprehend the language. Upon returning to his
native France, he began to consider how children acquire
their native language. He developed the Series Method to
teach directly, without translation, series of connected
sentences related to a task or activity (Brown & Lee, 2015).