Lesson Theories of L1 Acquisition

1 (Week 1)
Knowledge Activation!
Children have a remarkable ability to communicate. Small babies
initially learn to babble and coo and cry and vocally and nonvocally send
messages and receive messages. At the end of first year, they start to imitate
words and speech sounds and about this time use their first words; at 18
months, their vocabulary in terms of words increases and they are beginning to
use 2-word 3-word utterances (known as “telegraphic utterances); at the age of
3 years old, children can comprehend an incredible quantity of linguistic input,
they chatter nonstop; at school age, children start to internalize increasingly
complex structures, expand their vocabulary and sharpen their communication
skills and they also learn the social functions of their language. And as they
age, they become very adept at using the language. But do you ever wonder
what children really undergo to achieve such feat? This lesson shall help you
articulate the theories as to how first language is acquired. But before formally
discussing these theories, accomplish the task below first.
Directions. Speculate how first language is acquired. How do you think
children learn a language? Write your answer in the box provided.
I think children learn a language:
 Discussion!
Theories of L1 Acquisition
Let’s see if your speculation is sound based on existing theories that
explain how children acquire a language. There are three positions as to how
children learn their first language. These are the behavioristic position, nativist
position, and functional position. We shall discuss them one by one here.
1. Behaviorist Position
Behaviorists believe that children come into this world with a tabula rasa
(a clean slate bearing no preconceived notions about the world or about
language) and that these children are then shaped by the environment and
slowly conditioned through various schedules of reinforcement. They also
believe that language is a fundamental part of total human behavior and this
can also be conditioned and reinforced. This approach focused on the
immediately perceptible aspects of linguistic behavior-the publicly observable
responses-and the relationships or associations between those responses and
events in the world surrounding them. A behaviorist might consider effective
language behavior to be the production of correct responses to stimuli. If a
particular response is reinforced, it then becomes habitual, or conditioned.
This is true of their comprehension as well as production responses.
Moreover, the behaviorist view imitation and practice as primary
processes in language development. They believe that children repeat word for
word or part of someone else’s utterance and through this they learn a
language. Also, they believe that practice is necessary to acquire a language
wherein children repetitively manipulate forms. Finally, they believe that
children’s imitation is selective and based on what they are currently learning.

2. Nativist Approach
 The term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that
language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a genetic
capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of the language around
us, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of language. Noam
Chomsky claims that children are biologically programmed for language and
that language develops in the child in just the same way that other biological
functions develop. He believes that children are born with a special ability to
discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language system. The
environment makes a basic contribution in this case - the availability of people
who speak to the child. The child, or rather, the child’s biological endowment,
will do the rest.
Furthermore, Chomsky drew attention to the fact that children seem to
develop language in similar ways and on a similar schedule. Environmental
differences may be associated with some variation in the rate of acquisition.
3. Functional Approach
More recently, with an increase in constructivist approaches to the study
of language, there has been a shift in patterns of research. The shift has not
been so much away from the generative/cognitive side of the continuum, but
perhaps better described as a move even more deeply into the essence of
language. Under this approach, two language development perspective are
highlighted.
Cognition and Language Development
The first social constructivist emphasis of the functional perspective was
on Cognition and Language Development. Dan Slobin (1971; 1986), among
others, demonstrated that in all languages, semantic learning depends on
cognitive development and that sequences of development are determined more
by semantic complexity than by structural complexity.
There are two major pacesetters to language development, involved with
the poles of functions and forms: On the functional level, development is
paced by the growth of conceptual and communicative capacities, operating in
conjunction with innate schemas of cognition; and On the formal level,
development is paced by the growth of perceptual and information-processing
capacities, operating in conjunction with innate schemas of grammar. (In
simple terms: what children know will determine what they learn about the
code for both speaking and understanding messages.)
 Child language researchers began to tackle the formulation of the rules
of the functions of language and the relationships of the forms of language to
those functions. In recent years it has become quite clear that language
functioning extends well beyond cognitive thought and memory structure.
Social Interaction & Language Development
The second social constructivist emphasis of the functional perspective
was on Social Interaction & Language Development. Some research
(BerkoGleason, 1988; Lock, 1991) looked at the interaction between the child's
language acquisition and the learning of how social systems operate in human
behavior. Other investigations of child language centered on the function of
language in discourse. Since language is used for interactive communication,
it is only fitting that one study the communicative functions of language: What
do children know and learn about talking with others? about connected pieces
of discourse (relations between sentences)? the interaction between hearer and
speaker? conversational cues? Within such a perspective, the very heart of
language-its communicative and pragmatic function-is being tackled in all its
variability. This kind of research renewed interest in the performance level of
language. Overt responses, such as hesitations, pauses, backtracking and
other conversational cues, that were carefully observed by structuralists and
hastily weeded out as “performance variables” by generative linguists, have
now returned to the forefront.