They wave when someone F says 'bye-bye'; they clap when someone says 'pat-a-cake'; they eagerly hurry to the kitchen when 'juice and cookies' are mentioned.
At 12 months, most babies will have begun to produce a word or two that everyone recognizes. By the age of two, most children reliably produce at least 50 different words and sorne produce many more. These sentences are sometimes called 'telegraphic' because they leave out such things as anides, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs. We recognize them as sentences because, even though function words and gram matical morphemes are missing, the word order reflects the word order of the language they are hearing and the combined words have a meaningful relationship that makes them more than just a list of words.
Thus, for an English-speaking child, 'kiss baby' does not mean the same thing as 'baby kiss'. Remarkably, we also see evidence, even in these early sentences that children are doing more than imperfectly imitating what they have heard. Their two- and three-word sentences show signs that they can creatively combine words. For example, 'more outside' may mean 'I want to go outside again. For sorne language features, these patterns have been described in terms of developmental sequences or 'stages'.
To sorne extent, these stages in language acquisition are related to children's cognitive development. For example, children do not use temporal adverbs such as 'tomorrow' or 'last week' until they develop sorne under standing of time. In other cases, the developmental sequences seem to reflect the gradual acquisition of the linguistic elements for expressing ideas that have been present in children's cognitive understanding for a long time.
For example, children can distinguish between singular and plural long before they reliably add plural endings to nouns. Correct use of irregular plurals such as 'feet' takes even more time and may not be completely under control until the school years. Grammatical morphemes In the s, severa! One of the best-known studies was carried out by Roger Brown and his colleagues and students.
In a longitudinal study of the language development of three children called Adam, Eve, and Sarah they found that 14 grammatical morphemes were acquired in a similar sequence. The list below adapted from Brown's book shows sorne of the mor phemes they studied. Thus, there was evidence far a 'developmen tal sequence' or arder of acquisition. However, the children did not acquire the morphemes at the same age or rate. Eve had mastered nearly all the mor phemes befare she was two-and-a-half years old, while Sarah and Adam were still working on them when they were three-and-a-half or faur.
Brown's longitudinal work was confirmed in a cross-sectional study of 21 children. Jill and Peter de Villiers faund that children who correctly used the morphemes that Adam, Eve, and Sarah had acquired late were also able to use the ones that Adam, Eve, and Sarah had acquired earlier.
The chil dren mastered the morphemes at different ages, just as Adam, Eve, and Sarah had done, but the arder of their acquisition was very similar. Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain why these grammatical morphemes are acquired in the observed arder. Researchers have studied the frequency with which the morphemes occur in parents' speech, the cognitive complexity of the meanings represented by each morpheme, and the difficulty of perceiving or pronouncing them.
In the end, there has been no simple satis factory explanation far the sequence, and most researchers agree that the arder is determined by an interaction among a number of different factors.
To supplement the evidence we have from simply observing children, sorne carefully designed procedures have been developed to further explore chil dren'sknowledge ofgrammatical morphemes. Oneo f the first and best known is the so-called 'wug test' developed by Jean Berko Gleason In this 'test', children are shown drawings of imaginary creatures with novel names or people perfarming mysterious actions. Far example, they are told, 'Here is a wug.
Now there are two of them. There are two ' or 'Here is a man who knows how to bod. Yesterday he did the same thing. Yesterday, he '. By completing these sentences with 'wugs' and 'bodded', children demonstrate that they know the patterns far plural and simple past in English.
The acquisition of other language features also shows how children's language develops systematically, and how they go beyond what they have heard to create new forms and structures. Negation Children learn the functions of negation very early. That is, they learn to comment on the disappearance of objects, to refuse a suggestion, or to reject an assertion, even at the single word stage.
However, as Lois Bloom's longitudinal studies show, even though children understand these func tions and express them with single words and gestures, it takes sorne time before they can express them in sentences, using the appropriate words and word order. The following stages in the development of negation have been observed in the acquisition of English. Similar stages have been observed in other languages as well Wode Stage 1 Negation is usually expressed by the word 'no', either all alone or as the first r word in the utterance.
No cookie. No comb hair. Stage2 1 Utterances grow longer and the sentence subject may be included. The neg s ative word appears just before the verb. Sentences expressing rejection or prohibition often use 'don't'. Daddy no comb hair. Don't touch that! Stage3 The negative element is inserted into a more complex sentence. Children - may add forms of the negative other than 'no', including words like 'can't' t and 'don't'.
These sentences appear to follow the correct English pattern of attaching the negative to the auxiliary or modal verb. However, children do not yet vary these forms for different persons or tenses. I can't do it. He don't want it. Stage4 Children begin to attach the negative element to the correct form of auxiliary verbs such as 'do' and 'be'.
She doesn't want it. Even though their language system is by now quite complex, they may still have difficulty with sorne other features related to negatives.
I don't have no more candies. Questions The challenge oflearning complex language systems is also illustrated in the developmental stages through which children learn to ask questions. There is a remarkable consistency in the way children learn to form ques tions in English. For one thing, there is a predictable order in which the 'wh- words' emerge Bloom It is often learned as part of a chunk.
Identifying and locating people and objects are within the child's understanding of the world. Furthermore, adults tend to ask children just these types of questions in the early days of language learning, for example, 'Where's Mommy?
Children seem to ask an endless number of questions beginning with 'why', having discovered how effectively this little word gets adults to engage in conversation, for example, 'Why that lady has blue hair?
In contrast to 'what', 'where', and 'who' questions, chil dren sometimes ask the more cognitively difficult 'why', 'when', and 'how' questions without understanding the answers they get, as the following con versation with a four-year-old clearly shows.
CHILD ! Can we go now? The ability to use these question words is at least partly tied to children's cog nitive development. It is also predicted in part by the questions children are asked and the linguistic complexity of questions with different wh- words.
Thus it does not seem surprising that there is consistency in the sequence of their acquisition. Perhaps more surprising is the consistency in the acquisi tion of word order in questions. This development is not based on learning n new meanings, but rather on learning different linguistic patterns to express meanings that are already understood. Mommy book? At the same time, they may produce sorne correct questions-correct because they have been learned as chunks: Where's Daddy?
What's that? Stage2 As they begin to ask more new questions, children use the word arder of the declarative sentence, with rising intonation. You like this? I have sorne? They continue to produce the correct chunk-learned forms such as 'What's that? Stage3 Gradually, children notice that the structure of questions is different and begin to produce questions such as: Can I go?
Are you happy? Although sorne questions at this stage match the adult pattern, they may be right for the wrong reason. To describe this, we need to see the pattern from the child's perspective rather than from the perspective of the adult grammar.
We call this stage 'fronting' because the child's rule seems to be that questions are formed by putting something a verb or question word at the 'front' of a sentence, leaving the rest of the sentence in its statement form.
Is the teddy is tired? Do I can have a cookie? Why you don't have one? Why you catched it? Stage4 At Stage 4, sorne questions are formed by subject-auxiliary inversion. The questions resemble those of Stage 3, but there is more variety in the auxilia ries that appear befare the subject. At this stage, children can even add 'do' in questions in which there would be , no auxiliary in the declarative version of the sentence.
Do dogs like icecream? Even at this stage, however, children seem able to use either inversion or a wh word, but not both for example, 'Is he crying? Are these your boots? Why did you do that? Does Daddy have a box? Negative questions may still be a bit too difficult.
Why the teddy bear can't go outside? And even though performance on most questions is correct, there is still one more hurdle. When wh- words appear in subordinate clauses or embedded questions, children overgeneralize the inverted form that would be correct for simple questions and produce sentences such as: Ask him why can't he go out. Stage 6 At this stage, children are able to correctly form all question types, including negative and complex embedded questions.
Passage through developmental sequences does not always follow a steady uninterrupted path. Children appear to learn new things and then fall back on old patterns when there is added stress in a new situation or when they are using other new elements in their language. But the overall path takes them toward a closer and closer approximation of the language that is spoken around them.
Thepre-schoolyears By the age of four, most children can ask questions, give commands, repon real events, and create stories about imaginary ones, using correct word order and grammatical markers most of the time. In fact, it is generally accepted that by age four, children have acquired the basic structures of the language or languages spoken to them in these early years.
Three- and four-year-olds continue to learn vocabulary at the rate of several words a day. They begin to acquire less frequent and more complex linguistic structures such as passives re. They use language in a greater variety of situations. They interact more mt rid, often with unfamiliar adults. They begin to talk sensibly on the telephone to invisible grandparents younger children do not understand that their telephone partner cannot see what they see.
They show that they have learned the difference between how adults talk to babies and how they talk to each other, and they use this knowledge in elaborare pretend play in which they practise using these different 'voices'. In this way, they explore and begin to understand how and why language varies. In the pre-school years, children also begin to develop metalinguistic aware ness, the ability to treat language as an object separare from the meaning it conveys.
Three-year-old children can tell you that it's 'silly' to say 'drink the chair', because it doesn't make sense. However, although they would never say 'cake the eat', they are less sure that there's anything wrong with it. They may show that they know it's a bit odd, but they will focus mainly on the fact 1e that they can understand what it means.
Five-year-olds, on the other hand, d know that 'drink the chair' is wrong in a different way from 'cake the eat'. Language acquisition in the pre-school years is impressive. A quick mathematical g exercise will show you just how many hours children spend in language-rich environments. If children are awake for ten or twelve hours a day, we may estimate that they are in contact with the language of their environment for y k 20, hours or more by the time they go to school. Theschoolyears Children develop the ability to use language to understand others and to rt express their own meanings in the pre-school years, and in the school years, r this ability expands and grows.
Learning to read gives a major boost to meta d linguistic awareness. Seeing words represented by letters and other symbols ;e on a page leads children to a new understanding that language has form as is well as meaning. Reading reinforces the understanding that a 'word' is sepa :o rare from the thing it represents.
Unlike three-year-olds, children who can s read understand that 'the' is a word, just as 'house' is. They understand that 'caterpillar' is a longer word than 'train', even though the object it represents is substantially shorter!
Metalinguistic awareness also includes the discovery is 1- of such things as ambiguity. Knowing that words and sentences can have re multiple meaning gives children access to word jokes, trick questions, and te riddles, which they love to share with their friends and family. Children enter school with the ability to understand and produce several thousand words, and thousands more will be learned at school.
In both the spoken and written language at school, words such as 'homework' or 'ruler' appear frequently in situations where their meaning is either immediately or gradually revealed. Words like 'population' or 'latitude' occur less frequently, but they are made important by their significance in academic subject matter. Vocabulary grows at a rate of between several hundred and more than a thousand words a year, depending mainly on how much and how widely children read Nagy, Herman, and Anderson The kind of vocabulary growth required for school success is likely to come from both reading for assignments and reading for pleasure, whether narrative or non-fiction.
Dee Gardner suggests that reading a variety of text types is an essential part of vocabulary growth. His research has shown how the range of vocabulary in narrative texts is different from that in non-fiction. There are words in non-fiction texts that are unlikely to occur in stories or novels.
In addition, non-fiction tends to include more opportunities to see a word in its different forms for example, 'mummy', 'mummies', 'mummified'. The importance of reading for vocabulary growth is seen when observant parents report a child using a new word but mispronouncing it in a way that reveals it has been encountered only in written form. Another important development in the school years is the acquisition of dif ferent language registers. Children learn how written language differs from spoken language, how the language used to speak to the principal is different from the language of the playground, how the language of a science report is different from the language of a narrative.
As Terry Piper and others have documented, sorne children will have even more to learn if they come to school speaking an ethnic or regional variety of the school language that is quite different from the one used by the teacher. They will have to learn that another variety, often referred to as the standard variety, is required for suc cessful academic work. Other children arrive at school speaking a different language altogether.
For these children, the work oflanguage learning in the early school years presents additional opportunities and challenges. We will return to this topic when we discuss bilingualism in early childhood. Explaining first language acquisition These descriptions oflanguage development from infancy through the early school years show that we have considerable knowledge of what children learn in their early language development.
More controversia! What abilities does the child bring to the task and what are the contributions of the environment? Language learning in early childhood 15 Since the middle of the 20th century, three main theoretical positions have. Lt LS 1he behaviouristperspective e Behaviourism is a theory of learning that was influential in the s and Lt s, especially in the United States.
With regard to language learning, the best-known proponent of this psychological theory was B. Skinner a Traditional behaviourists hypothesized that when children imitated y the language produced by those around them, their attempts to reproduce y what they heard received 'positive reinforcement'.
This could take the form r of praise or just successful communication. Thus encouraged by their envi e ronment, children would continue to imitate and practise these sounds and t patterns until they formed 'habits' of correct language use. According to this y view, the quality and quantity of the language the child hears, as well as the n consistency of the reinforcement offered by others in the environment, , would shape the child's language behaviour.
This theory gives great impor t tance to the environment as the source of everything the child needs to learn. To clarify what is meant by these two terms, consider the following definitions and examples.
The other one eat carrots. They both eat t carrots. They were all e about 24 months old when they were recorded as they played with a visiting 1 adult. Using the definitions above, notice how Peter imitates the adult in the following dialogue. Peter 24 months is playing with a dump truck while two adults, Patsy and Lois, look on.
LO IS You're gonna put more wheels in the dump truck? Dump truck. Dump truck! LOIS Yes, the dump truck fell clown. Unpublished data from P.
Lightbown If we analysed a larger sample of Peter's speech, we would see that per cent of his sentences were imitations of what someone else had just said. We would also see that his imitations were not random. That is, he did not simply imitare per cent of everything he heard. Detailed analyses of large samples of Peter's speech over about a year showed that he imitated words and sentence structures that were just beginning to appear in his spontaneous speech. Once these new elements became solidly grounded in his language system, he stopped imitating them and went on to imitare others.
Unlike a parrot who imitares the familiar and continues to repeat the same things again and again, children appear to imitare selectively.
The choice of what to imitare seems to be based on something new that they have just begun to understand and use, not simply on what is available in the environ ment. For example, consider how Cindy imitares and practises language in the following conversations.
Cindy 24 months, 16 days is looking at a picture of a carrot in a book and trying to get Patsy's attention. The other carrot. A few minutes later, Cindy brings Patsy a stuffed toy rabbit. CINDY incomprehensible eat the carrots.
Cindy gets another stuffed rabbit. They both eat carrots. One week later, Cindy opens the book to the same page. She prac tises new words and structures in a way that sounds like a student in sorne foreign language classes! Perhaps most interesting is that she remembers the 'language lesson' a week later and turns straight to the page in the book she had not seen since Patsy's last visit.
What is most striking is that, like Peter, her imitation and practice appear to be focused on what she is currendy Jer 'working on'. X'e The samples of speech from Peter and Cindy seem to lend sorne support to Jly the behaviourist explanation of language acquisition.
The amount of imitation in the speech of other children, whose development ne proceeded at a rate comparable to that of Cindy and Peter, has been cal ce culated at less than 1O per cent. Consider the examples of imitation and practice in the following conversation between Kathryn and Lois. Choo choo?
Lois brought the choo choo train? I want play with choo choo train. What's this? LOIS Oh you know what that is. I do this. Kathryn puts the slide on the floor. I want do this. You can do it. Look I'll show you how. Get a more.
Each chapter examines how various theories view language, the learner, and the acquisition process. Summaries of key studies and examples of data relating to a variety of languages illustrate the different theoretical perspectives.
Each chapter concludes with an evaluative summary of the theories discussed. This third edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect the very latest research in the field of SLA. Key features include: a fully re-worked chapter on cognitive models of language and language learning a new chapter on information processing, including the roles of different types of memory and knowledge in language learning the addition of a glossary of key linguistic terms to help the non-specialist a new timeline of second language learning theory development This third edition takes account of the significant developments that have taken place in the field in recent years.
Highly active domains in which theoretical and methodological advances have been made are treated in more depth to ensure that this new edition of Second Language Learning Theories remains as fresh and relevant as ever. Whether we grow up with one, two, or several languages during our early years of life, many of us will learn a second, foreign, or heritage language in later years. The field of Second language acquisition SLA, for short investigates the human capacity to learn additional languages in late childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, after the first language --in the case of monolinguals-- or languages --in the case of bilinguals-- have already been acquired.
Understanding Second Language Acquisition offers a wide-encompassing survey of this burgeoning field, its accumulated findings and proposed theories, its developed research paradigms, and its pending questions for the future. The book zooms in and out of universal, individual, and social forces, in each case evaluating the research findings that have been generated across diverse naturalistic and formal contexts for second language acquisition.
It assumes no background in SLA and provides helpful chapter-by-chapter summaries and suggestions for further reading. Ideal as a textbook for students of applied linguistics, foreign language education, TESOL, and education, it is also recommended for students of linguistics, developmental psycholinguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. Supporting resources for tutors are available free at www.
Children learn languages quickly and easily while adults are ineffective in comparison -- A true bilingual is someone who speaks two languages perfectly -- You can acquire a language simply through listening or reading -- Practice makes perfect -- Language students learn and retain what they are taught -- Language learners always benefit from correction -- Individual differences are a major, perhaps the major, factor in SLA -- Language acquisition is the individual acquisition of grammar.
Explains theories of language acquisition for classroom teaching of first or second languages. Examines factors such as intelligence, personality and age on language learning, as well as new research ideas.
However, multilingualism is a highly complex phenomenon, which has a direct influence on how we learn languages. What is the role of the other languages spoken in the community? Do contrasting learning contexts, like CLIL or studying abroad, produce different results? Can positive emotions such as foreign language enjoyment have an active role in the foreign language learning process?
These and other topics will be discussed in this book, with the aim of understanding multilingualism, how languages are learned and how to teach them better.
This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Multilingualism. Now in its fifth edition, the award-winning How Languages are Learned has established itself as an indispensable introduction to research in language acquisition and its relationship with classroom practice.
This widely acclaimed book remains essential reading for second language teachers. Explains theories of language acquisition for classroom teaching of first or second languages. Examines factors such as intelligence, personality and age on language learning, as well as new research ideas.
A comprehensive introduction to second language learning for newcomers to the field, with frequent summaries and supporting activities. Relates theories of first and second language acquisition to what actually goes on in the classroom Uses activities and projects throughout to explore the practical implications of the ideas presented Suitable for teacher training courses The task is to describe how they are differentiated, and therefore what he might have acquired between the first data Babel no more: the search for the world's most extraordinary language learners.
A comprehensive introduction to second language learning for newcomers to the field, with frequent summaries and supporting activities. Adults tend to take language for granted - until they have to learn a new one. Then they realize how difficult it is to get the pronunciation right, to acquire the meaning of thousands of new words, and to learn how those words are put together to form sentences.
Second Language Learning Theories is a clear and concise overview of the field of second language acquisition SLA theories.
Written by a team of leading academics working in different SLA specialisms, this book provides expert analysis of the main theories from multiple perspectives to offer a broad and balanced introduction. Whether we grow up with one, two, or several languages during our early years of life, many of us will learn a second, foreign, or heritage language in later years.
The field of Second language acquisition SLA, for short investigates the human capacity to learn additional languages in late childhood,.
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