Language Acquisition

&
Learning

Language Acquisition
&
Learning

Language
Learner

Acquisition
vs
Learning

What is
Language?

A language is considered to be a system of

communicating with other people using sounds,
symbols and words in expressing a meaning, idea or
thought. This language can be used in many forms,
primarily through oral and written communications as
well as using expressions through body language.

Language is defined as "a systematic means of communicating

ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds,
gestures or marks having understood meanings." (Webster New
International Dictionary of the English Language, 654), and "is a
tool for communication" (Emmet, 22).

In most common use of language, these signs are the words which
we employ in such a way that they may
communicate ideas or feelings.

There are many possible theoretical positions about the nature

of language. Commonly, three different views are explicitly or
implicitly reflected in current approaches to language learning.
They are:
The structural view of language
The communicative view of language
The interactional view of language

The structural view of language is that language is a system of

structurally related elements for the transmission of

meaning. These elements are usually described as:
phonological units (phonemes)
grammatical units (phrases, clauses, sentences)
grammatical operations (adding, shifting, joining or
transforming elements)
lexical items (function words and structure words)
The target of language learning, in the structural view, is the
mastery of elements of this system.

The communicative view of language is the view that language is a

vehicle for the expression of functional meaning.

The semantic and communicative dimensions of language are more
emphasized than the grammatical characteristics, although these are
also included.
The target of language learning is to learn to express communication
functions and categories of meaning.

The interactional view of language sees language primarily as the

means for establishing and maintaining interpersonal

relationships and for performing social transactions
between individuals.
The target of language learning in the interactional view is learning

to initiate and maintain conversations with other people.

Language Learning Process

Children go through a number of different stages as language
develops, from the earliest stage of producing cooing sounds
through being able to produce complex, multi-word sentences.
Babbling
Single Words
Two Words
Multi-word Sentences

Babbling
first stage of language development
known as the pre-linguistic, babbling or cooing stage
period typically lasts from the age of three to nine months
babies begin to make vowel sounds such as oooooo and
aaaaaaa
by five months, infants typically begin to babble and add
consonant sounds to their sounds such as ba-ba-ba, ma-mama or da-da-da.

Single Words
second stage is known as the one-word or holophase stage of
language development
around the age of 10 to 13 months
children will begin to produce their first real words
only capable of producing a few, single words at this point,
but important to realize that they are able to understand
considerably more
infants begin to comprehend language about twice as fast as
they are able to produce it

Two Words
third stage begins around the age of 18 months
children begin to use two word sentences
sentences usually consist of just nouns and verbs
E.g. Where daddy?
"Puppy big!"

Multi-word Sentences
around the age of two

children begin to produce short, multi-word sentences

that have a subject and predicate
E.g. a child might say "Mommy is nice"
or "Want more candy
As children age, they continue to learn more new words
every day.
By the time they enter school around the age of five,

children typically have a vocabulary of 10,000

words or more.

Developmental Sequences
Developmental sequences reflect linguistic elements in childrens
cognitive understandings

Examples
Grammatical Morphemes
Negations
Questions

Grammatical morphemes - What is the difference

in meaning between apple and apples? What is
the difference in form? What does this tell you
about these two meaning?

Negation - Denial of the truth of a clause or

sentence, typically involving the use of a negative
word (e.g., not, no)

Grammatical Morphemes
Roger Browns longitudinal study (1973)
Present progressive ing
Plurals s
Irregular past forms
possessive s
Articles the and a
Regular past ed
Third person singular simple present s
Auxiliary be

Acquisition of Grammatical morphemes

e.g., wug test
i. Here is a wug. Now there are two of them. There are two
______.
ii. John knows how to bod. Yesterday he did the same thing.
Yesterday, he_______.
Through the tests, children demonstrate that they know the
rules for the formation of plural and simple past in English.

By generalizing these patterns to words they have never heard

before, they show that their language is not just a list of memorized
word pairs such as book/books and nod/nodded.

Acquisition of Negation
Lois Blooms study (1991) four stages
Stage 1: no e.g., No go. No cookie.
Stage 2: subject + no e.g., Daddy no comb hair.
Stage 3: auxiliary or modal verbs (do/can) + not
(Yet no variations for different persons or tenses)
e.g., I cant do it , He dont want it.
Stage 4: correct form of auxiliary verbs (did/doesnt/is/are) + not
e.g., He didnt go. She doesnt want it.
But sometimes double negatives are used
e.g., I dont have no more candies.

Acquisition of Questions
By the age of 4:
Most children are able to ask questions, give commands, report
real events, and create stories about imaginary ones with correct
word order and grammatical markers most of the time.

They have mastered the basic structures of the language or

languages spoken to them in these early years.
They begin to acquire less frequent and more complex linguistic
structures such as passives and relative clauses.
They begin to develop ability to use language in a widening social
Environment.

The six stages of childrens question-making can be illustrated as

follows:
Stage 1: using single words or single two- or three-word sentences
with rising intonation (Mommy book? Wheres Daddy?)
Stage 2: using the word order of the declarative sentence (You like
this? Why you catch it?)
Stage 3: fronting - putting a verb at the beginning of a sentence
(Is the teddy is tired? Do I can have a cookie?)

Stage 4: subject-auxiliary inversion in yes/no questions but not in wh

questions (Do you like ice cream? Where I can draw?)

Stage 5: subject-auxiliary inversion in wh-questions, but not in

negative wh-questions (Why can he go out? Why he cant go
out?)
Stage 6: overgeneralizing the inverted form in embedded
questions (I dont know why cant he go out.)

TUTORIAL QUESTION 1

Reflect on your own language

learning experience
First 3 years
Pre-school years
School years