ELT LANGUAGE ACQUISITION-203

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

What I have learnt is history and development of first language acquisition and some
approaches which have tried to explain how a child acquire her first language. Until the second
half of the twentieth century, most of the researches were made as diary-like recordings of
observed speech. They made some attempts to classify word types. But since the second half of
the twentieth century researches have begun to analyze child language systematically and try to
find out the nature of psycholinguistic process which provides human beings to gain fluent
control of extremely complex system of communication.

We mentioned about children who are our relative and our childhood. As we can see that
conversation, small babies have surprisingly good ability to communicate. They give and receive
lots of messages by means of crying and babbling. When they are hungry or sleepy, they have
different types of crying. When they get to end of their first year, they become to imitate the
words and speech sounds they hear. And they utter their first words. When they reach
eighteenth months, they become to utter two-word or three-word sentences such as “mommy
food”, “daddy gone”. This period is called telegraphic speaking as children’s speaking is
something like telegraphic utterances. Day by day, they improve their communicative skills. At
school age, children learn the functions of their language. I mean they learn what to say where.

According to behavioristic approaches, every human being comes into world with tabula
rasa (a clean slate). That means we born with nothing. Children learn by experiencing. The more
imitation and the more reinforcement, children do better. So they just focus on observable
aspects of linguistic behavior. If a specific behavior is reinforced, it is conditioned. Child goes on
doing the behavior. Skinner thought that people were learning by operant conditioning. In
operant conditioning, a human being gives off response/operant without necessarily observable
stimuli. For instance, when a child says her first word, parents become so happy and laugh. Then
child say it again and again. Here parents’ happiness and laugh are reinforcement for child. So if
a behavior is rewarded, it is maintained. If it is punished or there isn’t any reinforcement, it is
weakened and eventually disappears. But this theory has been a matter of debate for years as it
has lots of problems to explain the novel utterances which are never before used. Because of
this fact, mediation theory is developed to expand the base of behavioristic theory. It says that
all sentences we said have deep structure, besides surface structure.

There were some gaps in behavioristic approach. Because of this, Nativist approach came
up. It was Chomsky who tried to refuse behavioristic approach. He said “you cannot explain
everything through habit formation or imitation. For example, the child uses a sentence like “I
maked”. It is not possible that this child heard the sentence from an adult as this kind of
structure is not available for an adult language. If we try to explain this in terms of imitation,
behaviorism will fail. Then Nativist approach arose. According to Nativist approach, babies are
born with an innate capacity to learn language. It is in our nature to learn language. According to
Chomsky, every human has a part in his mind related with language learning. It is genetic, comes
from birth. People are born with that device. It is called language acquisition device(LAD). Then
LAD was expanded as universal grammar. In UG, children from different countries make same
grammatical mistakes. And children also learn systematically. They are always forming
hypotheses on the basis of the input received. Then they test those hypotheses. As their
language develops, these hypotheses are continually changed, reshaped and sometimes
abandoned. The early grammars of child language were referred to as pivot grammar. It is
observed in child’s two-word utterances. According to this grammar, there is a pivot word and
open word in a sentence. Pivot doesn’t move, but open word can change. For instance, “my toy”
here “my” is pivot word. “toy” is open word. If child wants to use a possessive related with him,
he knows that “my” will stay stable, the other word can change.

Nativist approach doesn’t give enough credit to environmental input. Also all they tried to
explain were system and grammar. They don’t mention about meaning. Therefore, semantic is
neglected. But functional approach gives importance to meaning as well as cognition. According
to them, language development is a result of child’s interaction with environment and their
developing cognitive capacity. Without exposure, output cannot be converted.

As we said before, competence is what is in our minds, but performance is actual

What I had difficulty in understanding was mediation theory, but now I guess I have learnt
it.I suppose I need to focus more on how I can make use of Nativist approach in my teaching. In
fact, I think the best one is functional approach. In this approach, as well as cognition,
environment is important factor in language learning process. Language is used for interactive
communication. Therefore, functions of language and social interactions are also important. But
when I think, operant conditioning can be useful in my teaching. To my mind, reinforcement is a
very good idea to make students involve the lesson if it isn’t exaggerated.