Reaction paper
- 1. Reaction Paper One of our most amazing abilities as human beings is the capacity to acquire a language, the process of learning and developing new words and speech when we are only in our first years of existence. It has been a real challenge for scientists and specialists in the matter, to find one big, complete and rational explanation to the process of language acquisition, which has been present in every field of study at every level. Teachers have been instructing their subjects in different levels and types of language depending on their fields of study. Since kindergarten through basic school to high school, going through mathematics, science, biology and so on, teachers deliver an unconscious development of the language to their students in order to help them to gain language proficiency, which is fundamental for children and people in general to be successful at school. But, are teachers aware about how the language is delivered or processed within a child’s mind? From which perspectives can we study the acquisition of language? As future English educators, our main concern should be how to teach English as a second language; in other words, we must help our future students to acquire a new language; therefore, we need to take consideration of the process of acquisition. This reaction paper refers to chapters one and two about First Language Acquisition; it analyses some of the theories and a variety of approaches delivered by important researchers and scientists with very different points of view regarding the development of language acquisition in children. Many authors have come up with different ideas of how this process of acquisition works; therefore there is a variety of theories and approaches, such as the Behaviourist approach, which suggested that all kinds of learning, including language, took place as a process of imitation and stimulus and response; they believed that the process of learning a language had its inception when a child produced a sound and its keeper, whether a parent or a caregiver reinforced that action in a positive way. It was only a few years later that Chomsky emphasized the idea that the language was too difficult and complex to be learned through a behaviourist model such as Skinner’s, and so the behaviourist approach was replaced with another view of learning, which indicated that human beings were born with cognitive abilities
- 2. and the process of learning was the result of the child acting within the environment; but after establishing this connection between child and environment, Lindfors (1987) brought to the table a sequence of several problems related to behaviourism and its view regarding language development, issues associated to speed of learning, the environment and animals and humans learning by the process of stimulus and response, among others. Currently, new points of view have emerged to demonstrate, to give an answer and show different perspectives to first language acquisition and language itself; areas, such as psychology, which focuses on the child and its development within the language and expresses that language and cognition are related, because they agree that children have a special cognitive ability for language learning. There are other areas focusing on the environment; that is the case of sociology and anthropology, which, at difference from psychology, examined the social aspects and nature of language acquisition. According to these perspectives, language is essential for social interaction which is one of the bases of humanity, and this is why children develop what Hymes (1970) defines as communicative competence, the ability to understand and produce significant language. Linguistics, on the other side, focuses on the language and suggests that children acquire language by learning sentence patterns and rules to produce aspects of the language, known as Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar, through a stimulus and response process. The author also refers to universal grammar, which is the innate knowledge of language. Nowadays, is a matter of fact that children acquire their language because they are constantly exposed to their mother tongue, paying unconscious attention to the language that surrounds them. Babies start babbling, cooing and crying, in order to communicate ideas to the environment. But throughout their growth they tend to imitate adults, being able to comprehend a wide range of linguistic input. In the one hand, the Behavioral approaches are related to the positive response for a communicative action made by the child, like babbling, which creates a positive reinforcement and a subsequent repetition by imitation of the communicative action previously indicated. The Nativist approach, on the other hand, determines that language acquisition is an innate skill genetically determined by the human biology, accommodated in a certain area of the brain. This language acquisition device (Chomsky, 1965) would permit the existence of an ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment, organize linguistic data to be refined later and, the ability to engage a constant evaluation of the current linguistic system in order to construct new inputs
- 3. to communicate (McNeill, 1966). On the contrary, the Functional approach stands, from constructivist perspectives, that children attend to the form of the language, not to the functional level of meaning created from social interactions. This means, language acquisition is possible concerning the logical rules governing the language; whereas, the meaningful functions of the language and interactive purposes are achieved from the forms. The studies of children’s language acquisition converged in language teaching and set developments for language teaching methodologies that are used these days. Gouin (1880) came up with the conclusion that language learning is based on transforming perceptions into conceptions, and children use language to represent their conceptions, to represent the way they see the world, based on the way they have learned to see it, from the society they were rose up. Studies indicate language acquisition can be possible through the constant contact with a certain language. In this case is acquired naturally, fluently and with all its features. The analyzed documents about first language acquisition give as a most accurate idea of how children acquire a language, what happens within their brains, the environment and the social aspects that have influence on the development of the language and its mysteries. When it comes to Freeman & Freeman’s chapter 1, we cannot avoid the idea that maybe one author and its theory are not totally accurate with the final result of only one approach to identify the variety of processes concerning language and its acquisition; but if we take into consideration each one of the several approaches and theories explained in chapters one and two, we get a better and clearer idea of what language acquisition is and the processes involved in it. From psychology, through anthropology, to linguistics and nativism, among others, each one of these areas of expertise put their arguments and beliefs on the table and if we take them all as one approach, we will be able to understand the process of language acquisition. Instead of criticizing each other to bring down their respective theories, the authors should work as a team, if they did this, future parents and educators would have a clearer picture when it comes to the process of acquiring a language. Regarding Brown’s text, we believe language acquisition is more related to a social phenomenon than determinism by genetics, because a child is able to speak according to the stimulus he receives from his social environment. And as humans are social beings by nature, they always will try to communicate something; thus,
- 4. children are always receiving inputs that constantly process, and later sending messages in reward. Also, we cannot help to find interesting the fact that natural languages are equal for learning. We didn’t know that gestural languages were considered natural languages as well, that surprised us. But we agree with Freeman’s assertion stating that the communicative competence comes from the social settings made by the background, which creates differences in the usage of a language, related to differences into children’s speech communities. Other point of information we found interesting as well, was the idea that children language acquisition development goes from form to meaning, that is to say, children go to the message before to know the rules of the language, which they discover through time. From that point of view, we could say that children are more worried about what to say instead of how to say it. Most of the greatest researchers of linguistics and human development have tried to explain how language is acquired from childhood to adulthood. Beneath that point scientists from several disciplines have dedicated their lives to understand the process of language acquisition in children. These researches are focused on the child as a high skilled communicative receiver, which is capable of catching the environment surrounding him, and to respond in the same way, by imitation, to his interlocutors. Moreover, there are some studies that have demonstrated children are used to respond according to the context of their speech communities and social background. In addition to that, other theories are more focused in the functioning of his brain, and the connections children tend to do during the process of language acquisition. Thorough this reaction paper theories and approaches continued to appear, giving us new points of view, showing us different perspectives and a selected variety when it comes to the fields of study to discuss, analyzing the importance of the language acquisition development as pure theory and its application onto first and second language acquisition, in order to encourage future English teachers like us, to enhance different teaching strategies supported by the first language acquisition process, in classes of ESL. Ma. Francisca Rojas Victoriano Alexander González