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LANGUAGES
Looking back on those days…
How did you learn Spanish
(L1)?
Stage Age
•Babbling •From birth to around 8 months
•The first “word” •At about 11 months children put names to
the objects and people around them.
•Two words: •Between 18 months and 2 years, they enter a
syntactic phase of acquisition by placing two
words together (e.g. look Daddy)
•Third and fourth years are periods of great
•Phonological, creativity when the essential language
syntactic and elements are put in place.
lexical norms
•Between 6 and 12, children continue to
•Syntactic and expand their reading vocabulary and to
lexical complexity improve their understanding of words. They
and richness like learning chants, poems, song lyrics and
love tongue twisters or jokes.
Views Characteristics
Behaviorist -Language learning is like any other
(1950s-1960s) kind of learning in that it involves habit
formation.
Views Characteristics
Nativist ( or - Children are pre-programmed to learn
Innatist) a language and are highly sensitive to
(1960s- the linguistic features of their
1970s) environment.
- Chomsky (1959) suggested an internal
or innate Language Acquisition Device
(LAD), now referred to as Universal
Grammar (UG), which allows children to
process all the language they hear and
to produce their own meaningful
utterances
HOW CHILDREN LEARN LANGUAGES
Views Characteristics
Cognitive- -Language development was an aspect
developmental of general cognitive growth.
(1970s -1980s) -Certain thinking skills must first mature in
order to create a framework for early
language development.
-In L2 learning, the Critical Period
Hypothesis (CPH) (Lenneberg,1967),
suggested that there is a specific and
limited time for language acquisition.
-Researchers have found that there are
many other important factors to consider
aside from age , such as motivation and
learning conditions.
Views Characteristics
Social- -stresses importance of child's interaction with
interactionist parents and other caregivers.
(1980s)
-crucial element: The way language is modified
to suit the level of the learner.