LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

We are designed to walk That we are taught to walk is impossible. And pretty much the same is true of language. Nobody is taught language. In fact you cant prevent the child from learning it. Noam Chomsky,
The Human Language Serie 2 (1994)

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Language is extremely complex Children before 5 already know the complex system that make up the grammar of a language: Syntactic Phonological Morphological Semantic and pragmatic rules of grammar Children acquire a system of rules that enables them to construct and understand sentences, most of them have never produced or heard before. Children are creative in the use of language Nobody teach grammatical rules to the children

Mechanism of language acquisition

IMITATION

BEHAVIOURISM

REINFORCE MENT

ANALOGY

COMPUTER MODEL
CONNECTIONISM MODEL
No grammatical rules are stored anywhere

ANALOGY

Reinforcement

Childs environment has Specific properties.

Adults speak to children in a special language CDS

Emphasize on the role of the environment in facilitating language acquisition

MOTHERESE HYPOTHESIS

Analogy, imitation, and reinforcement

Cannot account for language development.

What the child acquires is a set of sentences rather than a set of grammatical rules

Language Acquisition is a creative process The innateness Hypothesis

Language faculty Children acquire Is innate. The a complex grammar Infant is endowed quickly and easily With a UG. UG helps children to extract the rules of their language.

Children create Brain is grammars based equipped on the linguistic for Input and are acquisition guided by UG of human language grammar

STAGE IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Babbling: linguistic ability. Auditory input

Holophrastic stage. Childrens utterance is one word. Telegraphic stage: Starting to put words together into sentences. The words and sentences that children produce at each stage of development conform to the set of grammatical rules.

Humans are born with a predisposition to discover the units that serve to express linguistic meaning.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF GRAMMAR

PHONOLOGY Children acquire the small set of sounds Common to all languages By manner of articulation: nasal, glides Stops, liquids, fricatives, and africates. By place of articulation features: Labials, velars, alveolars and palatals MORPHOLOGY Overgeneralization. Children Acquire rules of their particular language SYNTAX

Childrens utterances reflect Their internal grammar.

Children understand word order rules.

PRAGMATIC
Child assumes that his listener knows Who is talking about.

Language in context

KNOWING MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

Second language acquisition or 2 acquisition, refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language. Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneous acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy. (before 3) Some amount of language mixing is normal part of early bilingual acquisition process and not necessarily an indication of any language problem.

THEORIES OF BILINGUAL DEVELOPMENT

The unitary system hypothesis The separate system hypothesis children initially construct one lexicon one grammar the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language.

Bilingual children develops their grammar along the same line as monolingual children. The rule of the thumb is that children receive equal input in the two languages to achieve native proficiency in both.

Second Language Acquisition

L2 learners construct grammars of the target language.

Fundamental difference hypothesis: L2 acquisition is different from L1

Interlanguage grammar- stages Transfer of grammatical rules from L1 to L2 Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition

Second language Teaching Methods

Synthetic Approach Bottom- up method

Analitical Approach Top- down method

Teaching of the grammatical, lexical, phonological, and functional Units of the language

The goal is to select topics, tasks that are relevant to the needs and Interests of the learner

Grammar translation

Content- based instruction