Language

Acquisitio
n
Lara Grace A. Abaleta

What is the
difference
between
Language
Acquisition and
Language
Learning?

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Focuses on learning
through communication

LANGUAGE LEARNING

Learning through form

(such grammatical
structures)
Subconscious, informal,
Conscious, formal,
natural
unnatural
Grammar structures are
Grammar rules are
learned later on
prioritized to learn how to
communicate
Does not require tedious Requires drills for practice
drills
and evaluation that
learners may find boring
and tiresome
Speaking and
Learners will struggle to
communicating would be communicate or speak
easier because it is in the and write effectively
system of the learner

Stages of
Language
Acquisition

PRE-PRODUCTION
Also called the silent period
The student takes in the new language
but does not speak it; they can
respond non-verbally
The teacher should not force the
learner to talk; they can ask the them
to point, draw, act out, label
Lasts six weeks or longer, depending
on the individual

EARLY PRODUCTION
Can understand more than can
produce
The individual begins to speak using
short words, phrases
Emphasis is still on listening and
absorbing new language
Errors will be committed many times

SPEECH EMERGENCE
Speech becomes more frequent; words and
sentences are longer
Still relies heavily on context clues and
familiar topics
Interlanguage occurs (a mixture of
vocabulary and structures from both
languages)
Vocabulary continues to increase
Errors begin to decrease, especially in
common or repeated interactions

BEGINNING FLUENCY
Speech is fairly fluent in social
situations with minimal errors
New contexts and academic
language are challenging
The individual will struggle to express
themselves due to gaps in
vocabulary and appropriate phrases.

INTERMEDIATE FLUENCY
Communicating in the second language is
fluent, especially in social language situations
The individual is able to speak almost fluently
in new situations or in academic areas, but
there will be gaps in vocabulary knowledge
and some unknown expressions.
There are very few errors, and the individual
is able to demonstrate higher order thinking
skills in the second language such as offering
an opinion or analyzing a problem.

ADVANCED FLUENCY
The individual communicates fluently in
all contexts and can maneuver
successfully in new contexts and when
exposed to new academic information.
At this stage, the individual may still have
an accent and use idiomatic expressions
incorrectly at times, but the individual is
essentially fluent and comfortable
communicating in the second language.

Theories on Language
Acquisition

Behaviorism
developed by B.F. Skinner in 1957
This theory believes that infants learn oral language
from other human role models through a process
involving imitation, reward and practice. Human role
models in an infants environment provide the stimuli
and rewards (Cooter & Reutzel, 2004).
It also argues that everything we know we have learned
through interactions with our environment. They say
that, rather than being biologically predisposed to learn
language, we learn language through reinforcement -by giving praises and encouragement - and shaping -letting them try to improve.

Behaviorism
Focuses on immediately perceptible
aspects of linguistic behaviorthe publicly
observableand the relationships or
associations between those responses and
events in the world surrounding them.
This theory was an extension of his
general theory of learning by Operant
Conditioning the conditioning in which
the organism emits a response or operant
without necessarily observable stimuli.

Tabula Rasa
Skinner believed that all children are
born with a blank slate called Tabula
Rasa, and so a key influence into
learning language is through the
interaction ideally by the
parents/guardians.

Empiricism
Holds that children are genetically
equipped to learn
The individual is not born with the
knowledge he or she gains over
the life span
Believes that a childs language is
not innate but develops as a
result of experiences

Nativism
The term nativist is derived from the
fundamental assertion that language
acquisition is innately determined.
Essentially says that we have an innate
predisposition to learn language.
It states that we are born with a built-in
device of some kind that predisposes us to
language acquisition, resulting in the
construction of an internalized system of
language.

Findings:
Jean Berko (1958) demonstrated that children
learn language not as a series of separate
discrete items, but as an integrated system.
Using simple non-sense word test, she
discovered that as young as four years old,
children apply rules in:
Plurality
Present progressive
Past tense
Third singular
Possessives

 In 1960s, the early grammars of child

language is referred to as pivot
grammar.

Sentence Pivot word + Open word

Examples:
My toy No milk
That chair Baby shoes

Mentalism
Holds that knowledge primarily
derives from inborn mental
processes
Language is governed by rules
Child is born with a mental capacity
for working-out the underlying
systems
Nature vs. Nurture

Language Acquisition Device

by Noam Chomsky

Chomsky believed in the existence of a

mind/brain, and within it, a specialized
language faculty - which he named the
Language Acquisition Device.
LAD controls the development of
language
Claims that children acquire language
skills more rapidly than other abilities

Platos Problem
From this LAD concept, Chomsky
created the idea "Plato's Problem"
which is a concept that questions if
we are born with blank slates or
Tabula Rasa, where nothing makes
sense without structure, how do we
make sense of the first things we
experience? Therefore concluding
that we must be born with an innate
ability to do so.

Functional Approach
Language was something you could
hardly extract and detach from your
cognitive and affective framework
and consider separately.
Linguistic rules written as
mathematical equations failed to
capture that ever-elusive facet
language: meaning.
It focuses on the functions of
language.

Functional Approach
The relationships in which words
occur in telegraphic utterances are
only superficially similar.
For example: Baby shoes
Three possible underlying relations:

- Agent-action
- Agent-object
- Possessor-possessed

Constructivism
posits that the learner is ultimately in
charge of his or her learning, that it
results from both a cognitive
processing and organizing of
information within an individual or
social aspect, where the learner
interacts and dialogues with the
problem, the context and the players
to discover meaning and value.