Saturday, 18 October 2014
Tuesday, 7 October 2014
Monday, 6 October 2014
Subject: English and
its Teaching III
Topic: Essay on FLA
Student: María
Gabriela Villar
Teacher: Sara Racker
Deadline: September
18th,2014.
____________________________________________________________________________
Possessing a language is what distinguishes
human beings from other animals, yet the acquisition of language in children is
not perfectly understood. Prior to Chomsky’s theory of First Language
Acquisition (FLA) language was considered not knowledge but behavior. Most
explanations involve either the observation that children mimic what they hear
or the assumption that human beings have a natural ability to understand
grammar.
In fact, by observing our own
children’s experience regarding language,
we may well agree with the behaviorist point of view. All babies start making
sounds like “da” “ba” that they later associate with certain object according
to the intervention of an adult. I was astonished when I heard my daughter
saying “agua” with an outstretched arm; it was one of Ana Julia’s first words
by the age of 9 months. I associated that fact with stimuli –responses
–reinforcing stimuli behaviorist theory.
She used to spend most of the time with a caretaker who had got a girl
who was five months older than Ana. I believed that she was imitating the
caretaker’s daughter whenever she wanted some water. What is more, I was
strongly convinced that children development of language ability depended on
the quality of INPUT they received. My daughter received floods of INPUT so that
she spoke very well at the age of 2 years old.
However, if we observe other children the process is more or
less the same independently of adults’ reinforcement and follows an accuracy
order. The time of language acquisition
can be described by the following timeline: cooing(0-5 months) , babbling ( 5-8 months),
one word utterance( first birthday),
two- word utterances ( 1 and a
half ),telegraphic period ( 2-3 years old),after that period the development of language and incorporation of grammar structures occur at
high speed. The question is how children can master any language by the age of
6.
Chomsky’s classic critique of
behaviorism was introduced through Chomsky’s key notion of “creativity” people
produce sentences that they have never heard before. Human language is basically “unpredictable”
and one stimulus has many responses .Behaviorist B.F. Skinner originally
proposed that language must be learned and cannot be a module. The mind
consisted of sensorimotor abilities as well as laws of learning that govern
gradual changes in
an organism’s behavior. Noam
Chomsky challenged this belief by arguing that children learn languages that
are governed by highly subtle and abstract principles, and they do so without
explicit instruction or any other environmental clues. Therefore language
acquisition must depend on an innate specific module that he puts
metaphorically as a black box, called the Language Acquisition Device (LAD).
Something comes into the black box and something goes out of it; by observing
what comes out it is possible to arrive at some understanding of the process.
Much of the debate in language acquisition has attempted to test these once
revolutionary and controversial ideas. Exposure to language is required for a
language to be acquired, and thus environment and nurture are not entirely left
out of the equation. However, this theory states that a child is born with an
innate predisposition to acquire and learn language. This biological innateness
for language is the end result of a language acquisition device (LAD), which
Chomsky invokes through the idea of a Universal Grammar (UG).Universal grammar
is present in the child’s mind as a system of principles and parameters. Through
exposure to any particular linguistic environment, parameters are set and
grammar for that particular language is built. The Universal Grammar acts as a
menu, giving potential for all the differing rules observed throughout the
world's languages.
Chomsky also distinguish a period
“a deadline” before which the innate parameters must have been exposed to
language input .This period last from birth to puberty. Beyond puberty it would
no longer be possible to acquire a grammar in a typical way. That critical
period is taken into account for SLA as well.
There are
many theories about how children acquired their First Language. Brunner states
that the interaction with children’s parents is very important and that they
provide a Language Acquisition Support System (LASS) for the child. The LASS
recognizes that people do not acquire and learn language in isolation. The LASS
supports and shapes language as it establishes both general and specific
cultural norms and cultural expectations. The LASS educates the child,
sometimes indirectly, sometimes directly, about the social rules of language as
it is used.
To sum up,
there seems to be a combination of the different theories that complement each
other. However, I think that Chomsky is the one who manages to explain why any children is
able to succeed in one of the most complex intellectual challenges as to learn
any language in a short period of time and whatever his context is. If we were
not born with a genetic capacity to develop language we would not be able to acquire
it.
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