Language Acquisition

Introduction:

We are going to discuss language acquisition and how people acquire languages. When a baby is born , he doesn’t have a language but he learns his mother language from the people around him , we need to know how this happens and the ways it happens . The new born baby gets language step by step till he is just like any one else. Many people studied that matter but they didn't understand it completely. The researchers who studied the way that children get their mother language from the beginning said that there is a relation between learning one's first language and genes. In fact this means that people have the instinct of communication like any other instinct . They are born and eager to talk and get in touch with others. They are born to explore everything around them so they need to communicate with it. (Tripp, S. (1973).

Yet this is not the whole matter, of course the process of language acquisition is more complex than this. That is mainly because language acquisition begins with birth and lasts to death. Yet here we are more concerned with the amusement of how young children, who come to this world with some kind of “clear brains”, gain and acquire such a complicated kind of knowledge across early years of their ages (Meadow, S. and Mylander, C. (1990).

Here we need to ask a question "How do the children acquire their mother languages?" Children are born with clean minds , the method of language acquisition is a problem itself as it is a complicated process begins when they are born and lasts forever . We are interested in knowing what happens when the new born children come to the world and gain languages in the very first years and if there is a specific method for this. (Meadow, S. and Mylander, C. (1990).

What does a language or a linguistic system mean in general?

Language acquisition is a very complex process that researcher and scientists tried to study deeply and put theories to understand it through linguistics studies. A Language is a complete system which has signs that could be vocal or written ones. Sometimes there are combinations of them. People use different languages in order to communicate with each other , to express themselves in society in a developed way to understand each other , to convey messages and to tell what they need and what they refuse in a way that is accepted by everyone.   

"How do children master a language in a short time?" This is the question that most researchers tried to answer. They needed to know the methods that children use to acquire a language . Researchers tried to find answers that satisfy them in this field. They reached many results regarding these studies . Many result confirmed that there are two main factors that make language acquisition faster and stronger . We are going to discuss  the nature of these factors and what they are exactly in the following paragraphs . We are also going to study the process of language acquisition in children and its stages.(Huttenlocher, J. and Smiley, P. (1987).

What factors affect children’s language development?

According to Stork and Widdowson , there are two main factors in the process of language acquisition . Studies discovered this fact and presented those two factors as the most important element in language acquisition. We can here discuss the two factors. The first one states that there is a big relation between language acquisition and genes and that children are born ready to learn a language. The other one states that the environment plays a great role in language acquisition and also the cultural linguistic atmosphere in which language acquisition happens affect the process greatly.

Many studied in this field concluded that human beings have the capacity to acquire any language just like they acquired their mother language. They assume that there are stages in the process of acquiring a specific language. Here we are going to discuss and discover the factors that the language acquisition in children are affected with and also the stages in this process and its development. (Jackendoff, R. (1994).  

1- Genetic factors and the readiness for language acquisition:

When we talk about the genetic readiness then we mean the natural abilities humans have and that we are born ready for communicating with others and for using a system to convey our feelings and needs , this system is languages. In fact all children need to be socially involved and they need to express themselves . When they are born , they can identify what happens around them through understanding sounds and movements. (Pinker, S. (1994).

Every child have an amount of readiness which is different from other children. All children are born with a degree of readiness to learn and acquire a language. We all born with the ability to communicate with others and use a language to do this.

2- The cultural, environmental, and linguistic context:

Here we refer to the time used and taken to reach the level of mastering a language in children and the time taken to reach the real communication with adults.

3- The number of linguistically rich experiences that the child has undergone and:

This means the number of experiences that affect the process of language acquisition.

4- Emotional state of the child:

When the psychological and emotional state of the child is stable, this leads to having better ability in mastering the language and this makes the process faster.

5- The quality of intellectuality development of the child that mainly depends on the development of both the genetic as well as the contextual environment of the child:

Each child has a different level of intelligence than other children. This intelligent has two faces the first is genetic and the second is acquirable by the surrounding environment. Thus we could increase the instinct level of intelligence children are born with. Environment here means all the things found around the child, the place where he lives and also the people surrounding him who can play a role in letting him acuire a language and master it. (Kuhl, P. (1993).

6- Presence or absence of any kind of physical disabilities:

This means that the normal child who is not handicapped must be better in mastering a language than the handicapped one .

7- Problems that occur during birth:

Medical problems that happen during birth or even in the first years of a child's life may affect the whole process and delaying any progress in it.

Stages of language acquisition development:

In order to know the way the process of acquiring a language in children and get benefits from it , we need to know all the stages and how they really happen . We also need to study those stages in order to discover how language acquisition happens.

There are a great number of researchers whose studies were in the linguistic field .Jean Piaget(1896-1980) is one of the leading and most famous ones. "The Cognitive development" is his theory in which he tried to explain the mental structure and the features of development . He had a very famous book which is called "Language and Thoughts of the Child" in which he discussed language and the mental process happening in a child's mind until he is a grown up adult. He stated that there are some specific stages which each of them has its own characteristics . Those stages are very important to Piaget that he considered them to be the tool that we can use to strengthen the child's cognitive development as well as the development of his way in acquiring languages. (Piaget, J. (1972).

Piaget has stated the stages as follows:

Sensory-Motor Stage: age (0-2 years)

Senses and motor abilities are those factors which develop in this stage. All sensory aspects in a child develop increasingly in order to gain a good level of understanding all surroundings in the environment a child lives in. This also includes the increasing of the linguistic knowledge into a child's mind.

Preoperational Stage:

Here the end of the latency period comes. When we refer to the latency period we mean the storing time in which the child takes to record all sound and signs he listens to and see from the adults. The start of the preoperational stage is characterized with some symbols that the child use to convey messages of what he wants to express.

Concrete Operations Stage:

This stage is when the child is seven to eleven years old. The mental operations are beginning to be performed well . The child use more real levels of mastering the language.

Formal Operations:

After the child is eleven years old, this stage begins. This stage could continue till the child is sixteen years old. Critical thinking appears to have higher levels here. The child uses all the possible ways to express his problems ,his worries about the future and any thing he wants to experience. A high level of full mastering the language is really needed in this stage. Writing and reading are very important here.

We can also talk about the theory of Chomsky(1928) which is also relevant to this. The expression "innate grammatical system" is used by him to say that during childhood the child can acquire a language. He tells us that there is a very important specific period in which the child can gain and acquire a language. Here the child has all the abilities  needed for mastering a language. He here assumed that the child in this period is ready to get all the keys of a language to speak it efficiently. He assumed that a child can even acquire more than one language.

Conclusion and personal opinion:

At the end we need to say that language acquisition is a very complicated process which needs high levels of understanding and studying in order to be understood. We presented two studies of Piaget and Chomsky that discussed hypothesis of innateness and readiness of the child . They don’t give great interest in the environment and the surrounding circumstances and how they affect the process of acquiring a language.  Using rewards and punishment are two main important factors when acquiring a language according to Skinner .

Any language needs different skills in order to be mastered. I think it is important to understand those skills and how they work. Reading , writing, listening and speaking are the four language skills we should understand. They could be classified into two main parts: Listening and reading can be put in the first "decoding "category while speaking and writing can be put into a second "decoding" category. The four skills are very important when we want to master a language. It is important to study each skill and how we could be aware of the way to master each skill separately and with relation to other skills . In fact studying a language is a very enjoyable process which enables us  to study other languages.