How do we learn language?

In ‘What does language involve?’ (steps 1.3 to 1.8) we briefly

looked at how young children’s experience of learning their first
language differs from how we expect our learners to learn the
language of school. In this section we will look at this process
more closely and consider how learning a second language is
both similar and different from learning our first.

Young children are predisposed to interacting and learning with

others. The gestures, hand signals and sounds babies make are all
communicative acts that eventually evolve into the language patterns
(i.e. grammar) that structure the language we use as adults to
communicate. Through imitation and repetition of the language
children hear around them, and through a process of trial and error,
children learn which patterns of language ‘work’, or in other words,
what language tends to elicit a desired response. Over time, children
start to recognise that words and phrases belong to certain categories
(i.e. a tiger is a type of cat or ‘I pushed my brother off his chair’, is an
example of a caused motion grammatical construction). Children build
up a stock of words and grammatical patterns, or meaning making
resources, that they can use whilst communicating. These are
sometimes referred to as schemas. They also learn that they have
choices over which words and phrases to use: we can use different
words and phrases to talk about the same thing, but certain
expressions seem to be more effective.

In many ways learning a second language, or indeed learning the

language of school is like learning our first language. Effective second
language learning can only take place if the language input is rich, and
above all meaningful. The main difference between first and second
language learning is that the meanings learners make in their second
language are filtered through their first language schemas. That is why
when we are trying to work out what someone is saying in the second
language, we draw from our knowledge of our first language to make
sense of it, we translate. The danger is that we often assume that the
categories we’ve accumulated whilst learning our first language are
the same for the second language, but often to our disappointment,
they’re not. That’s why it’s often difficult to arrive at a direct translation
or we find that there is no equivalent word in the second language for
one we know in our first, or vice versa.

Traditionally, in an attempt to make learning the second language

easier language teachers have taught it by teaching learners its
grammar rules. These rules have been devised by linguists who were
interested in studying how the language system operates. Memorising
and applying these rules can be useful starting points when we are
trying to string together the words and phrases in a second language:
time is simply too short to learn a second language in the way we did
our first. For some, these rules can be very helpful short cuts.
However, traditional grammar rules tend to focus on the structure or
form of the language without paying much attention to meaning and
students often find these rules arbitrary and difficult to memorise and
apply. More recently, however, linguists have been interested in
developing functional and cognitive grammars that map the form of
the language with its function and meaning. Some basic principles of
these grammars can be very useful for teachers interested in
developing literacy in the content areas, therefore much of how we
talk about language on this course is based on some of these
principles.