ELD 211: ‘‘Language Acquisition and

Language Teaching’’
Mr. M. Pute
Department of Language Education, UWC

mpute@uwc.ac.za
Child Language Development and
Second Language Learning
 Theories of Language Acquisition
Theory Central Idea Individual with
theory
Behaviourist Children imitate adults. B.F. Skinner
Their correct utterances
are reinforced when they
get what they want or are
praised.
Innateness A child’s brain contains N. Chomsky
special language-
learning mechanisms at
birth.
Cognitive Language is just one J. Piaget
aspect of a child’s overall
intellectual development.
Interaction This theory emphasises Bruner
the interaction between
children and their care-
givers.
 INNATENESS

Noam Chomsky (1957): a criticism to the behaviourist

theory.
– Focus: children receive impoverished language
input
– Conclusion: children must have an inborn faculty
for language
– Language acquisition is therefore a biologically
determined process, e.g. the human species has
evolved a brain whose neural circuits contain
linguistic information at birth.
 INNATENESS

According to Chomsky (1957).

“We are designed to walk… that we taught to walk is

impossible. And pretty much the same is true of
language. Nobody is taught to language. In fact you
can’t prevent the child from learning it”.
INNATENESS

The child’s natural predisposition to learn language

is triggered by hearing speech and the child’s brain
is able to interpret what he/she hears according to
the underlying principles or structures it already
contains.

This natural faculty is known as the Language

Acquisition Device (LAD).

The device is supposed to contain natural words for

things and actions – nouns and verbs.
INNATENESS

Is an English child born knowing specific things

about English?

Likewise, is a Xhosa child born with the natural

faculty to make clicks?
INNATENESS

The answer to both questions is NO.

Chomsky does not suggest that a child is born with

the knowledge of a specific language.

But all children are born with the LAD which contains
underlying words for concepts, things and verbs.

It is then the child’s task to establish how the specific

language he/she hears expresses these underlying
principles.
INNATENESS
For instance, the LAD already contains the concept
of verb past tense.

By listening to such forms as “worked”, “played” and

“patted”, the child will form the hypothesis that the
past tense of verbs is formed by adding the sound
/d/, /t/ or /id/ to the base form.

This, in turn, will lead to the “virtuous errors”.

e.g. My teacher holded the baby rabbits.
Nobody don’t like me.

All this process is unconscious.

INNATENESS
The LAD is triggered when is exposed to favourable
conditions, namely an environment where language
is used: the language-rich environment
No child can learn a language in isolation.

While Chomsky’s position is that the LAD contains

specific knowledge about language (in general),
Dan Isaac Slobin suggested that the LAD is rather a
mechanism for working out the rules of
language.
INNATENESS
D.I. Slobin:
“It seems to me that the child is born not with a set of
linguistic categories but with some sort of process
mechanism – a set of procedures and inference
rules… that he uses to process linguistic data.
These mechanisms are such that, applying them to
the input data, the child ends up with something
which is a member of the class of human languages.
The linguistic universals, then, are the results of an
innate cognitive competence rather than the content
of such a competence”.
EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT INNATENESS
Work in several areas of language study has
provided support to the idea of an innate language
faculty.
Let’s see three types of evidence.
1.Human anatomy, peculiarly adapted to the production of
speech.
 We have evolved a vocal tract which allows the precise
articulation of a wide repertoire of vocal sounds.
 Neuro-science has identified specific areas of the brain with
distinctly linguistic functions, i.e. Broca’s area and Wernicke’s
area.
 Experiments aimed at teaching chimpanzees to communicate
using plastic symbols or manual gestures have proved
controversial. They are unable to have grammar.
EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT INNATENESS

2. Creole varieties of specific languages have proved to be the

results of LAD at work.
 Trigger: Slaves from different origins forced to communicate
without a common language of use
 Result: Restricted form of language known as pidgin
 Fact: The adult speakers were past the critical age at which they
could learn a new language fluently – they had learned an
European language (Dutch, French, English) as foreign language
and under unfavourable conditions. Remarkably, the children of
these slaves turned the pidgin into a full language known as
creole.
EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT INNATENESS

3. Sign languages used by the deaf

 Studies have shown that, far from being crude gestures replacing
spoken words, these are complex, fully grammatical languages in
their own right.
 A sign language may exist in several dialects.
 Children learning to sign as a first language pass through similar
stages to hearing children learning spoken language.
 Deprived of speech, the urge to communicate is realised through
a manual system which fulfils the same function.
 There is even a signing creole, again developed by children, in
Nicaragua.
 Limitations
• Chomsky’s work was theoretical; did not study real children
• Relies on children being exposed to language but takes no account
of the interaction between children and their carers
• Does not recognise the reasons why a child might want to speak,
the functions of language.
• In 1977, Bard and Sachs published a study of a child known as Jim,
the hearing son of deaf parents. Jim's parents wanted their son to
learn speech rather than the sign language they used between
themselves. He watched a lot of television and listened to the radio,
therefore receiving frequent language input. However, his progress
was limited until a speech therapist was enlisted to work with him.
Simply being exposed to language was not enough. Without the
associated interaction, it meant little to him.