View Content #22902

Patricia Rounds is retired from a long career in applied linguistics that includes, most recently, coordinating the University of Oregon's ESOL/Bilingual Endorsement Program, directing the Sapsik‘ʷałá program for American Indian educators, teaching math at Woodburn High School and at the American Cooperative School of Tunis, and travelling in North Africa.

Join me in exploring a short conversation between a caretaker and a young child. Since first language acquisition is nearly 100% successful, I suggest that thoughtful consideration of this simple conversation could be thought-provoking for our own classroom practice.

Child:       Find dolly.                 
Caretaker:   Hmmmm, you did.
Child:   Dolly nice.
Caretaker:   She is, isn't she?
Child:     Dolly bed.
Caretaker:   Wish I were in bed ...
Child:     Drop blanky!
Caretaker:    I did.  Sorry.  I'll pick it up.
Child:     Dolly sleep?
Caretaker:    Yes, she's sleeping now. (Peccei 2006).

This child could be any age from, say, 9 to 18 months and has probably engaged in interactions like this one hundreds or even thousands of times and has thus figured out a lot about how language works.  She has learned to break up a continuous stream of speech into meaningful bits that we call words.  She has learned to associate the sounds represented by b-l-a-n-k-y to a valued object in her environment.  It is unknown how many times she heard that particular combination of sounds before she could make the appropriate association.  Also, she has learned that she can re-combine these bits of sound to create new message using some very simple rules. For example, she says “Find Dolly” which indicates the basic (subject here deleted)/verb/object order of English, while a child learning Japanese, a language with predominant subject/object/verb word order would say “Dolly find.”

The child in our interaction has learned that there is something called turn-taking:  caretaker says something; child responds.  Early on in a child’s life caretakers will accept almost anything as a response: crying, burping, yawning, sneezing—but over time children learn to use words to satisfy their side of an interaction.  There is characteristic give and take between the two parties as they make relevant responses to each other’s verbal contribution.  Since the interaction continues the child is nicely rewarded.

In the natural course of a conversation with a child the topic would very likely be the here and now and shared experience.  Short and pertinent “She’s sleeping now” is more expected than “Well, junior shall we invest in blue chip industrials or would grain futures offer better short term prospects?” By exploiting the association between what is heard and what is seen, participation in such seemingly simple interactions gradually furthers language development.

So we see how interactions provide the context for copious input, i.e. language that the child hears that is mostly understandable.  Sometimes a distinction is drawn between input and intake, suggesting that the former is all the language generally in the child’s surroundings, while intake is the language the child “selects” to make meaning and advance language development.  This distinction helps us understand why children cannot learn language by listening to TV or radio.  Intake accelerates the pace of acquisition by strengthening the connections that create language systems in the brain.

Finally, let’s consider the quality of the child’s language, or output.  It’s clearly not perfect.  It doesn’t replicate the caretaker’s utterance. There are words missing.  The content words are there such as dolly, blanky and bed.  We have already seen that basic understanding of the rules of word order are there.  What’s not there are the grammatical words—the niceties that string together content words and help to disambiguate meaning from time to time.  E.g. “Dolly sleep?” in place of “Is Dolly sleeping?” The niceties are not there yet; however, we know that they gradually but eventually appear by the age of 4 years perhaps.  More complex word order, such as that exemplified by English question formation emerges bit by bit.

Is this a relevant model for second language acquisition? Older learners already know about words and basic grammar—although this knowledge may affect the hypotheses learners make about how the new language works. Older learners know how to engage in everyday conversations.  So in some ways the job of second language acquisition should be relatively easy.  But those of us who have been challenged to learn and/or teach a second language are only too aware of how often our efforts are less than 100% successful.  Our brief examination of first language learning is suggestive of the basic elements that need to be present in order for language acquisition to proceed.  Learners need to have lots and lots of meaningful input/intake and they need to hear it again and again.  Learners need a chance to interact with target language speakers in contexts that support understanding of what they are hearing, as well as their attempts to express themselves however imperfectly.  Perhaps most importantly, we are reminded that grammar emerges slowly over time as it is needed.  Caretakers know this and allow for it to happen—patiently.

Reference

Peccei, Jean Stilwell (2006). Child Language: A Resource Book for Students. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.