Theories
of Teaching Language to Children
By Anthony M. Wanjohi
Language acquisition is the process by
which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to
understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse
capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This
language might be vocal as with speech or manual as in sign. Language
acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition, which studies
infants' acquisition of their native language, rather than second language
acquisition that deals with acquisition (in both children and adults) of
additional languages (Graham, 1998). Over the last fifty years, several
theories have been put forward to explain the process by which children learn
to understand and speak a language. These include Behaviourist theory,
Innateness theory, Noam Chomsky’s Cognitive theory and Piaget’s Interaction
theory.
There is no one single
theory that can explain language acquisition. Proponents of different theories
have examined various theories but appear to contradict. This paper thus
intended to examine different theories, analyses their very weaknesses and
strengths.
The objective of this
paper was to explore different theories of language development in
children.
The exposure of various theories provides
a comprehensive, yet manageable, overview of current major educational
psychological theories and issues and analyzes the
implications for the teaching process. Adopting the idea that "there are
no final and only answers to questions concerning language acquisition
theories,", this paper is an exhortation for
teachers to develop their own learning theories and test them in terms of
classroom reactions, structure, and the adequacy of supporting evidence.
2.0 Theories
of Language Development in Children
There are various theories of language
acquisition in children. This section discusses briefly the key ones.
The behaviourist psychologists developed
their theories while carrying out a series of experiments on animals.
They observed that rats or birds, for example, could be taught to perform
various tasks by encouraging habit-forming. Researchers rewarded
desirable behaviour. This was known as positive reinforcement. Undesirable
behaviour was punished or simply not rewarded - negative reinforcement.
The behaviourist B. F. Skinner then
proposed this theory as an explanation for language acquisition in humans.
In Verbal Behaviour (1957), he stated:
"The
basic processes and relations which give verbal behaviour its special
characteristics are now fairly well understood. Much of the experimental
work responsible for this advance has been carried out on other species, but
the results have proved to be surprisingly free of species restrictions.
Recent work has shown that the methods can be extended to human behaviour
without serious modifications."(cited in
Lowe and Graham, 1998, p68)
Skinner suggested that a child imitates
the language of its parents or carers. Successful attempts are rewarded
because an adult who recognises a word spoken by a child will praise the child
and/or give it what it is asking for. Successful utterances are therefore
reinforced while unsuccessful ones are forgotten.
Limitations of the Behaviourist
Theory
While there must be some truth in
Skinner's explanation, there are many objections to it.
a) Language
is based on a set of structures or rules, which could not be worked out simply
by imitating individual utterances. The mistakes made by children reveal that
they are not simply imitating but actively working out and applying
rules. For example, a child who says "drinked"
instead of "drank" is not copying an adult but rather over-applying a
rule. The child has discovered that past tense verbs are formed by adding
a /d/ or /t/ sound to the base form. The "mistakes" occur
because there are irregular verbs which do not behave in this way. Such
forms are often referred to as intelligent mistakes or virtuous errors
b) The
vast majority of children go through the same stages of language
acquisition. There appears to be a definite sequence of steps. We
refer to developmental milestones. Apart from certain extreme cases (see
the case of Genie), the sequence seems to be largely unaffected by the
treatment the child receives or the type of society in which s/he grows up.
c) Children
are often unable to repeat what an adult says, especially if the adult
utterance contains a structure the child has not yet started to use. The
classic demonstration comes from the American psycholinguist David
McNeill. The structure in question here involves negating verbs:
Child:
Nobody
don't like me
Mother:
No, say, "Nobody likes me."
Child:
Nobody don't like me.
(Eight
repetitions of this dialogue)
Mother:
No, now listen carefully: say, "Nobody likes me."
Child:
Oh! Nobody don't likes me.
(McNeil
in The Genesis of Language, 1966)
d)
Few children receive much explicit grammatical correction. Parents are
more interested in politeness and truthfulness. According to Brown, Cazden and Bellugi (1969):
"It seems to be truth value rather than well-formed syntax that chiefly
governs explicit verbal reinforcement by parents - which renders mildly
paradoxical the fact that the usual product of such a training schedule is an
adult whose speech is highly grammatical but not notably truthful."
(cited in Lowe and Graham, 1998).
e)
There is evidence for a critical period for language acquisition.
Children who have not acquired language by the age of about seven will never
entirely catch up. The most famous example is that of Genie, discovered
in 1970 at the age of 13. She had been severely neglected, brought up in
isolation and deprived of normal human contact. Of course, she was
disturbed and underdeveloped in many ways. During subsequent attempts at
rehabilitation, her carers tried to teach her to speak. Despite some
success, mainly in learning vocabulary, she never became a fluent speaker,
failing to acquire the grammatical competence of the average five-year-old.
Noam Chomsky published a criticism of the
behaviourist theory in 1957. In addition to some of the arguments listed
above, he focused particularly on the impoverished language input children
receive. Adults do not typically speak in grammatically complete
sentences. In addition, what the child hears is only a small sample of
language.
Chomsky concluded that children must have
an inborn faculty for language acquisition. According to this theory, the
process is biologically determined - the human species has evolved a brain
whose neural circuits contain linguistic information at birth. The
child's natural predisposition to learn language is triggered by hearing speech
and the child's brain is able to interpret what s/he hears according to the
underlying principles or structures it already contains. This natural
faculty has become known as the Language Acquisition Device (LAD).
Chomsky did not suggest that an English child is born knowing anything specific
about English, of course. He stated that all human languages share common
principles. (For example, they all have words for things and actions -
nouns and verbs.) It is the child's task to establish how the specific
language s/he hears expresses these underlying principles.
For example, the LAD already contains the
concept of verb 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"
mentioned above. It hardly needs saying that the process is
unconscious. Chomsky does not envisage the small child lying in its cot
working out grammatical rules consciously!
Chomsky's ground-breaking theory remains
at the centre of the debate about language acquisition. However, it has
been modified, both by Chomsky himself and by others. Chomsky's original
position was that the LAD contained specific knowledge about language.
Dan Isaac Slobin has proposed that it may
be more like a mechanism for working out the rules of language:
"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,
if you will - 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 result of an innate cognitive competence
rather than the content of such a competence." (Russell,
2001).
Evidence to support the
innateness theory
Work in several areas of language study
has provided support for the idea of an innate language faculty. Three
types of evidence are offered here:
a) Slobin has pointed out that human anatomy is
peculiarly adapted to the production of speech. Unlike our nearest
relatives, the great apes, we have evolved a vocal tract which allows the
precise articulation of a wide repertoire of vocal sounds. Neuro-science has also identified specific areas of the
brain with distinctly linguistic functions, notably Broca's area
and Wernicke's area. Stroke victims provide valuable data: depending on
the site of brain damage, they may suffer a range of language dysfunction, from
problems with finding words to an inability to interpret syntax.
Experiments aimed at teaching chimpanzees to communicate using plastic symbols
or manual gestures have proved controversial. It seems likely that our ape
cousins, while able to learn individual "words", have little or no
grammatical competence. Pinker (1994) offers a good account of this
research.
b) The
formation of creole varieties of English appears to be the result of the LAD at
work. The linguist Derek Bickerton has
studied the formation of Dutch-based creoles in Surinam. Escaped
slaves, living together but originally from different language groups, were
forced to communicate in their very limited Dutch. The result was the
restricted form of language known as a pidgin. The adult speakers were
past the critical age at which they could learn a new language fluently - they
had learned Dutch as a foreign language and under unfavourable
conditions. Remarkably, the children of these slaves turned the pidgin
into a full language, known by linguists as a creole. They were
presumably unaware of the process but the outcome was a language variety which
follows its own consistent rules and has a full expressive range. Creoles
based on English are also found, in the Caribbean and elsewhere.
c) Studies
of the sign languages used by the deaf 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. For an account of this, see Pinker, 1994 (pp 36-7).
Limitations of Chomsky's
theory
Chomsky's work on language was
theoretical. He was interested in grammar and much of his work consists of
complex explanations of grammatical rules. He did not study real
children. The theory relies on children being exposed to language but
takes no account of the interaction between children and their carers.
Nor does it 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. (Chomsky, 1966).
Subsequent theories have placed greater
emphasis on the ways in which real children develop language to fulfil their
needs and interact with their environment, including other people.
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget placed
acquisition of language within the context of a child's mental or cognitive
development. He argued that a child has to understand a concept before
s/he can acquire the particular language form which expresses that concept.
A good example of this is ‘seriation’. There will be a point in a child's intellectual
development when s/he can compare objects with respect to size. This
means that if you gave the child a number of sticks, s/he could arrange them in
order of size. Piaget suggested that a child who had not yet reached this
stage would not be able to learn and use comparative adjectives like
"bigger" or "smaller", (Piaget, 1987).
Object permanence is another phenomenon
often cited in relation to the cognitive theory. During the first year of life,
children seem unaware of the existence of objects they cannot see. An
object which moves out of sight ceases to exist. By the time they reach
the age of 18 months, children have realised that objects have an existence
independently of their perception. The cognitive theory draws attention to
the large increase in children's vocabulary at around this age, suggesting a
link between object permanence and the learning of labels for objects. (Piaget,
1987)
Limitations of the
Cognitive Theory
During the first year to 18 months,
connections of the type explained above are possible to trace but, as a child
continues to develop, so it becomes harder to find clear links between language
and intellect. Some studies have focused on children who have learned to
speak fluently despite abnormal mental development. Syntax in particular
does not appear to rely on general intellectual growth. (Piaget,
1987).
2.4 The Input or Interactionist Theories
In contrast to the work of Chomsky,
more recent theorists have stressed the importance of the language input
children receive from their care-givers. Language exists for the purpose
of communication and can only be learned in the context of interaction with
people who want to communicate with you. Interactionists such
as Jerome Bruner suggest that the language behaviour of adults when talking to
children (known by several names by most easily referred to as child-directed
speech or CDS) is specially adapted to support the acquisition process.
This support is often described to as scaffolding for the child's language
learning. Bruner also coined the term Language Acquisition Support System
or LASS in response to Chomsky's LAD. ColwynTrevarthen studied
the interaction between parents and babies who were too young to speak.
He concluded that the turn-taking structure of conversation is developed
through games and non-verbal communication long before actual words is uttered (Chomsky, 1966).
These theories serve as a useful
corrective to Chomsky's early position and it seems likely that a child will
learn more quickly with frequent interaction. However, it has already
been noted that children in all cultures pass through the same stages in
acquiring language. We have also seen that there are cultures in which
adults do not adopt special ways of talking to children, so CDS may be useful
but seems not to be essential, Chomsky, (1966).
The main theorist associated with interactionist theory is Lev Vygotsky. Interactionists focus on Vygotsky's model
of collaborative learning. Collaborative learning is the idea that
conversations with older people can help children both cognitively and
linguistically.
The field of children's language
development is one that encompasses a range of distinct theoretical
perspectives. The theoretical issue that has predominated over all the others
in this area for the last thirty-five years or more is that of the extent to
which children are pre-programmed for the specific task of language learning. A
related issue is that of whether language is independent of other areas of
cognition, or is it dependant upon more general cognitive abilities. A number
of distinct theoretical positions have been identified - some of the main
protagonists being, as any textbook account will reveal: Chomsky, who believes
the child is born with specific linguistic knowledge; Skinner, portrayed as
believing that language is entirely a matter of conditioning; Piaget, who sees
language development as an outgrowth of general cognitive development; and
Bruner, who emphasises the importance of the social/interactional context in
which language development takes place.
Skinner bases his theory of children
acquiring language through behaviourism. Skinner states that all behaviour is
conditioned e.g. punished or rewarded until it becomes natural and automatic.
Babies imitate their parents/carers and are either reprimanded or praised
according to their accuracy. This is Skinner going against Chomsky, as he
believes biology plays almost no part in the way children learn language.
Piaget’s theories on children learning
language is mainly focused around “cognitive development,” meaning language are
controlled by the development of thinking. If a baby can use sentences involving
phrases such as, "more than", "less than" it is obvious
that the concepts of "more than" must have been grasped, before the
child uses the phrase in an utterance.
Chomsky- Noam Chomsky stated that children
are born with an innate knowledge of language when they are born and learning
of their native language is at high speed when hearing it from others. This
links to children over-regularizing and putting grammar into utterances when
they are not needed. Chomsky is one of the most famous theorists on child
language acquisition, but because his theories were based on his own intuitions
about English and not actually studied on real children, many theorists find
flaws within his theories and statements
Chomsky, then, sees the child as
essentially autonomous in the creation of language. She is programmed to learn,
and will learn so long as minimal social and economic conditions are realised.
In Bruner's version, the program is indeed in place, but the social conditions
become more important. The child is still an active participant, is still
essentially creative in her approach to language acquisition, but the role of
the parents and other caretakers is also seen as primordial.
Bruner, R. (1976) Applied
mergers and acquisitions. New York: John Wiley and
Sons.
Chomsky, N. (1966). Topics in the
theory of generative grammar: London: Walter
de Gruyter, 1966
Graham P.(1998).Cognitive-behaviour
therapy for children and families. London:
Cambridge University Press,
1998
Piaget, J. (1987) Possibility and
Necessity: The Role of Necessity in Cognitive
Development. London: Minnesota UP.
Pinker, S. (1988) Connections and
symbols. Journal of Cognitive
Science [special
edition] MIT Press,
Skinner, B. (1989). Verbal Behaviour. New
York: Pennsylvania State University
Suggested Citation in APA
Wanjohi,A.M.(2010). Theories
of Teaching Language to Children. KENPRO Publications. Available online at http://www.kenpro.org/papers/theories-of-teaching-language-to-children-2010.htm
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