Primary English: Knowledge and Understanding - Medwell Jane A. 2014

The acquisition of language

TEACHERS’ STANDARDS

A teacher must:

3. Demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge

✵ have a secure knowledge of the relevant subject(s) and curriculum areas, foster and maintain pupils’ interest in the subject, and address misunderstandings

✵ demonstrate a critical understanding of developments in the subject and curriculum areas, and promote the value of scholarship

✵ demonstrate an understanding of and take responsibility for promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher’s specialist subject

✵ if teaching early reading, demonstrate a clear understanding of systematic synthetic phonics.

4. Plan and teach well structured lessons

✵ impart knowledge and develop understanding through effective use of lesson time

✵ promote a love of learning and children’s intellectual curiosity

✵ contribute to the design and provision of an engaging curriculum within the relevant subject area(s).

5. Adapt teaching to respond to the strengths and needs of all pupils

✵ have a secure understanding of how a range of factors can inhibit pupils’ ability to learn, and how best to overcome these

✵ have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs; those of high ability; those with English as an additional language; those with disabilities; and be able to use and evaluate distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support them.

8. Fulfil wider professional responsibilities

✵ take responsibility for improving teaching through appropriate professional development.

Curriculum context

National Curriculum programmes of study

This knowledge underpins your teaching of the Key Stage 1 programme of study for English, which states, for example, that to speak clearly, fluently and confidently to different people, pupils should be taught to:

✵ speak with clear diction and appropriate intonation;

✵ choose words with precision;

✵ organise what they say;

✵ focus on the main point(s);

✵ include relevant detail;

✵ take into account the needs of their listeners.

In working towards these objectives, enjoy listening to and using spoken and written language and readily turn to it in play and learning; use talk to organise, sequence and clarify thinking, ideas, feelings and events; use language to imagine and recreate roles and experiences; speak clearly and audibly with confidence and control and show awareness of the listener; extend their vocabulary, exploring the meanings and sounds of new words.

Early Years Foundation Stage

The Early Learning Goals specify that, by the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage, children should:

✵ enjoy listening to and using spoken and written language, and readily turn to it in their play and learning;

✵ extend their vocabulary, exploring the meanings and sounds of new words;

✵ use talk to organise, sequence and clarify thinking, ideas, feelings and events.

Introduction

Language acquisition is one of the key topics in the study of learning. Every theory of learning has tried to explain it and probably no other topic has aroused such controversy. Being able to use and understand a language is the quintessentially human characteristic: all normal humans speak, no non-human animal does. Language is the main vehicle by which we express what we are thinking, which suggests that language and thought must be closely related.

When we speak we do not only produce strings of words that relate in some way to the world around us or our reactions to it: we combine those words into groups according to some very complex rules — what we call grammar, or syntax. And we should not underestimate the complexity of these rules. As an example of this, look at the following pair of sentences.

(a) Bill saw Jane with her best friend’s husband.

(b) Who did Bill see Jane with?

You will agree that sentence (b) is a perfectly logical question form derived from sentence (a). Now look at sentence (c).

Following the ’rules’ used in (a) and (b), it would be logical to accept the question form in (d).

(d) Who did Bill see Jane and?

You know, however, that that does not work. But can you explain why the question-forming rule works in one case and not in the other?

The same difficulty appears in the following four sentences. Why is sentence (d) not acceptable?

(a) David drove the car into the garage.

(b) David drove the car.

(d) David put the car.

Explaining these things is quite difficult, and most people will respond by saying that the (d) sentences ’don’t sound right’. Nevertheless, learning a language, and learning, implicitly, complex rules like these is something every child does successfully, in a matter of a few years and without the need for formal lessons. It is not surprising that children’s acquisition of language has received so much attention. How on earth do they do it?

Theories about language acquisition

How do children acquire language? There have essentially been three competing theoretical explanations for this phenomenal process.

1. The behaviourist account

Behaviourist views of learning are characterised by the use of the stimulus—response—reward loop. Broadly speaking, stimulus—response learning works like this. An event in the environment (the stimulus) produces a response from an organism capable of learning. That response is then followed by another event, which rewards the organism. That is, the organism’s response is positively reinforced. If the stimulus—response—reward sequence happens a sufficient number of times, the organism will learn to associate its response to the stimulus with the reward it gets. This will consequently cause the organism to give the same response whenever it meets the same stimulus. In this way, the response becomes a conditioned response. Behaviourist learning theorists are renowned for their work with non-human subjects (e.g. teaching pigeons to peck at buttons of certain colours to get food) but their theories have also been applied to human learning. Many of you will be familiar with approaches to child behaviour management that stress finding good behaviour and rewarding it, with the aim that this rewarded behaviour will continue and non-rewarded (less desirable) behaviour will disappear.

A behaviourist view of language acquisition simply claims that language development is the result of a set of habits. In 1957, the psychologist B.F. Skinner produced a behaviourist account of language acquisition in which linguistic utterances served as stimuli and responses. His theory claimed that language learners receive linguistic input from speakers around them, and are rewarded for their correct repetitions and imitations. As mentioned above, when language learners’ responses are reinforced positively, they tend to repeat those responses. Through ongoing experience of imitation, reward and repetition, learners’ language becomes progressively closer to adult language.

2. The generative/innatist approach

The claims of the behaviourists about the process of language acquisition were strongly criticised in Noam Chomsky’s 1959 review of Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior. Chomsky fundamentally questioned the relevance of the stimulus—response—reward sequence to the learning of language. His attack was centred on the identification of a basic problem with the behaviourist account — that is, how could the behaviourists explain the fact that young children commonly produce language utterances they can never have heard before? If language learners were learning largely through imitation, where did novel utterances come from? And it is clearly the case that children say things they have never heard. Here are just a few of the things that Alexander said sometime between his second and third birthdays:

’I goed there last week.’

’I see your foots.’

’Don’t kick it where I’m not are.’

None of these was an expression he had ever heard his parents make. Alexander cannot therefore have produced them simply through imitation. Some other learning process had clearly been operating.

PRACTICAL TASK

Collect some other examples like this from young children you have access to. In each case, try to suggest an explanation for why the child has produced this expression. Is it simply a mistake, or is there something else going on?

Following the ideas of Chomsky, two main points became established in theories about language acquisition. First, it seemed to be the case that young children, instead of simply imitating what they heard, used this input data to develop their own rules about how language was produced. So Alexander, having heard lots of examples where the past tense of a verb had been formed by the addition of ’ed’, applied this ’rule’ to the verb ’go’. Similarly, having realised that nouns were commonly made plural by the addition of ’s’, he applied this to the noun ’foot’. He was generating new language forms from the rules he was developing. Notice that both the ’rules’ applied in these examples actually produced incorrect language forms. Later Alexander went on to realise that there are plenty of exceptions in the English language to the rules he had devised, and adjusted his speech accordingly.

Chomsky’s second point was that the process of deriving, testing and adjusting rules of language was so complex that what was really amazing about language acquisition was that young children did it so quickly. Most children by the age of three have learned more about the workings of their language than expert linguists can describe. How could this happen so fast? Chomsky’s answer was that children must be born with a pre-existing mental capacity that allowed them to learn language quickly. Thus there was a dimension to language acquisition that was innate. This became known as the Language Acquisition Device, or LAD.

3. The social/interactive approach

The Chomskyan approach to language acquisition clearly seemed much more attuned to the observable evidence about young children’s language development. Yet, as time has passed and new research evidence has emerged, some problems have become apparent. First, research has suggested that the language that carers direct at young children is not actually their normal language. If Chomsky was correct in his theory that children derived their own rules from the language that surrounded them, rules that gradually approached those of adult language users, then it might be thought that children were constantly exposed to models of correct adult language from which such rules could be derived. In fact, parents and other adults tend to speak to children in non-standard ways, in what has become known as ’motherese’ (Durkin et al., 1982). A new approach to language acquisition has developed from (rather than replaced) the Chomskyan position and stressed the importance of the adult’s input to children’s development.

This new, social/interactive model stresses that language is actually a by-product of communication, which is essentially what human beings are programmed to do. Children ’communicate’ with their carers almost from birth, and there is research evidence that babies as young as a few days can copy their mothers’ facial expressions and, to a degree, the sounds they utter. Language is acquired and used because it dovetails with this need for communication. Children learn language through using it in interaction with others to achieve particular ends.

The new model lays stress, not so much on the LAD, the innate propensity that young children probably must have for learning language, as on the LASS, the Language Acquisition Support System, which parents and other carers seem to instinctively operate when faced with the young of the species. Adults seem to know when to use which language forms with youngsters, when to use ’baby-talk’, when to repeat their messages, and when to elaborate ideas in more complex language. So it is through this constant interaction with adults that young children come closer and closer to adult language usage.

PRACTICAL TASK

Try to eavesdrop on some adults as they talk with young children. As they talk, try to find any examples of the following.

✵ Adults talking in simpler forms than they would use in normal conversation.

✵ Adults expanding what a child says (e.g. Child: Mummy go. Adult: Yes, Mummy is going to the shop.).

✵ Adults correcting the talk of the child.

✵ Adults responding to what a child means, even if it is expressed incorrectly.

What can you learn about adult methods of supporting children’s emerging talk from these conversations?

How children learn language

If we accept a social-interactive position on the ways in which children become users of language, we can examine more closely some of the processes by which this happens.

All normal children, from the moment they are born, are surrounded by spoken language. One of the most noticeable facts about babies is that people talk to them, and this begins long before anyone could expect these babies to understand what was being said. And the remarkable thing about the way people talk to babies is that they generally do it meaningfully. Of course, there is a certain amount of ’goo-gooing’, but, more often, the talk will be similar to, ’Who’s going to see his Nana? Yes, he is. Oh, there’s a clever boy’. Many babies spend almost the whole of their waking life being played with; play which almost inevitably is accompanied by talk. This talk is invariably meaningful, even if not precisely expressed in adult forms. In addition to this, young children are also surrounded by talk which is not directly addressed to them. Again such talk is invariably meaningful and much of its sense is obvious from its context. Children then begin life bathed in meaningful talk.

Because the talk that surrounds them is meaningful, young children are receiving continual demonstrations of the functions of spoken language. If an adult says to a child, ’Who’s dropped his ball then? There we are. Back again’, and returns the ball, the adult is demonstrating the connection between talk and the action it refers to. When the child says, ’Daddy blow’, and the adult responds with, ’Yes, Daddy will blow the whistle now’, the demonstration is not only of the connection between language and action, but also of an appropriate form of speech. Children receive millions of demonstrations of meaningful talk, not only directed at them, but also taking place around them. From these demonstrations they have to work out how the system of language works, so that they can begin to take part in it.

The simple fact of witnessing demonstrations of language would not be sufficient to turn children into language users unless some other factors were also present. First among these is engagement, that is the desire on the part of children to take part in the language behaviour they see around them. This desire arises because children witness the power of language in the world, and want to share in it. They see, for example, that if you can ask for a biscuit rather than just scream loudly, you are more likely to get what you want. They also see that using language to achieve what they want is not so difficult that they are unlikely to master it. On the contrary, language is presented to them from the very first as something they can do. This produces a crucial expectation of success, which we know to be vitally important in actual achievement. There is plenty of evidence that children, both in and out of school, achieve very much what they are expected to achieve by other people. It is likely that this works because children internalise others’ expectations about them, and come to hold these expectations of themselves. The most familiar example of this concerns children whom adults label as ’not very clever’, and who come to believe this of themselves. Because they do not believe they can ’be clever’, they stop trying to be.

In the case of spoken language, however, every child is expected to be able to master it (unless some medical condition makes this impossible). Asking any parent the question, ’Do you expect your child to learn to talk?’ is likely to produce only a very puzzled response. The question seems ludicrous because the answer is so obvious. Because the adults around them believe so firmly that they will become talkers, the children themselves come to believe they will do it, and they do, generally effortlessly. There is an ’absence of the expectation that learning will not take place’.

When children are learning to talk, it is highly unlikely that the adult expert talkers who surround them will decide to administer a structured programme of speech training. Adults who have tried to be even a little systematic in helping children to develop language have found that it simply does not work. The following much quoted exchange between child and carer is an example of what can happen.

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.

Instead of this situation, in which the adult has tried to take responsibility for what the child should learn, it is much more usual for the child to take the responsibility. Learning to talk is the child’s task, which can be supported by adults but is not sequenced, structured or taught by them. This is implicitly accepted by the majority of adults who rarely try to force the pace when children are learning to talk, but instead take their lead from the child’s performance.

During this learning, nobody expects children to perform perfectly from the very beginning. If children had to wait until they had perfect control of all facets of spoken language before speaking, they would not produce any speech until at least nine or ten years of age. What happens is that children produce spoken language forms that are approximations to adult forms, and these approximations gradually become closer and closer to the desired end product. ’Baby talk’ is not only accepted by carers but is actually encouraged by being received with amusement and pride. It is also usually responded to as a meaningful utterance, and elaborated by the adult into a more fully developed form. When a child says, for example, ’Daddy you naughty’, the adult is much more likely to respond with something like, ’Oh, fancy saying Daddy is naughty. He’s a good Daddy’, rather than, ’No. Say “Daddy, you are naughty”’. The adult responds to the child’s attempts at fully fledged speech forms by interpreting and adding meaning, rather than by correcting them. Approximations are accepted and responded to by adults, and gradually children realise for themselves that they are approximate and how to make them more ’adult’.

Any learning, to be effective, requires a great deal of practice on the part of the learner, and learning to talk is no exception. For the vast majority of children this is no problem at all. They are constantly surrounded by talk and are expected, and given chances, to join in with it. Even when by themselves they carry on practising, from early babbling in which language sounds are practised to later oral accompaniments to actions such as play. Significantly this practice occurs for completely different purposes than to help children learn to talk. For example, adults rarely hold conversations with babies and young children because they know this is good for their language development. Nor do children talk to themselves when playing because they think this will make them better talkers. Both activities occur for more fundamental, human reasons. Conversations take place because there is something to converse about and children are included in the conversation that accompanies everyday action from very early in their lives. Children talk to themselves because this is how they represent their actions to themselves and how they reflect on these actions. This kind of talk becomes more and more elliptical and eventually fades altogether, occurring inside the head as ’inner speech’. It is the beginning of thought.

For all the importance of the above processes in children’s growing capacity to produce meaningful speech, none of them would work were it not for the fact they all operate in a two-sided situation. Children are immersed in language, receive a myriad of demonstrations of it, are expected to try to emulate these and given freedom and opportunities to do it at their own pace and level of approximation, but the crucial factor is that all this happens in the context of real dialogue with other people. Adults talk, not just across children, but to them; they expect children to talk back to them, and when they do, adults respond. This constant interaction is at the heart of growing language use. And it is the need for interaction which comes first. Relationships need to be developed and things need to be achieved together. Language comes into being as a means of helping these things happen. It is therefore learned as a means of coping with the demands of being human.

Because of the interactive nature of language learning the process inevitably involves response. Children respond to adult language, and adults respond to children’s attempts at language. Such response not only reaffirms the relationship that forms the context of the talk, but also gives children feedback about their language, and, perhaps, a more elaborated model on which to base future language.

A SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

Because they are human, children are born with the need to communicate.

Adults talk to children, thereby giving them plenty of demonstrations of purposeful language.

Children work out the ’rules’ of language from the interactions they have with other language users.

Many of their initial attempts at these ’rules’ will be incorrect but they are steps along the path to correct adult usage.

The freedom to experiment and the freedom to be wrong are crucial elements in the learning of language.

Interaction between adults and children is vital in language learning and this interaction, and shared attention, is not the same as listening to a TV or computer.

M-LEVEL EXTENSION

Recent research in the US has been exploring the importance of children being talked to by adults in their early years. The project is known as the Thirty Million Words project (http://tmw.org/tmw-initiative/) because of the finding that some children, by their fourth birthdays, have been exposed to thirty million words more than other children, and the claim that this is linked to later school performance. It would be worthwhile exploring the papers and discussion on this website to find out more about this.

If the above features are characteristic of young children’s learning of language, it might be thought that they would have strong implications for language use in early childhood settings and in schools. Do settings and schools provide the conditions in which language development will flourish? Or do they tend to emphasise a more limited conception of how language is learnt?

Make notes about the environment for language development that seems to be provided in any classrooms you are able to work in/visit. Focus particularly on the extent to which children in these classrooms are given the freedom to experiment and the freedom to be wrong in their language learning.

FURTHER READING

Clark, E.V. (2002) First Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

DfE (2013) Teachers’ Standards. London: DfE. (www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/208682/Teachers__Standards_2013.pdf)

Leffel, K. and Suskind, D. (2013) ’Parent-directed Approaches to Enrich the Early Language Environments of Children Living in Poverty’. Seminars in Speech and Language. 34 (4): 267—77 (http://tmw.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/SSL-00517.pdf)

Lust, B.C. and Foley, C. (2004) (eds) First Language Acquisition: The Essential Readings. Oxford: Blackwell.

Trott, K., Dobbinson, S. and Griffiths, P. (2004) (eds) The Child Language Reader. London: Routledge.