Children's language acquisition
On Monday, 08.09.2014 we've listened a lecture about Modern Methods of Foreign Languages Teaching as a science. At the lecture have been considered the main terms and the goals of whole course. Input, feedback, approach, techniques, acquisition - all of these terms will help us to become a good teacher and will organize an interesting and effective lessons. At least, I hope so.
I would like to stop at the last term - acquisition. But if we want to teach somebody (in our case they are students) for a new language, we should know how the process of memorization new words and acquisition different skills such as listening, speaking, writing and reading were occurred. In my opinion, one of the best ways to understand how to teach language is analyze and consider
how children learn their first language.
Also we should answer for following questions: How do children accomplish this remarkable feat in such a short amount of time? Which aspects of language acquisition are biologically programmed into the human brain and which are based on experience? Do adults learn language differently from children? Researchers have long debated the answers to these questions, but there is one thing they agree on: language acquisition is a complex process.
Language learning is natural. Babies are born with the ability to learn it and that learning begins at birth. All children, no matter what language their parents speak, learn language much the same way. According to research this learning takes place in three basic stages:
Stage One – Learning Sounds
In this stage, babies learn which phonemes belong to the language they are learning and which don’t.
Stage Two – Learning Words
At this stage children essentially learn how the sounds in a language go together to make meaning.
Stage Three – Learning Sentences
During this stage, children learn how to put words in the correct order.
So, I think that such kind of information will help to understand the nature of studying languages.
References: http://giftedkids.about.com/od/gifted101/a/language_learning.htm
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/linguistics/learn.jsp
