ELT 1 Module 3

Republic of the Philippines
Municipality of Altavas
ALTAVAS COLLEGE
Altavas, Aklan
1 Semester, Academic Year 2021-2022
st
PRINCIPLES AND THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND LEARNING
Module 3: Issues in First Language Acquisition
LEARNING OBJECTIVE
 Identify issues in first language acquisition
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DISCUSSION
ISSUES IN FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Competence and Performance

 Competence refers to one’s underlying knowledge of a system, event, or fact. It is the
nonobservable ability to do something and to perform something.
 Performance is the overtly observable and concrete manifestation or realization of
competence. It is the actual doing of something.
 In reference to language, competence is one’s underling knowledge of the system of a
language—its rules or grammar, its vocabulary, all the pieces of a language and how
those pieces fit together.
 Performance is the actual production (speaking and writing) or the comprehension
(listening and reading) of linguistics events.
Comprehension and Production

 Production is more directly observable, but comprehension is as much performance
—a “willful act,”—as production is.
 In a child language, most observational and research evidence points to the general
superiority of comprehension over production: children seem to understand “more”
than they actually produce. For instance, a child may understand a sentence with an
embedded relative in it (e.g., “The ball that’s in the sandbox is red.”) but not be able
to produce one.
Nature or Nurture?
 Nativists contend that a child is born with an innate knowledge of or predisposition
toward language, and that this innate property (the LAD or UG) is universal in all
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human beings. However, we must not put all our eggs in the innateness basket.
Environmental factors cannot by any means be ignored, as connectionists and
emergentists have shown.
 Derek Bickerton proposed that human beings are “bioprogrammed” to proceed from
stage to stage. Like flowering plants, people are innately programmed to release
certain properties of language at certain developmental stages.
Universals
 Closely related to the innateness controversy is the claim that language is universally
acquired in the same manner, and moreover, that the deep structure of language at
its deepest level may be common to all languages.
 Most of current UG research is centered around what have come to be known as
principles and parameters.
 Principles are invariable characteristics of human language that appear to apply to
all languages universally. Rules of the road in driving universally require the driver to
keep to one side of the road; this is a principle. But in some countries you must keep
to the left (e.g., the UK and Japan), and in others keep to the right (e.g., the USA and
Taiwan); the latter is a parameter. So, parameters vary across languages.
 The Principle of Structure Dependency states that language is organized in such a
way that it crucially depends on the structural relationships between elements in a
sentence (words, morphemes, etc.) (Holzman, 1998).
Systematicity and Variability

 One of the assumptions of a good deal of current research on child language is the
systematicity of the process of acquisition. From pivot grammar to three-and-four
word utterances, and to full sentences of almost indeterminate length, children
exhibit a remarkable ability to infer the phonological, structural, lexical and semantic
system of language.
 But in the midst of all this systematicity, there is an equally remarkable amount of
variability in the process of learning. Certain “typical” patterns appear in child
language. For example, children learning past tense forms of verbs like go offers an
illustration of the difficulty of defining stages. Young children who have not yet
mastered the past tense morpheme tend first to learn past tenses as separate items
without the knowledge of the difference between regular and irregular verbs.
Language and Thought

 The issue at stake in child language acquisition is to determine how thought affects
language, how language affects thoughts, and how linguistics can best describe and
account for the interaction of the two. While we do not have complete answers, it is
clear that research has pointed to the fact that cognitive and linguistic development
are inextricably intertwined with dependencies in both directions. And we do know
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that language is a way of life, is at the foundation of our being, and interacts
simultaneously with thoughts and feelings.
Imitation
 It is a common informal observation that children are good imitators. We think of
children typically as imitators and mimics, and then conclude that imitation is one of
the important strategies a child uses in the acquisition of language.
 Surface-structure imitation is a type of imitation where a person repeats or mimics
the surface strings, attending to a phonological code rather than a semantic code.
 Deep-structure imitation is a type of imitation done when a child attend to a greater
extent to that meaningful semantic level as he/she perceives the importance of the
semantic level of language.
Practice and Frequency

 Closely related to the notion of imitation is a somewhat broader question, the nature
of practice in child language.
 It is common to observe children and conclude that they “practice” language
constantly. A behavioral model of first language acquisition would claim that practice
—repetition and association--is the key to the formation of habits by operant
conditioning.
 Brown and Hanlon found that the frequency of occurrence of a linguistic item in the
speech of mothers was an overwhelming strong predictor of the order of emergence of
those items in their children’s speech.
Input
 The role of input in the child’s acquisition of language is undeniably crucial.
Whatever one’s position is on the innateness of language, the speech that young
children hear is primarily the speech heard in the home, and much of that speech is
parental speech or the speech of older siblings.
Discourse
 While conversation is a universal human activity performed routinely in the course of
daily living, the means by which children learn to take part in conversation appear to
be very complex. Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) proposed that conversations be
examined in terms of initiations and responses. The child learns not only how to
initiate a conversation but also how to respond to another’s initiating utterance.
FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION INSIGHTS APPLIED TO LANGUAGE

TEACHING
Partly through the effort of visionaries like Maximilian Berlitz, applied linguists
established the credibility of Direct Method.
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Principles of the Direct Method (Richards and Rodgers, 2001)
1. Classroom instruction was conducted exclusively in the target language.
2. Only everyday vocabulary and sentences were taught.
3. Oral communication skills were built up in a carefully graded progression organized
around question-and-answer exchanges between teachers and students in small,
intensive classes.
4. Grammar was taught inductively.
5. New teaching points were introduced orally.
6. Concrete vocabulary was taught through demonstration, objects, and pictures;
abstract vocabulary was taught by association of ideas.
7. Both speech and listening comprehension were taught.
8. Correct pronunciation and grammar were emphasized.
EVALUATION
Directions: Answer the following questions.
1. Competence and performance are difficult to define. In what sense are they
interdependent? How does competence increase? Can it decrease? Try to illustrate
with nonlanguage examples of learning certain skills, such as musical or athletic
skills. (15 pts)
2. Go through the issues discussed in this module and recall your English language
class in elementary. Did you have opportunities to understand and to speak, to
imitate the teacher, to practice your language, especially discourse and conversation?
Describe your experience. (15 pts)
3. Would the Direct Method work for you as a teacher? Discuss pros and cons. (20 pts)
Reference:
https://epdf.tips_principles-of-language-learning-and-teaching-5th-e.pdf
Prepared by:
Ms. Kristine F. Cantilero
Instructor
- End of Module 3 -

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Republic of the Philippines

PRINCIPLES AND THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND LEARNING

Module 3: Issues in First Language Acquisition

Competence and Performance

Comprehension and Production

Systematicity and Variability

Language and Thought

Practice and Frequency

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION INSIGHTS APPLIED TO LANGUAGE

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