Language And Language Essay

Language is crucial to young children’s development; it is essential for learning and communicating with others. Children learn most effectively through being involved in rich experiences and practical activities promoted through play, and adults need to join this play talking with and listening to them. There have been several theories about how young children acquire language. Some argued that the environment is an important factor, while others state that language is innate and that environment has a minor role in shaping knowledge.

The first group is called “the Behaviorist school”. For them Children come into this world with a tabula rasa and that they are then shaped by the environment and slowly conditioned through either positive or negative reinforcement. They learn a language step by step through imitation, repetition, memorization, controlled drilling and reinforcement. They receive reinforcement from their parents after speaking correctly (operant conditioning), and he will want to continue speaking to get the same positive reaction. Thus language acquisition is a process of habit formation. B.F. Skinner is the best known behaviorist who speculated that children are conditioned by their environment to respond to certain stimuli with language. And if a particular response is reinforced, it then becomes habitual, or conditioned. According to the behaviorists, the role of the environment is key and vital to the learning process. The environment is the active agent while the learner is the passive agent. The environment produces the necessary language input for the learner and it is up to the environment to give positive and negative reinforcement for the learner. Moreover, babies don’t come with native-born abilities; t...

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...its of language (degenerated), the fact that at such a young and cognitively limited age children nevertheless were able to acquire language fairly quickly indicates that they were born with this ability (the opposite view of the behaviorists who claimed that the environment was the sole cause of language development). Children produce grammar without having learnt any grammatical rules. For example in W.H questions children don’t produce questions by moving auxiliary instead, they correctly invert the auxiliary of the main clause rather than the first auxiliary.

To conclude, although behaviorism may not tell us much about the way the first language is acquired, it can point to successful strategies in the acquisition of a foreign language when getting older. Besides, despite being criticized, the environment still plays an important role in language acquisition.