Next to the miracle of birth, the acquisition of language is sure to follow as the next wonder. What parent, teacher, observer, has not been awed watching a child making gibberish sounds, utter their first word, form the first sentence? We are all born with this distinguishing feature possessed only by humans – the ability to acquire, develop and embellish language. The reason we can do this is that learning is an innate aptitude with which every child is born. Every newborn comes wired to learn the language of his environment.
Every child from any country, culture or ethnic or racial background is born with the ability to speak the language found in their surrounding.
And they do this with great.
speed. This innate ability has the child experience the same stages of development while acquiring a language no matter what language s/he speaks. Every baby follows a predetermined pattern of language learning be it Thai, Japanese, Welsh, Hindu, English, French, Mandarin, etc. The important point here is that children do not learn a language by imitation.
By 8 months, babies can pick up the sound of the language they will be using. At 18 months they are forming 2-word sentences. By the age of 5, the child has an expressive vocabulary of about 2000 words. By 7, this has doubled.
As parents and adults, we often modify our speaking pattern – we speak Baby Talk with infants, goo-goo, gaga them, exaggerate intonations and go through a myriad of expressions or other language
modifications with the hope of increasing the child’s ability to speak. Forget it! Your child will follow that pattern of language acquisition and do so at remarkable speed. So, just relax and let your child go through the stages of language acquisition at his/ her pace. The best help parents can give is assist in expanding their child’s vocabulary so communication can be more effective. The best help teachers can give is to promote grammar as a means of understanding and formalizing use of language for academic and professional usage.
Recommended Reading:
- Syntactic Structure by Noam Chomsky
- The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker
Informative Link:
