2.2 Theory of Language Acquisition Language is crucial to young children’s development; it is the essential key for learning, for communicating and building relationships with others as well as enabling children to make sense of the world around them. The role of the environment on a child 's language development is important. Through the neighborhood, children can absorb all the acquired information. However, the most important is a concern of parents and family. Parents help the children develop their first language.
1.1 Introduction: The first year of a child’s life is extremely important for language development, more in depth learning continues throughout a child’s early years. In the first 12 months, babies develop many of the foundations that form their speech and language development. For the first three years or so, children understand a lot more than they can say. From three to six years old, you can expect longer, more abstract and complex conversations, their vocabulary will continue to grow. During the early school years, children will learn more words and start to understand how the sounds within language work together.
Language development is a critical part of a child’s overall development. Language encourages and supports a child’s ability to communicate. Through language, a child is able to understand and define his or her’s feelings and emotions. It also introduces the steps to thinking critically as well as problem-solving, building and maintaining relationships. Learning a language from a social perspective is important because it gives the child the opportunity to interact with others and the environment.
For preschool children, literacy enhancing activities in the home such as singing songs, playing games, reciting rhymes, and drawing pictures improve literacy and language outcomes. These are very supportive activities that provide a nurturing environment where a child grows and learns and also provide the essential needs that motivate active learning within the child. Therefore, parental involvement is vital in supporting a child’s literacy development (Anderson, 2007). Although the parent might not be physically in the classroom setting, they still show their support of their child’s education, including literacy development by being available and providing support with homework. The child may interpret the parent’s lack of involvement as an indication that school is not important and may lose motivation.Overall, research has figured out that parental involvement does make a difference to pupils’ engagement and their achievement and the evidence indicates that parental involvement benefits students, parents, teachers and schools.
We all know that understanding a language involves not only knowledge of grammar, phonology, and lexis, but also certain features and characteristics of the culture. Some authors mention different aspects of teaching and learning culture as a basis of learning language and they should be taken into consideration when they are teaching foreign language in order to motivate their students. Besides, culture associations that are part of language, as well as the socio-cultural background of the participants in teaching and learning environment, ultimately affect how and how well the language is learnt. This is due to the fact that a part of foreign language learning is rooted in culturally-influenced use of language and sociolinguistic rules that underlie it, Albertini suggests that an examination of assumption is especially important for teachers of students from non-dominant culture (that is student from non-Eurocentric, non-English background) because their school achievement typically falls below that of dominant culture students. Therefore, here we can have some opinions towards the importance of teaching foreign language culture along with teaching structures.
Moreover, they regulate their style of talking to fit the infant’s stage of development. This type of baby talk is termed parentese. Parentese is higher in pitch, simpler in vocabulary, and shorter in sentence length. The role of parents and other adults in language development is critical. Most people believe that language development begins when a child starts to talk which is around one year of age but the influence of a parent and adult on language development happens a lot earlier but is not true because it happened it the womb because the mother talk to the baby while they growing inside the mother Parents and other caregivers must start by using appropriate language and responding to children’s use of language in the proper way if language development is to progress in a healthy manner.
One of the learning outcomes are it helps children to enhance their understanding of the ways their own language (s) works and help them to develop the strategies for learning new languages. Besides, by using Language Awareness Approach, children can explore new languages and discuss similarities and differences among the languages. Last but not least, children get to discover the relationship between language and identity through Language Awareness Approach. The activities that I planned for the children will strike a balance between teacher-directed and child-centred because language learning is about both explicit and implicit knowledge. One of the activities is use alphabet crafts of English uppercase letters to teach the Mandarin names for some animals.
Language is an important means of communication. Language reflect thinking, obviously we can’t say a sentence until we have first thought of it. Often our thinking gets mixed with emotions and our reasons become loaded with desires,
This video illustrated salient information to understand the knowledge about language development in early childhood. By introducing, communication development of children up to age five, possible supports for speech-language from pathologists and audiologists, and lastly, age-specific milestones. Communication is what we humans use in order to learn, interact with others and form relationships. As a matter of fact, from birth hearing is very critical because we learn, absorb and react in our life with it, being that, language acts like a bridge in our life that is associated with other traits. Indeed, our first five years are the most salient stages in life to build our communication skills.
The most important things in language development are exposure and need. If children are exposed to a variety languages environment with many different people from the time they are born if they feel