Human Development and Language Acquisition.

Applied Linguistics.
Miss Mara Angelica Fuica. Names:Timothy Albornoz Mayorga Nicol Irarrzabal Betancur. Pedagoga Media en Ingls.

Concepcin, September, 30th, 2013.

Human Development and Language Acquisition. We shall start mentioning one of the most difficult discussion topics to comprehend: language learning and language acquisition. Some authors affirm that the first language acquisition, learning our native language, is an environmental and mean of interaction process necessary to develop and increase our sociolinguistics skills. But, it is clear that language acquisition is not only something that appears at the moment of interaction with our parents, it is learn along the early years and it is an innate process, nothing but vocabulary is taught to children. But a major question to be considered is how they acquire the syntax (grammar) if they are not taught by their parents and secondly, in which age is better to acquire a second language according to the experts. According to Yule (1985) there are a series of processes to pass by in order to develop and learn our own language (L1). To begin with, babies are born prepared to acquire and understand any language. But, the determiner of their final language result is the environment where they are raised and the interaction with the native speakers of the place where they are born. Furthermore, babies brain plasticity in the early years of interaction with their native speaker parents allow them to start developing their earliest articulation of word as a repetition of common words listened in their language. This interaction is called input, which is the way to communicate and generating a response from the child and sends by its message three important skills to be learnt later: phonological aspects of speech, vocabulary and lately syntax (Gervain & Mehler, 2010). Besides, this progression is divided into several stages in which children start with the basic part of the first language to be learnt. At first, they start forming short syllables, at least two different utterances which depend on the articulator organ, the tongue. After this, the way of speaking is naturally learnt by children, in relation to different inputs sent by their parents in order to acquire and teach the language indirectly. It can be seen that children are prepared to learn their language as a natural process, but there are different theories that focus their attention to syntax and other to semantics. It is important to notice that the best way to understand the way people learn a language is taking the best parts from these theories in order to understand that syntax without semantics do not include meaning. For instance, the interaction between parents and children make this an approach for them to acquire de social and structural part of the language, not only listening they are going to learn and develop a language. Moreover, acquisition and learning are two concepts which have to do an understandable difference between the meanings and how it refers to the knowledge of a second language. A similar situation can we found with a certain tongue as a second language and other one as a foreign language. In the case of a tongue as a second language, it takes a social role more than an education one, because the purpose to learn and acquire a second language belongs to the whole community, not only to a group of students that can learn it in a classroom. Conversely, a foreign language is taught week by week some hours, and even only during some courses through the ages, during the school or high school. The importance of the second language is that it tries to be teaching even as a mother tongue. The acquisition of a language develops gradually, in different

situations where the main way to acquire the language is interacting with other people, especially native speakers, which increases the fluency. In fact, to improve the pronunciation it uses a method called audio-lingual. However, the tactic about the learning of a second language is comparable with other subjects in any language, there are less instances to practice it, because the knowledge of this tongue is learned by the accumulation of concepts and words. Here an important fact is the dynamic and didactics that teachers use to teach it, because most of times it is taught only in classes. Conclusion Acquiring a first language is not a simple process as most of people think. It needs to be developed along the early years and requires a lot of interaction; it means that this is a social process and not only a structured method, it is natural but with a certain undiscovered syntax behind language acquisition. We are born prepared to learn languages, even a second one, because it depends on the inputs received from our environment and their effectiveness. Even scientific studies affirm that the best age to learn for a second language is from 11 years to 16. We disagree in this point, because there are psychosocial facts in that period that make more difficult to learn it. Students are conscious of themselves and of their attitudes, in fact they feel ashamed when they start to produce words in other language and there are teaching factors which do not motivate students to learn a L2. This is not the case in kids because they do not feel ashamed when they start learning other tongue and even if it is a totally different world of words and knowledge, they receive and store the information automatically.

Bibliography
Gervain, J.&Mehler, J. (2010).Speech Perception and Language Acquisition in the First Year of Life. Ann. Rev. Psychol., 61, 191-218. Retrieved from: http://www.annualreviews.org.dti.sibucsc.cl/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100408 Yule, G. (1985). The Study of Language. [Electronic Version].Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from: http://staff.neu.edu.tr/~dpopescu/Cambridge.The.Study.Of.Language.4th.Edition.Apr.2010.eBookELOHiM.pdf