Primer Ensayo de Enseñanza del Inglés para Niños

Lizeth Peralta

Three kinds of approaches

Behavioristic Approaches

The behavioristic approach focuses on the characteristics of the linguistic behavior and the relationships or associations between responses and situations in the world surrounding them; it explains that if the teacher speaks with a sweetie form, the students will respond the same way, but if the teacher speaks loud or furious the students could not respond or could respond slowly.

B.F. Skinner, one of the theorists of this topic, explained his theory about conditioning in which a human being emits a response or an operant, without necessarily observable stimuli; that the operant is learned by the reinforcement, that theory is called the operant conditioning.

 Another theory about this topic is the mediation theory, which it refers that the meaning was accounted for by the claim that the linguistic stimulus elicits a mediating response that is self-stimulating. Another theorist, Charles Osgood called the self-stimulation a representational mediation process, and he described it as a process that is really convert and invisible, acting within the learner.

The Nativist Approach

The term nativist means the first assertion that language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a built-in device of some kind that predisposes us to language acquisition. Eric Lenneberg explained that language is a species-specific behavior that certain modes of perception, categorizing abilities, and other language-related mechanisms are biologically determined.

Chomsky claimed the existence of innate properties of language to explain the child’s mastery of his native language in such a short time despite the highly abstract nature of the rules of language. According to Chomsky, this innate knowledge is embodied in a little black box of sorts, a language acquisition device.

McNeill described the LAD as consisting of four innate linguistic properties: 1)the ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment, 2) the ability to organize linguistic events into various classes which can later be refined, 3) the knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds are not, 4) the ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic system so as to construct the simplest possible system out of the linguistic data that are encountered.

The universal grammar refers that all human beings are equipped with their language-specific abilities; researchers are now expanding the LAD notion into a system of universal linguistic rules that go well beyond what was originally proposed for the language acquisition device while the pivot grammar is commonly observed that the child’s first two-word utterances seemed to manifest two separate word classes and not simply two words thrown together at random.

Functional Approaches

Lois Bloom illustrated the issue in her criticism of pivot grammar when she pointed out that the relationships in which words occur in telegraphic utterances are only superficially similar. She found three possible underlying relations: agent-action, agent-object and possessor-possessed.

Piaget described overall development as the result of children’s interaction with their environment, with a complementary interaction between their developing perceptual cognitive capacities and their linguistic experience.

Dan Slobin demonstrated that in all languages, semantic learning depends on cognitive development and that sequences of development are determined more by semantic complexity than by structural complexity. There are two major pacesetters to language development, involved with the poles of function and of form: on the functional level, development is paced by the growth of conceptual and communicative capacities, operating in conjunction with innate schemas of cognition; and the formal level, development is paced by the growth of perceptual and information-processing capacities, operating in conjunction with innate schemas of grammar.

Bibliography:

My class of First Language Acquisition