Importance of Learning a Language - Essay Example

 Learning Language Language learning has been through a long debate which suggests that one of the main reasons for creating conflicts on languageacquisition is that two quite different conceptions are involved in language acquisition: on the one hand language as system and on the other language as resource (Halliday, 1978). The quotation by Slobin (1994) indicates language has been a system for those who despite being destitute are able to grasp language just like the way a socially privileged child learns. Though this child learns language as a resource, to which Chomsky indicates that those who follow him are subjected to learn the central and most essential characteristic of language. This system which Chomsky indicates is the grammar finite system composed of implicitly known rules that enables a child or a speaker or hearer to produce and understand a potentially infinite number of different sentences. In this context it is not bothered about whether a child is subjected to social deprivations or a child being rare up in financial freedom. Irrespective of the social status, to learn a language on this account is to construct a grammar, a set of complex and abstract rules, which relate meanings to sounds. Since a child is unaware of the rules and regulations of the grammar, all he learns is through inspection of other people’s utterances or through direct instruction, therefore the learning of such rules are dependant upon the terms of innately-given knowledge of the general principles underlying all human languages and a predisposition actively to construct and test hypotheses about the organisation of the particular language to which the child is exposed (Nicholls & Wells, 1985, p. 22). Language as a System What Slobin means in the first account is the argumentation for the importance of the environment point out, is any recognition of the pragmatic dimension of language-the uses to which it is put. When a child is born, either in congested urban slum or in privileged ghettos, either in mountainous hilly villages or to a wealthy noble family, just like his genetic information which is in his blood, he is capable of listening and understanding his mother language. At that time a child is not concerned with any of the social interaction with each other through language, or that the concern about the production of grammatically well-formed sentences, but a means for acting in the world in order to establish relationships with others so that it might be easier for him to communicate information and to engage with them in joint activities. We can say that a child is thus born into a community of language users whose social interaction in the form of symbols, gestures and facial expressions makes him learn and his learning of language forms part of his socialisation as a member of that community. Language as a Resource To acquire complete control of the complex patterns of his native or mother language is, therefore, placed on the second account, which is mentioned above in the following words of ‘language as a resource’. A child when interacts in whatever environment and in whatever circumstances, experience through interacting in his environment and acquires the resources of the language of his community and learns how to make use of those resources in order to achieve a variety of purposes in relation to different people in different situations. The language which children under 4 years use is easily recognisable as their mother tongue (English, for example) it is also readily apparent that it is very different from the language of most adults. But exactly in what ways and in what respect it differs from adult language depends on consideration of the various component skills and the different kinds of social and conceptual knowledge which underlie language. For example, two young children clearly after learning the meaning of a large number of words are able to string words together into sentences, although by the yardstick of ‘correct grammar’ some of the sentences contain glaring errors. They are able to express relatively complex meanings; although these meanings are concerned with their current interests and needs, rather than abstract concepts or events that are distant in terms of time or space (Harris, 1990, p. 4). Language acquisition with or without resource suggests that children if interacted with some social setting are able to grasp with the ability to learn a human language. This also indicates that children will only learn if they grow up in a language-using environment where what they differ is in whether they attribute the main responsibility for what is learned to the child or to the environment. In contrast, those who stress language as resource emphasize the interaction context in which language is learned and point to the wide variation between individuals in the degree and range of skill that is eventually acquired. Because of the fact that language is concerned with the communication of meanings and not with grammatical concerns therefore this is what Slobin meant to argue that it is essentially collaborative in nature. Child’s Linguistic Capacities Socio-culture theorists believe that the development of a socio-cultural theory of mind demands careful attention to the institutional context of social interaction and when it comes to child’s learning, culturally specific institutions such as schools, homes, and libraries play a significant role in structuring interactions that occur among people or between people and cultural artefacts such as books or computers. They believe that we cannot develop a viable socio-cultural conception of children development of linguistics without looking carefully at the way these institutions develop, the way they are linked with one another, and the way human social life is organised within them (Forman et al, 1993, p. 6). According to Smith (1995) young children are so adept at learning words that they often learn an object name from hearing a single object named. For example, a 2-year-old who sees a tractor for the first time and is told that it is a tractor is likely, from that moment forward, to recognise and name a variety of other tractors (Forman et al, 1993, p. 6). Children are considered as smart word and linguistic learners for the reason that word learning is directed, constrained, and characterised by many regularities. The account offered here suggests that the directed, constrained, and stable properties of children’s early word learning are the developmental product of processes that are undirected, open, and variable. Learning of a Second Language Second language learning is not that easy to a child as what it is with respect to first learning. Why is it so difficult for some children to learn second-languages in school and why do some children, who seem to have learned the language, nonetheless do poorly in their academic work? Educational innovators and theorists write that one reason why children find learning second languages in school difficult may be that they are taught in the wrong way. A child’s natural capability to learn native language is not dependant upon his social or economic environment but this is not the case with the second language learning. Social factor in this respect matters as the background of the child, the family, the community, and the attitudes of the family and community to the target language group. Another critical factor is that of the child’s teacher’s relationship to their attitudes, expectations, and willingness to adjust to the child’s cultural heritage. Then there are the attitudes and behaviors of the outside society toward minority-language groups and the effect these attitudes and behaviors have on the acculturation of children from different ethnic backgrounds (McLaughlin, 1985, p. 182). If we talk about the social background of minority related children, some minority-language children come from highly educated families where the child is encouraged to do well in school and learn the language of the dominant culture; other children come from rural backgrounds where education is regarded as something to get over as quickly as possible and where there is little emphasis on learning the majority language. Another aspect that refrain children from acquiring second language proficiency is the attempt to make generalisations about social background characteristics which might be that of stereotyping ethnic minority groups. For example, Mexican-American children are often described as passive, non-competitive, and present-oriented whereas such stereotypes are completely without empirical support. With respect to the social class, if we limit the economic factors behind language learning, there are no significant differences between Anglos and Mexican-Americans’ children on these variables (Saville-Troike, 1973). The same is true of stereotypes of American Indian children, who with few generalisations are able to make Indian children as a group, because the many tribes maintaining their identity in the United States are extremely heterogeneous with regard to language and cultural characteristics (Saville-Troike, 1973). Factors Affecting Second Language Learning Acquisition Second language learning capacity is dependant upon the social factors of the children which includes important influences as that on the children’s success in acquiring a second language in the classroom as the way they experience language in the home and community. Even among children for whom the language of the school is the first language, children are at a disadvantage if their everyday language is a non-standard variety or if they have had limited experience with the functions of language valued in the school. Gordon Wells (1981) analysed and reported that those children who come to school having had experience with ‘decontextualised’ language have an advantage over peers who have had little experience with such language. Wells found the best predictor of attainment in reading and writing in his subjects was the extent of the child’s understanding of the purposes and mechanics of literacy at the time they entered school, an understanding that was largely a function of having been read to and having experience with written text. Furthermore Wells found out that children who had more experience with abstract, analytic, and decontextualised uses of language in the home had an advantage in learning to read and write (McLaughlin, 1985, p. 183). Wells did not recognised the necessity to assume that there has been a connection between second language use and social class, because he felt there were enough exceptions in the subjects he studied to invalidate a simple distinction along class lines. Research by members of his group (MacLure & French, 1981) indicated that for all social classes, the transition from the home to the school was equally abrupt, at least with respect to such language interactions as question sequences and turn taking. Nonetheless, with groups more diverse than Wells’ British subjects, there is likely to be a strong correlation between social class and the way children are prepared in the home for school. In many middle-class or upper-middle-class homes in Europe and America, books and magazines are found in living rooms and bedrooms, letters are written and received regularly, and reading is a valued leisure activity. However this is not the case with those children who are living in social deprivation and have no access to literary resources, other than having access to basic necessities of life. Parents in middle or upper class of cities and towns place a high value on education and carefully monitor their children’s academic progress while the parents who live in suburban do not consider education on a higher value. That is the main reason for why many working-class immigrants to Western countries have had no experience to teach their children they would otherwise have to teach. Many parents are illiterate and come from rural environments that are totally different from the technological environment of Western industrialised countries. If language is really embedded within human species how come our culture provides us with those important values to which our background does not fit in. If we talk about urban centres of literate, technologically advanced societies, middle and upper-middle class parents teach their children through language where instructions are given verbally from a very early age. This is in contrast with those children who though living in urban literate societies but somehow experience as immigrant children from less technologically advanced non-urbanized societies. Furthermore, many immigrant children come from communities where horizontal peer-to-peer interaction patterns are much more common than vertical adult-child patterns. Ethnographic research on language use in different cultural groups indicates that speech communities differ in the relative importance they assign to various language functions. In some cultural groups, much more emphasis is put on the expressive and aesthetic use of language than on informative or problem-solving uses. In such cultures, it is more important to say something with flair and originality than to be clear and precise. People’s language is valued for how they say things, not for what they say and this is the emphasis that has been placed on the expressive and aesthetic use of language characterizes of the children of many immigrant groups in Europe. On the other hand children from mainstream, middle or upper middle class homes are accustomed to using language primarily to solve problems, control social interactions, and communicate meanings. The expressive and aesthetic functions of language are undervalued in highly technological cultures (Brent-Palmer, 1979). Another obstruction in the understanding of the second language is the complication that the variant of the first language used in the child’s home and community is often a rural or lower-class urban variety which is quite different from the standard norm. For example, the British spoken at home by an immigrant child in Germany may be quite different from the British that the child is exposed to in school (assuming that the child receives first-language instruction). This difference between the two language acquisitions requires that proper adjustment to be made from speaking a non-standard to speaking a standard variety of the first language (G. Gonzalez, 1977). The child’s non-standard first language is often regarded as ‘impoverished’ by educators for the reason that the child lacks in perfection. In many cases, there are deviations from the standard at the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical levels that reflect the influence of a majority language. That is, the language is a ‘contact dialect’, in the sense that there are intrusions at various levels that result from contact with a majority language. Another critical factor behind the learning of a children’s second-language learning, besides the language that the child hears at home and in the community, is the attitude of parents and community members to the target language. One might suppose that more favourable attitudes toward the target language would lead to more successful second-language learning. Evidence suggests us that the attitudes of parents have an effect on children’s attitudes and motivation. Gardner (1968) discovered that children’s attitudes are a true reflection of their parents. Therefore parents who held positive attitudes toward a particular target language group developed similar attitudes in their children, and these children were more skilled in the second language than the children of parents with less favourable attitudes. Second language acquisition requires the problem of discovering the correct explanation to be solved for events that appear to have a simple observable relation with each other. The most significant factor is that permeates the inquiry into the relation between age and the ability to learn a second language. Children when starts learning a second language must be able to correspond in some way to the ultimate communication process that they will attain after years of having used that language. References Brent-Palmer C. (1979) “A sociolinguistic assessment of the notion of ‘immigrant semilingualism’ from a social conflict perspective”. Working Papers in Bilingualism, 17, 135-180. Forman A. Ellice, Minick Norris & Stone C. Addison, (1993) Contexts for Learning: Sociocultural Dynamics in Children’s Development: Oxford University Press: New York. Gonzalez G. (1977) "Teaching bilingual children". In Bilingual education: Current perspectives (Vol. 2). Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. Halliday, M.A.K. (1978) Language as Social Semiotic, London, Arnold. Harris John, (1990) Early Language Development: Implications for Clinical and Educational Practice: Routledge: London. MacLure M., & French P. (1981) “A comparison of talk at home and at school” In G. Wells, Language through interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLaughlin Barry, (1985) Second-Language Acquisition in Childhood: Preschool Children. Volume: 2: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Hillsdale, NJ. Nicholls John & Wells Gordon, (1985) Language and Learning: An Interactional Perspective: Falmer Press: London. Saville-Troike M. (1973) Bilingual children: A resource document. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. Read More