Theories Of Language Acquisition

Question 0

Bruner

Answer 0

Input theory- childrens language acquisition is largely down to parents and teachers. It is their job to insert new words into familiar sentence structures in order to teach them new words. Bruner also wrote about ‘motherese’.

Question 1

Piaget

Answer 1

Learning through play, cognition theory. If children interact with their environment and things around them, naturally they will begin to name them and acquire language.

Question 2

Vygotsky

Answer 2

Socio-cultural theory- children learn language through social interactions which teach them. Cognitive development is maturational.
ZPD- zone of proximal development is when a child is not overly or under challenged

Question 3

Bancroft

Answer 3

Peek-a-boo games teach children language as they show key conversation ideas such as turn-taking

Question 4

Skinner

Answer 4

Imitation theory- children learn language through copying others. Reward encourages repetition.
However this does not account for children having different language utterances and virtuous errors. All children go through similar stages regardless of the support they receive

Question 5

Reinforcement theory

Answer 5

No particular scholar is associated with reinforcement theory, but it says that children learn language through learning by their mistakes. If they get it right, they are positively reinforced, and if they get it wrong they are negatively reinforced so don’t do it again.

Question 6

Chomsky

Answer 6

INNATENESS theory- all children have an LAD (language acquisition device) which begins working when exposed to language. Backed up by virtuous errors which suggest an innate grammatical knowledge. However feral children who never learn language and the class-gap shows this to be untrue.

Question 7

Bereiter

Answer 7

Deprived working class children learn language slower and/ or wrong so therefore under-perform in the classroom. Labov challenged this by saying it was a difference, not a deficit.