1. Practical N° 7. By Marianela Depetris, Celeste Imaz.
Young Children acquiring /learning languages:
Read chapter 1, BY Lightbown & Spada (2009), chapter 2, Brewster,Ellis & Girard (2007)and examples from Slattery &
Willis (2007)and explain in detail:
1. How can principles of SLA help teachers?
2. Explain the Critical Age Period Hypothesis.
3. What is telegraphic speech? Provide examples.
4. What is the relevance of the order of acquisition of morphemes?
5. Indicateand explain with examples the stages for Negation and Questions.
6. What does “restructuringlanguage” mean?
7. What does the use of recastingallowchildren to do?
8. What is the importance of motherese or caretaker speech? What are the implications for ELT?
9. Explain the cartoon images in terms of the theory read.
1.- Principlesof SLA help teachers in that children can learn by imitation and habit-formation of correct languageuse. They
can summarize main concepts and pay attention to creativity in errors.Children arebiologically programmed for language
and that languagedevelops in the child in justthe same way that other biological functions develop.Children can also
produce languagethey never heard in their environment. The languagethat children areexposed to contains falsestarts,
incomplete sentences and slips of the tongue, and yet they distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
Also children may acquirecomplex grammar systems. Language is independent of cognitivedevelopment and may depend
on a specific moduleof the brain.
2.- The critical ageperiod hypothesis is the need of exposure to the language. After the girl was in rehabilitation,doctors
notice that there was a difference in comprehension and production.She used grammatical forms inconsistently and
overused formulaic and routinespeech. An experiment with deaf children of ASL concludes thatdeaf children makeno
difference in their ability to comprehend and produce grammatical markers.Even children with very limited cognitiveability
develop quite complex language systems if they are brought up in environments in which people interactwith them.
3.- Telegraphic speech is when children produceonly content words. There areno function words or grammatical
morphemes. For example: “kiss baby” does not mean the same thing as “baby kiss”.
4.- The relevance of the order of acquisition of morphemes is that the word order reflects the word order of the language
they are hearingand because the combined words have a meaning relationship thatmakes them more than justa listof
words.
5.- The stages for negotiation are: Children learn the functions of negotiation very early.That is,they learn to comment on
the disappearanceof objects,to refuse a suggestion, or reject an assertion,even at the singleword stage. Even though
children understand these functions and express them with singlewords and gestures, it takes some time before they can
express them in sentences, usingthe appropriatewords and word order.
The stages for questions are:
- There is a predictableorder in which the “wh-words” emerge.
- “What” is the firstword to be used. Itis often learned as partof a chunk and it is some time before the child learns
that there arevariations of the form.
- “Where” and “who” emerge very soon.
- “Why” emerges around the end of the second year.
- Then, “how” and “when”.
- Although they may not understand the answers.
- Children can read and answer the quiz on the pre-school years/theschool years
6.- “Restructuring language” is a process by which second languagelearners replaceprevious strategies witch new
approaches instead of simply performingthe same readingprocesses more quickly as they become more proficient
2. 7.- The use of recastingallowchildren to emphasize their immediate environment, the “here” and “now”, or experiences
that the adultknows the child has had.Adults often repeat the content of a child’s utterance, but they expand it into a
grammatically correctsentence.
8.- The importance of motherese or caretaker speech is that expressiveabilities began to improve, there is a very rapid
acquisition of the structures of English.One-to.one interaction gives the child accessto languagethat is adjusted to his or
her level of comprehension. When a child does not understand, the adultmay repeat or paraphrase.The response of the
adultmay also allowchildren to find out when their own utterances are understood.
9.- In the cartoon images the mother is reformulatingall her daughter’s utterance minus the error. She is usingthe
Recastingcorrectivefeedback which is generally implicitbecausethey are not introduced by “You mean”, “Use this word”,
or “You should say”.In the example the littlegirl is tellingher mother that she“drawed” a picture for her and the woman
instead of makingan explicitcorrection or a metalinguistic feedback for example, she justrecasts the girl’s utterance by
saying:“You drew this picture for me”, becauseshe does not expect an uptake from the girl
