The document discusses key principles of second language acquisition (SLA) relevant to young children learning English as a second language, highlighting factors like the critical age hypothesis and the role of motivation in language learning. It describes the stages of language development in children, including telegraphic speech, acquisition of grammatical morphemes, negation, and question formation. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of adult interaction in language learning, including recasting and the use of caretaker speech.

1. Villoria,Rocio
Pereira,Amneris
PRACTICE II, DIDACTICS OF ELT.
Adjunto a/c Prof. Estela N. Braun.
MODULO 2: “El Proceso de Aprendizaje en niños pequeños”
PRACTICAL Nº 7
Young children acquiring/learning languages.
1. Principles of SLA are very useful and helpful for teachers because such principles guide them
in teaching English as a second language. Nowadays, it is generally recognized that
understanding more about similarities and differences in L1 and L2 acquisition processes can
help teacher in foreign language classroom.
2. The Critical Age Period Hypothesis suggested that there is a specific limited time for language
acquisition. Children who are not given access to language in infancy and early childhood will
never acquire language if these deprivations go on for too long. Some researchers found that
there are many important factors to consider aside from age, such as motivation and
learning conditions.
3. Telegraphic speech is formed only for content words -it leaves out things such as articles,
prepositions and auxiliary verbs-. We recognize this speech as a sentence because, even
though function words and grammatical morphemes are missing, the word order reflects the
word order of the language they are hearing and because the combined words have a
meaning relationship that makes them more than just a list of words. Children produce this
speech at the age of two, when they begin to combine words into simple sentences such as
“Mommy juice” or “baby fall down”.
4. Roger Brown found that in a longitudinal study of the language development of three
children fourteen grammatical morphemes were acquire in a remarkably similar sequence:
 Present progressive –ing (Mommy running)
 Plurals –s (two books)
 Irregular past forms (Baby went)
 Possessive ‘s (Daddy’s hat)
 Copula (Annie is happy)
 Articles the/a

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 Regular past –ed (she walked)
 Third person singular simple present (she runs)
 Auxiliary be (he is coming)
However, in a cross-sectional study of twenty-one children, he found that the children
did not acquire the morphemes at the same age or rate, but the order of their acquisition was
very similar. Even though there has been no satisfactory explanation for the observed order,
most researchers agree that it is determined by an interaction among a number of different
factors.
5. Children learn the functions of negation very early. The stages of negation are:
STAGE 1 negation is usually expressed by the word “no”, either all alone or as the first word
in the utterance. For example: No. No cookie. No comb hair.
STAGE 2 the negation word appears just before the verb, and sentences expressing rejection
or prohibition often use “don’t”. For example: Daddy no comb hair. Don’t touch that!
STAGE 3 the negative element is inserted into a more complex sentence. Children may add
forms of the negative other that “no”, including words like “can’t” and “don’t”. The sentences
appear to follow the correct English pattern of attaching the negative to the auxiliary or modal
verb. However, children do not yet vary these forms for different persons or tenses. Example: I
can’t do it. He don’t want it.
STAGE 4 the negative element is attached to the correct form of auxiliary verbs such as ‘do’
and ‘be’. Example: You didn’t have supper. She doesn’t want it. However, they may still have
difficulty with some other features related to negatives, such as “I don’t have no more candles”.
 On the other hand, the stages of the questions are formed by:
STAGE 1 questions are composed by single words or simple two- or three-word sentences
with rising intonation. Example: “Cookie? Mummy book?”
Also, the may produce some correct questions that they have been learned as chunks:
“Where’s daddy?”
STAGE 2 children use the word order of declarative sentences, with rising intonation –“You
like this? I have some?”- and they continue to produce the correct chunk-learned forms such as
“What’s that?”
STAGE 3 children begin to produce questions such as “Can I go? Are you happy?”. We call this
stage ‘fronting’ because the child’s rule seems to be that questions are formed by putting

3. Villoria,Rocio
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something –a verb form or question word- at the ‘front’ of a sentence, leaving the rest of the
sentence in its statement form. Example: “Is the teddy is tired? Why you don’t have one?”
STAGE 4 some questions are formed by subject-auxiliary inversion, like “Are you going to play
with me?”. At this stage, children can even add ‘do’ in questions in which there would be no
auxiliary in the declarative version of the sentence, such as “Do dogs like ice cream?”.
Moreover, they seem able to use either inversion or a wh- word, but not both. We may find
inversion in ‘yes/no’ questions but no in wh-questions, unless they are formulaic units such as
“What’s that?”
STAGE 5 both wh- and yes/no questions are formed correctly, like “Are these your boots?”.
However, negative questions may still be a bit too difficult -“Why the teddy bear can’t go
outside?”-, and when wh- words appear in subordinate clauses or embedded questions,
children overgeneralized the inverted form that would be correct for simple questions.
Example: “Ask him why can’t he go out?”
STAGE 6 children are able to correctly form all questions types, including negative and
complex embedded questions.
6. Restructuring is the process by which learners change their interlanguage systems. During
restructuring, language learning strategies facilitate the learner to become more
independent by moving from the controlled to the automatic phase. For example, by the age
of four, most children can ask questions, give commands, report real events and create
stories about imaginary ones, using correct word order and grammatical markers most of the
time. Three and four- year old kids continue to learn vocabulary at the rate of several words
a day. They begin to acquire less frequent and more complex linguistic structures such as
passives and relative clauses. They use language in a wider social environment, in greater
variety of situations and they interact with unfamiliar adults. They start using language to
defend themselves and their toys; to talk on the telephone to invisible grandparents. They
pretend to use different voices like in a play. In the pre-school years they also develop
metalinguistic awareness, the ability to treat language as an object separate from the
meaning it conveys.
7. Adults often repeat the content of a child’s utterance, but they expand or recast it into a
grammatically correct sentence. For example if a baby says ‘’dump truck’’ ‘’fall’’, her
mother/father responds ‘’Yes, the dump truck fell down’’; they do that to correct learners’
errors in such a way that communication is not obstructed.

4. Villoria,Rocio
Pereira,Amneris
8. Some researchers observed that adults often modify the way they speak when talking to
little children. This caretaker speech is characterized by a slower rate of delivery, higher
pitch, more varied intonation, shorter, simpler sentence patters, stress on key words,
frequent repetition and paraphrase.
9. In the cartoon ‘’Baby Blues’, what the mother’s baby is doing is recasting the sentence. Her
baby committed an error, a grammatical error, instead of saying DREW, he said DRAWED, so
she expanded his sentence into a grammatically correct way, to create a clearly
communication.
-The sentence like ‘’Bye bye boat’’ or ‘’Katherine sock’’ are sentences that children created
between eighteen months and two years, in which they enter into a genuinely syntactic phase of
acquisition by placing two words together to create a new meaning. This is telegraphic speech
and it is formed by contents words.
-The experience would then say to the child, pointing to the picture, ‘’This is a wug’’. In the test,
children are shown drawing of imaginary creatures with novel names. Then, another ‘’wug’’ is
drawn, so there are two wugs. Children instead of saying there are two wug, they say there are
two mugs, so here children demonstrate that they know rules for the formation of plural in
English.
- ‘’What that?’’ And ‘’No sit there’’ are examples of negation and question.
What that?- Children’s earliest questions are single words or simple two sentences with rising
intonation. They may produce some correct questions because they have been learned as
chunks. Like ‘’What’s that’’
No sit there  It is the first stage of negation which is usually expressed with the word ‘’No’’.
- ‘’Ride truck’’ is an example of telegraphic speech, it is formed only by content words.
The other sentences: ‘’Cat stand up table’’, ‘’He play little tune’’, ‘’Andrew want that’’. ‘’Cathy
build house’’ and ‘’Show Mommy that’’ are examples of grammatical morphemes:
 Present progressive –ing (Mommy running)
 Plurals: -s (two books)
 Irregular past forms (Bbay went)
 Possessive’s (Daddy’s hat)
 Copular ver (Annie is happy)
 Articles the/a
 Regular past –ed
 Third person singular simple present (She runs)
 Auxiliary BE (He is coming)

5. Villoria,Rocio
Pereira,Amneris