This document summarizes key aspects of language acquisition in young children based on theories and research. It discusses stages of development for areas like telegraphic speech, order of morpheme acquisition, negation, questions, and restructuring. Principles of second language acquisition can help teachers understand similarities and differences between first and second language learning. While age is a factor, motivation and learning conditions also influence language development. Adult speech is modified, or "motherese", when talking to children, using simpler structures and repetition to aid comprehension.

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PRACTICE II, DIDACTICS OF ELT. Adjunto a/c Prof. Estela N. Braun (2016).
SESSION 13. May 24th, 2016.
Módulo 2: El Proceso de Aprendizaje en niños pequeños. May 24th
 Theory. Feeding /Leading /showing .Proceso de adquisición de L1
y L2 en niños pequeños. Lightbown & Spada(2008): How languages
are learnt.Chapter 1: Language Learning in Early Chilhood. PPT.
 Plus Steven Pinker’s video. (30 minutes). Patsy Lightbown and Nina
Spada video on how languages are learnt.
 Apply it to examples: throwing stage.
Practical N° 7.
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. Indicate and explain with examples the stages for Negation and Questions.
6. What does “restructuring language” mean?
7. What does the use of recasting allow children 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)- 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.

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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 an early
childhood will never acquire language in 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 it is formed for only content words, this speech 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 ameaning relationship that makes them more than justa listof words. Children
produce this speech at the age of two, when they begin to combine words into simple
sentences such us “Mommy juice” or “baby fall down”.
4)- Roger brown found that in a longitudinal study of the language development of three
children, he found that fourteen grammatical morphemes were acquired 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
 Regular past –ed
 Third person singular simple present ( She runs)
 Auxiliary BE (He is coming).
However, in a cross-sectional study, he discovered that children mastered the morphemes
at different ages,but the order of their acquisition was very similar;the order is determined
by an interaction among a number of different factors. CHECK
5)- Children learn the functions of negation very early. The stages of negation are:
STAGE 1 Negation is usually expressed by the word “NO”. 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”, like “Don´t touch that!”.

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STAGE 3 The negative element is inserted into a more complex sentence. Children may
add forms of the negative order than “no”, including words like “CAN´T”, “DON´T”. These
sentences appear to follow the correct English patter 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 Children begin to attach the negative element to the correct form of auxiliary
verb. “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 candies”.
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 tone intonation, like “Cookie?”, “Mummy book?”. Also, they may
produce some correct questions that they have been learned as chunks, such as “What´s
that?”.
STAGE 2 Children usethe word order of declarative sentence, with rising intonation; “You
like this?” and they continue to produce the correct chunk-learned forms.
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 something, like a verb form or question word, at the front of a sentence, leaving
rest of the sentence in its statement form, like “Do I can have a cookie?”.
STAGE 4 In this stage, some questions are formed by subject-auxiliary inversion, like “Are
you going to play with me?”. Also,they 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 seemable to use either inversion or a wh- word, but not both. We way find
inversions in yes/no questions but not 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?”. There are some problems with inversion with wh questions.
STAGE 6 Children are able to correctly form all question 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
ageof four, most children can askquestions, givecommands, report real events, and create
stories about imaginary ones, using correct word order and grammatical markers most of

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the time. Three- and four- years old 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/his
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.
8)- Some researchers observed that adults often modify the way they speak when talking
to little children. This motherese or caretaker speech it 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 sentences 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 content words.
 “The experience would then say to the child, pointing to the picture, “This is a wug”.
In this test, children are shown drawings of imaginary creatures with novel names.
Then, another “wug” is drawn, so there are two hugs. Children instead of saying
there are two wug, they say there are two wugs, 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 questions.
 What that? Children’s earliest questions are single words or simple two sentences
with rising intonation. They may produce some correct questions becausethey 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.

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And 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 (Baby went)
 Possessive ‘s (Daddy’s hat)
 Copula (Annie is happy)
 Articles the/ a
 Regular past –ed
 Third person singular simple present ( She runs)
 Auxiliary BE (He is coming).