CHILDREN’S ATTITUDES TOWARDS SECOND LANGUAGE
I. Introduction
Psycholinguists and neurolinguits have focused on acquisition of second language in childhood.Also,in this paper,it will be told about language acquisition in childhood.It has a six subtitle.First,it will be explained definition of acquisition.Second,it will be underlined such factors in acquisition as L1 learning,the age,critical period and motivation.Then,it will be emphasized on children’s attitudes towards target language.Moreover,it will be indicated in cognitive development of children.In the last section,it will compared children’s acquisition to adults’ acquisition.
II. Definition of Acquisition
Researches use variety of criteria to determine when acquisition has taken place(Gass&Selinker,2008,p.81).
-The first apperance of a corrrect forms,
-A certain percentage of accurate forms,(Hakuta,cited in Gass&Selinker,2008,p.81)
-The presence of at least two examples of structures in two different postests (Mackey,cited in Gass&Selinker,2008,p.81).
Apparently acquisition can mean different things.On the other hand researchers tried to find real definition of acquisition.While some of them regard acquisition as emergence or accurate use , others distinguish between acquisition and learning.According to second view,it possible for learners to acquire language(Ellis,1994,p.14). It is much more close to educational definition of acquisition. That is to say,it is the language that subsequent to learning first language one as young children and it is the process of learning target language which refers to any language that is the aim or goal of the learning.It includes informal learning and formal learning.Informal learning takes place in environment of child.For example; a child who is from Turkey lives in USA.He exposure to target language and he learns unintentionally.Formal learning takes place in classroom and L2 learning that involves a mixture of these settings and circumtances.For example; when a hihg school student in England takes a class in French (Savilla,2006,p.2).
III. Factors in Second Language Acquisition
When children learn language,they may have problems in learning that affect them.They are relating to cognitive,affective and social aspects of human being.Factors can be divided their individual differences as well.These are such factors as L1 learning,age,critical period,motivation etc.
A) Learning First Language
Age norms are impossible to ignore that they clearly holds up for the very early stages and provide an ordered and broadly valid account of the events that mark vocalisations in the first year of life.According to Jakobson(cited in Singleton & Ryan,2004, p.9) all children begin to babble at approximately the same age and start by babbling a set of unmarked phonetic contrasts that are present in every language; every successive stage of phonological development follows a universal markedness hierarchy, with the most complex sounds coming last.
5 main stages are generally recognised in the child language acquisition literature.
(1) Birth–1 month: Crying and reflexive vocalisations, for example grunts,belches and coughs.
(2) 1–2 months: Vocal play, cooing or phonation. The child starts producing vocalisations
with a vowel-like quality.
(3) 2–6 months: Vocal play with an increasing degree of supralaryngeal articulatory behaviour.
(4) 6 months +: Emergence of multisyllabic babbling known as repetitive,reduplicated or
babbling .
(5) ~9–12 months: More complex babbling or jargon babbling. These utterances can be highly
complex in their phonetic and acoustic structure (Singleton & Ryan,2004, p.8).
The very early stages of acquisition point to a stable sequence of speech milestones (crying and reflexive vocalisations cooing babbling) occurring within fairly well-defined age-ranges and acquiring of L1 continues in adolesence.It would appear sensible to look at evidence concerning the contination of L1 acquisition beyond the childhood years(Singleton & Ryan,2004, p.55).According to Nippold(citen in Singleton & Ryan,2004, p.55) it is difficult to identify any point in the lifespan when the process of language development is truly complete.This continuing development is most obvious on the pragmatic and semantic levels.
A number of semantic and pragmatic abilities have been shown to grow in adolescence (Singleton & Ryan,2004, p.55) .
To summarise, there is good evidence of all aspects of normal L1 development continuing into adulthood, and indeed of at least some aspects of such development continuing through to middle age and beyond.
B) Age
An examination of the considerable number of studies relating age to L2 learning supports the prediction made above(Cummins,1980,p.180).
Language acquisition is explicable only if one posits an inborn ‘language faculty’,
including a ‘language acquisition device’, which is pre-informed as to the
nature of what is to be acquired. This claim is linked to the suggestion that
all human languages share the same general design characteristics, are
subject to the same formal constraints, and draw on a common pool of
primitive elements, and that these ‘universals’ derive from the characteristics
of the language faculty. Language emerges very early in the maturation of the normal
child and that, despite many differences in the specific conditions
operating from child to child and from environment to environment, it
develops in a consistent manner.But, the idea that ‘the child approaches the task of
acquiring a language with a rich conceptual framework already in place
and also with a rich system of assumptions about sound structure and the
structure of more complex utterances. It is clear that there is an innate
language faculty.Adult language learning is qualitatively different from child language acquisition(Singleton & Ryan,2004, p.186-187).
A cautious generalization is that oral fluency and accent are the areas where older learners most often do not show an advantage over younger learners.Oral production was variable on which older learners did not perform significantly better than younger learners. The prediction which follows from the present theoretical framework is that given sufficient
exposure to the L2 and motivation to learn L2, older learners will perform
better than younger learners (Cummins,1980,p.180).
C ) Critical Period
Most discussions center on the question of whether there is a ‘critical period’ for language acquisition-a biologically determined period of life when language can be acquired more easily and beyond which time language is increasingly diffucult to acquire.The critical period hypothesis claims that there is such a biological timetable.Initially the Notion of a critical period was connected only to first language acquisition.Second language researcerhers have outlined the possibilities of extrapolating the critical period hypothesis to second language contexts.The classic argument is that a critical point for second language acquisition occurs around puberty,beyond which people seem to be relatively incapable of acquiring a nativelike accent of the second language.This had led some to assume,incorrectly,that by the age of 12 or 13,you are “over the hill” when it comes to the possibility of successfull second language learning.(Brown,1993,p.52-53)
“ If the child does not learn its first language during this period then it will never attain full native-like mastery of any language.” (Smith,1999,p.120)
One last strand of evidence comes from the sad cases known as wolf children;children who have
have been abondoned or isolated in infancy and brought up in conditions where they have been
deprived of normal linguistic input.The most famous and most chilling case of such a child is
Genie.Genie’s mother partially sighted;her father was psychotic.From the age of about two to
thirteen years ,Genie was kept incarcerated,harnessed to a potty by day and caged at night
half-starved,frequently beaten for making any noise,growled and barked at her father and brother
and essentially never spoken to.When she was fortuitously discovered,she gave evidence of knowing
a few words such as rattle,bunny and red but she appeared to have no syntax at all.She did respond to
gestures and appeared cognitively somewhat less deprived than her linguistic performance would lead
one to expect.She was taken into care and exposed to intensive language (and other) input,leading to the
possibility of testing the predictions of the critical period hypothesis.After encouraging initial progress
Genie was the victim of mismanagement to a degree bordering on cruelty but she does provide us with
some evidence.In the few years immediately following her rescue,her development wa remarkable and
her vocabulary in particular grew dramatically in size including subtle discriminations of form and color.
However,despite the fact that she showed some ability to create novel utterances,her syntax never
developed,suggesting that the stimuli she was exposed to had too late-outside the critical period-to
trigger normal language maturation.The case is not entirely clear-cut,because it is impossible know whether
the trauma she had suffered or her mental state when she was first loscked up were such that she would
never have been able to develop language develops even in the presence of gross impairment in other
cognitive domains,it seems most plausible that her failure to master ordinary syntax was indeed due to
her deprivation in the critical period.What is striking is that she lacked precisely those attributes of
language which are,by hypothesis,the fruit of the maturational unfolding of the genetic program in terms
of the fixing of parameters.The acquisition of vocabulary is not so tightly constrained,as witness the fact
that w e go on adding to our vocabulary throughout our life,but the acquisition of the core syntactic
properties of language ,a core which is specifed genetically up to parametric variation,is restricted to this
critical period.(Smith,1999,p.122-123)
D) Motivation
The most obvious physiological distinctions between different age- groups, what separates them is probably as much a matter of feeling as of thinking.A number of researchers have ascribed a great deal of importance to such differences in their treatment of age-related effects in language acquisition and have evoked them in attempting to explain the putative language learning superiority of children.The development of formal operations are deleterious to language learning.This claims in terms of the ‘affective filter’. What the affective filter is supposed to depend on levels of motivation.(Singleton & Ryan,2004,p.164)
Motivation has been defined as the learner's orientation with regard to the aim of learning a second language (Crookes & Schmidt,cited in Norris,2001,para.7)
“ Mowrer proposed that a child's success when learning a first language could be attributed to the desire to gain identity within the family unit and then the wider language community.” “ Using this as the basis for his own research Gardner went on to investigate motivation as an influencing factor in L2 acquisition ( Norris,2001,para.1) .”
It is accepted that students who are most successful in learning a target language are those who have a desire to become familiar with or even integrate into the society where the language is used (Falk,cited in Norris,2001,para.7) This form of motivation is known as integrative motivation. When somebody becomes a resident in a new society that uses the target language in its social interactions, integrative motivation is a key component in assisting the learner to develop some level of proficiency in the language.(Norris,2001,para.7)
On the contrary integrative motivation is the form of motivation referred to as instrumental motivation. This is generally identified by the desire to gain something practical or concrete from the study of a second language (Hudson,cited in Norris,2001,para.9). With instrumental motivation the purpose of language acquisition is more pragmatic, such as meeting the requirements for school or university graduation, applying for a job, requesting higher pay based on language ability, reading technical material, translation work or achieving higher social status. Instrumental motivation is often characteristic of second language acquisition, where little or no social integration of the learner into a community using the target language takes place, or in some instances is even desired (Norris,2001,para.9).
IV.Language Attitudes
The Miami studies apply among participants with positive attitudes about their bilingualism, who assumed to pass it on to their children.There is a study which includes simultaneous bilingual language acquisition from age 3 to 36 months and 24 families.They were provided equal exposure to English and Spanish the first three years of life.With interviews and questionnaires, it is determined that the circumstances of their lives appeared to back up their plans, in that there were speakers of both languages within their families who would be involved in their child’s care. As it happened, only one of the 24 families ended up providing equal exposure to both languages.End of the study a few children terminated to speak one or the other language on a regular basis.
Children speech’s were recorded weekly in each language and applied a number of tests in both languages.In spite of the fact that all of the children began their language learning in two languages, by study’s end, six children would not speak enough Spanish or in one case enough English for a language experience or for other assessments in that language. As it happened,those children were spending less than 20% of their time in the environment of that language. They all learned some words and phrases of their non-primary language, but it did not appear to be enough to allow them to function comfortably in that language. Although there was an expressed plan to speak equal amounts of English and Spanish to their babies, five of these bilingual families faced a reality in which their children had insufficient exposure and little competence in Spanish.Only one student questioned whether she would be in a situation that would allow her to teach her child Spanish. Thus, there appeared to be little attitudinal impediment to Spanish-language maintenance.(McCardle & Hoff,2006,p.73-74)
V.Cognitive Development
Studies of populations with a typical language development have stroped awareness of the connections between language and cognition.Age-related differences in L2 learning capacity may be associated with cognitive differences between children and adults.The dominant paradigm of language emergence as a function of cognitive development is provided by Piaget, according to whom the child comes into the world equipped with elementary intelligence which consists in the capacity to assimilate new experience to his/her internal organisation of the world and to modify or acommodate the latter to take new experience into account (Singleton & Ryan,2004,p.155 )
Given the strong evidence for positive links between bilingualism and cognitive processes, researchers have found explanatory power in varying models. Although much past research has focused on outcome,or product, measures of cognition rather than process variables researchers have proposed theories to explain the positive relationship.Psychologists and psycholinguists operate from a verbal mediation theoretical framework to describe how bilinguality affects cognitive processing. The objectification, code switching, and verbal mediation theories have contributed to our understanding of bilingual children's active
processing of linguistic information into coherent systems of knowledge. Emerging from these models is a discussion of related cognitive strategies bilingual children appear to utilize in making sense of their language environments.( Lee,1996,p.499-522)
Much of the current work in cognitive development investigates how cognition operates in infants and children and when specific cognitive abilities arise.Researchers in this field are interested in young children’s basic cognitive skills, including how children understand and represent numbers, space, objects, events, and other people. This approach relies on tightly controlled laboratory studies, which focus on the mental representations children form and the
cognitive processes they engage in as they confront precisely specified objects and events.
although cognitive developmentalists have begun showing an interest in social phenomena, they have been less concerned with what children’s emerging cognitive skills, social understanding, and social representations might mean for their social, psychological, and academic well-being in the world outside the laboratory.( Olson & Dweck,2008,p.194)
VI. Younger is Better
Faced with a collection of demonsrater which offers two directly inconsistent hypotheses some researchers have inclined towards more differentiated positions, suggesting that younger L2 learners may be better than older learners in some very specific respects.Younger learners are specifically more efficient at acquiring a native-like accent in the target language, the strong version of this position being that unless exposure to the L2 begins in the childhood years an authentic accent will not normally be acquired.( Singleton & Ryan,2004,p.84)
Children learn new languages very easily.Most adults find foreign languages quite difficult. They must toil and struggle and put in long hours of hard work to make even small gains in their ability in a new language. But a child seems to just pick it up out of thin air. To a child, it is all play and no work. And, to make it even more frustrating for the adult learner, the results of a child's language play are superior to the results of an adult's language struggle. It does not seem fair.One commonly held theory to explain this phenomenon is this: God has given young children a magical ability to learn new languages. This ability slowly disappears, and is completely gone by the time an adult begins the task of learning a new language.This theory is attractive for two reasons. First, it explains the phenomenon. Children learn a new language easily and adults do not because, according to the theory, the magic is limited to childhood. And second, this theory helps adult learners to accept their fate. With the magic gone, they find it a little easier to buckle down to their difficult studies, knowing that now there is no other way for them to learn a new language.But before we accept this theory in its totality, that is, before we accept the proposition that this magic of childhood completely disappears in a an adult, we should observe in detail how a child learns a new language. If the theory is true and all the magic has fled from an adult, we will at least have observed the magic as it functioned in the mind of a child. This, in and of itself, should make a very interesting study. But if some of the magic of childhood remains in the mind of an adult, we might learn some secrets for waking that magic up and using it to make our task of language learning more enjoyable and more productive.( McGlothlin,1997,para.1-4 )
There is a fair amount of evidence suggestive of a general advantage for learners whose experience of the target language begins in their childhood years. There is no counter-evidence to this proposition from natural exposure studies, and what looks like counter-evidence from research into formal language learning cannot be accepted at face value because of the length of exposure factor, which calls into question the applicability
of eventual to the attainments investigated. With regard to shortterm attainment, the picture is more confused. However, the balance of evidence does seem to indicate an initial advantage for older learners at least as far as grammatical development is concerned. One should note that the corollary of observations made above concerning the term eventual is
that where target language exposure is limited, as in a school setting, to a set number of hours per week, initial is to be interpreted liberally in terms of many years rather than months.
( Singleton & Ryan,2004,p.100)
VII.Conclusion
In this paper,it was told about language acquisition in childhood.It had a six subtitle.First,it was explained definition of acquisition.Second,it was underlined such factors in acquisition as L1 learning,the age,critical period and motivation.Then,it was emphasized on children’s attitudes towards target language.Moreover,it was indicated in cognitive development of children.In the last section,it was compared children’s acquisition to adults’ acquisition.Also adult learning can be researched with the assistance of this paper.
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