preview

The Strengths And Theories Of The First Language Acquisition

Decent Essays

What is First Language Acquisition? First Language Acquisition studies how children acquire their native language. Up to this day, there are many theories that theorist came up with to explain how children acquire their language. The main theories that people believe for how children acquire language are Innateness Hypothesis, Imitation Theory, Reinforcement Theory, Active Construction of a Grammar Theory and last but not least, Social Interaction Theory. These theories have many similar characteristics as well as many differences.
The main theories of language acquisition perceive that children are capable of developing and maturing whether by themselves or with the support and stimulation from their environment to acquire language. The five …show more content…

Strength of this theory is that children learn best from first hand and concrete experiences. By listening to other people, whether it is on television, the radio or face to face, the child will memorize the words and sentences of the language and imitate or reproduce what was heard and by doing so will acquire language. The theory explains that children will learn the language of their parents or guardians regardless of where they were their birth place or ancestors’ language. A weakness of this theory is that it fails to acknowledge that children has any sort of internal grammar rules for combining words, sentences and other elements in systemic ways. For example, a child would not hear their parents or an adult saying words such as ‘goed’ or ‘hitted’, therefore, that child is connecting how other past tense verbs are being formed by adding ‘ed’, so the child adds ‘ed’ to all verbs to form its past …show more content…

Now, my position on how children acquire language is better understood and modified. I believe that the major theories, such as Innateness Hypothesis, Imitation Theory, Reinforcement Theory, Active Connectionist Theories and Social Interaction Theory are all correct to an extent and are linked to each other; therefore, neither of them can be considered the only theory to understand how language is acquired. Children learn at different rates and by different methods and that is one main reason I agree with all the theories to an extent and cannot just agree with one or even two of them. But the Innateness Hypothesis, the Imitation Theory and the Active Construction of a Grammar Theory are three theories that mainly influence my understanding of language acquisition; mostly by observing, interacting and speaking to

Get Access