English Language A2 Theories

Those who believed that language development is linked to the development of the brain and is part of a wider understanding of life

The most suitable way to refer to the form of language used when speaking to a child

Those who believe language is acquired through imitation and reinforcement

1.

Insertion2. Omission3. Substitution4. Transposition5. Phonetic Speaking6.

Over/Under generalisation of rules7. Salient Sounds

The Wug theory: Berko drew a picture of an imaginary creature and called it a 'wug'. She asked children what more than one wug would be called. 3/4 of them said 'wugs', applying a rule to a word they could never have heard before.

It was designed as a way to investigate the acquisition of the plural and other inflectional morphemes in English-speaking children.

Halliday's taxonomy: Children acquire language in order to facilitate developments in life: Instrumental, Regulatory, Interactional, Personal, Representational, Imaginative, Heuristic. This takes a pragmatic view as opposed to Dore.

Functions of Language: Dore looks at individual utterances, rather than the broad picture of life: Labelling, Repeating, Answering, Requesting (Action), Calling, Greeting, Protesting, Practicing.

Children's Play: Young children use props or pivots to support their play, but older ones imagine instead.

Children role-play adults as part of exploring their environment. He also explored 'Zones of Proximal Development', which describes how adults and children work together to move towards competence, knowledge and independence.

Pretend Play: Sometimes termed 'sociodramatic play', children often adopt roles and identities, acting out storylines and inventing objects and settings. They invent objects and settings, fulfilling Halliday's Imaginative language function, and practice negotiation and socila interaction.

It involves social and dramatical skills, has explicit rules and reflects real world behaviour. Starts age 4 (However, important to remember that all children develop at different stages)

Child Directed Speech: Children have a larger vocabulary if their mothers talk to them a lot.

Language Acquisition Support System (L.A.S.S) - For spoken language, the idea that ritualised activities, like meal time and bed time, have rules and are predictable so that children can learn.

Includes games like peekaboo. Non-verbal actions and prosodic features also teach children important linguistic aspects such as turn taking and syntax. He championed the idea of scaffolding where adults help children to further develop their skills.

Critical Period: Furthered Chomsky's nativist argument by saying that there was a 'critical period' during which children should pick up language.

He argued that is they did not evolve language skills by the age of five, full grammatical fluency is never achieved. He tested on feral children. One example to look at is Genie.

Writing/Reading at home: Argued that schools should let local values form the delivery of literacy teaching as some groups, eg. those whose customs involved more singing and verbal storytelling, were disadvantaged by middle class values

L.

A.S.S - Adults use books to interact with children and encourage speech. Says this is four phased: 1. Gain attention2.

Query3. Label4. FeedbackSees children as active learners and sees social contexts as important.

There is no theorist for this. Remember to categorise stages of reading cues: Graphophonic, Semantic, Visual, Syntactic, Contextual, Miscue.

Reinforcement: Idea of positive and negative reinforcement used to encourage or discourage readers.

Six stages of reading development: Pre-reading and pseudo reading, initial reading and decoding, confirmation and fluency, reading for learning, multiplicity and complexity, construction and reconstruction.

Drawing, letter-like forms, copied letters, child's name and strings of letters, words, sentences, texts

Four phases of development: 1. Preparation2. Consolidation3. Differentiation4.

Integration

Categories for evaluating children's writing: 1. Observation/comment2. Recount3. Report4. Narrative

Modes of Writing: proposed three modes of writing used by school children: Expressive, Poetic and Transactional

Bruner's reference to how adults interact with children to support language development

Those who believe humans have an inbuilt capacity to acquire language

Classifying texts: chronological and non-chronological: the second requires more skill because it relies on the child being able to link ideas mentioned elsewhere and come up with their own system of organisation. This compliments Rothery.

1. Pre-phonemic2. Semi-phonetic3. Phonetic4.

Transitional5. Standard Spelling

Fis Phenomenon: A child who mispronounces the word 'fis' (fish) cannot understand what an adult means if they use 'fis', but they understand 'fish'

Categorising first words: Nelson identified four categories of first words: naming, actions or events, describing or modifying, personal and social words

Imitation theory: children copy adults and learn language through the positive or negative reinforcement they receive from their imitations

Innateness/Nativist theory: Humans are born with an inbuilt pre-disposition to language. They have 'linguistic universals' and have a LAD (language acquisition device). They are equipped to discover the grammar of their language because it's innate. Maintains that CDS alone cannot be responsible for baby's linguistic development.

Over and Under Extension: Children base overextensions on a) the physical qualities of objects and b) features such as taste, sound, texture, movement, shape and size.

Division of overextensions: She divided overextensions into three groups: categorical, analogical and mismatch statements.

Stages of linguistic development: Labelling, packaging and network building

Interactionalism: Linked linguistic development with an understanding of the concepts surrounding the words' meanings, meaning that speech development is linked to the development of the brain (cognitive capacity). The stages were: sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, formal operational.

He also talked about egocentricism in children and the idea of games such as peekaboo demonstrating the idea of object permanence.

Stages of negative formation: children find it difficult to use negatives correctly at first and learn forms of the negative in three stages, from 'no' through to 'don't' and 'am not'.

Addition to negatives: once pragmatic competence is achieved, youngsters learn to copy parents' use of words like 'maybe' when they really mean 'no'

Pronoun development: pronouns are difficult to master and therefore children learn them in three stages: 1. the child uses their own name e.g. "Tom play".

2. the child recognises I/me pronouns and that these are used in different places within a sentence e.g. "I play toy" and "me do that".

3. the child uses them according to whether they are in the subject or object position within a sentence e.g. "I play with the toy" and "give it to me".