Offer some thoughts about what you see as a relationship between behavioral, nativist, and functional approaches to studying first language acquisition and your own experiences in learning or teaching a second language.
In a second response, discuss the role of culture in first language aquisition. Many of you speak more than one language and English is your second language. Do you think the child-parent interaction is different in the United States' English speaking population and a non-English speaking population that you are familiar with?
6 comments:
The relationship between the Behavioral, Nativist, and Functional approaches is that they are focused in the linguistics abilities that a person posess.
They deal with estimulation, construction,responses, and social functions that language learners apply them in order to communicate and learn about the world that is around them.
People's capacity to learn linguistics matters and to improve their communication is a result of their interaction with their environment.
In my experience learning a second language I do not have the opportunity to develop a nativist approach with all the innate acqisitions. Now I am trying to learn it in a Functional way.
About the child-partent interacion, I think there is not any differnce, just the language. A child learns, reinforces, and recognizes sounds and messages in the language that he/she is learning.
Maybe these interaction will defer from each other in emotional and psychological aspects.
The behavioral, nativist, and functional approaches offer insight as to how a being acquires language. All three of these approaches have a valid stance on how language is obtained. Their perspectives have been proven when looking into different cases.
When looking into the behavioral approach, I can see how learning takes place because children do respond when they are reinforced. In the classroom, if students blurt out "Ms." I ignore that behavior but if calls Ms.Palomino, I respond by saying thank you for getting attention the correct way, and students do respond to this action. Thier behavior is controlled by the consequences.
The nativist approach also is proven in all children because children are born with a genetic capacity to learn. I think that the environment in which the child grows in develops and shapes the language system of a child.
The role of culture in any language acquistion does have effects because children do develop patterns according to how they are interacted with. I do believe there is a difference in the child-parent interaction in the United States than in other cultures. In Mexican culture children have a spoken language similar to that of an adult. Topics of conversation are more advanced than here in the United States. The enviornment in which they are surrounded in is very aware of culture and world issues and are brought around children and children are invited into these topics. Adults do engage in adult like conversations with children which seem to be very different in the United States culture.
Well althought the theories are very different, they all enphasized that human beings are predesposed to learn the skill, its just different processes or techniques that motivate or push the individual to learn it. I as an SL learner and teacher believe that everybody has the ability, however depending on different factors (background, socio-economic status, formal/informal education, etc.)is how we learn.
The culture place a huge role in language acquisition, especially here in the US, where we have a diverse number of cultures. I have seen how children from Hispanic speaking parents are reluctant to learn their parents language, and one of the reasons is because they feel that their language is seen by our society as a second class language. Also, in the other hand I have seen parents who don't want to teach their children their language because they still believe in the myth that if your don't learn English you won't succeed in this country.
How sad :( , anyways I am a stronger believer that interactions among families are important for L1 or L2 acquisition. In my country the interaction between children and adults is very common, I can see how children mature faster and their vocabulary is very extensive. On the other hand, I don't see that interaction here in the families in the US, maybe because of the rythm of life or society, I don't know, but many of the students that I work with come with very limited vocabulary and I think that one of the reasons is because of their limited interaction with adults. Yes, that is a very big difference between English and non-English speking population.
All 3 theories concentrate in how people acquired first language. Although, all 3 approaches, behavior, nativist, and fucntional have been researched, as a bilingual education teacher, ESL student, I believe all 3 come together when learning a first or second language. As a teacher, I do believe some students have it "within" to learn a language; however, behavior, social and other facotrs do shape a first langauge. As an ESL student myself, I don't believe I was born with a "lingual gene:" it was diffiuclt for me to learn Enlgish. To me a Direct method (end of book) was my forte.
Language is culture; therefore, the role of culture in learning a language is vital. As a bilingual education teacher, I believe that we must bring out culture to our classroom. Students need to reach the comfort zone level in oder to learn and what a better way to do so but to bring one of the most important aspects of society, our culture.
I do believe that the child-parent interaction is different here in the United States than in Mexico. In my personal experience, I see it everyday in my classoom when parents pick up their children or come and visit. Recent immigrants (from Mexico) tend to have more respect for their children and vice versa. They also teach their children to respect teachers, something is hard to see in our schools. But once again it all depends on how one is raised, SES, culture, etc.
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I think that there is a strong relationship between the behavioral, nativist and functional appraoches in that they are constructed through linguistic behavior. All of them require some sort of reinforcement or practice and it also deals with what surrounds us. I think it is important to understand that in today's society language learners are using a combination of appraoches to learn a second or even third language. In learning a different language, I think I used a combination of these three.As a child I observed everyone who surrounded me and often imitated to learn. As humans we are also born with certain abilities that allow us to learn and in school It think we get more of the functional approaches through direct instruction.
I think culture, morals, beliefs have a lot to do with the child-parent interaction. I see that it is different here in the United States as compared to the way I remember it in Mexico. I am much more communicative with my children and I think that has allowed them to become more vocal and independent. I remember in my home I was only to speak when spoken to and I was never allowed to speak my second language around those who did not speak it as a form of respect.
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