The first language is also referred to as the mother tongue.
Mother tongue is the first language mastered by humans from birth through
interaction with fellow members of the language community, such as family and
the environmental community.
The acquisition of a first language leads to the way children
learns their mother tongue. For example, with Babbling, babbling is considered
an early form of language acquisition because babies will produce sounds based
on the language input they receive.
The acquisition of the first language is very influential on
the cognitive and social development of children. Children begin to recognize
verbal communication with their environment.
Adults help children learn languages mainly by talking to
them. usually occurs when a mother coaxes and talks with her baby with her
child, and occurs when a teacher patiently repeats instructions to an
inattentive student.
'Baby talk' has simpler vocabulary and sentence structure
than adult language, exaggerated intonation and sounds, and lots of repetition
and questions.
the
first language is obtained through:
The
role of input and interaction
by
the time children are four or five years old usually learn to use their mother
tongue to communicate in their environment.
Research
in the 1970s, such as the study by Catherine Snow in 1972 (in Fletcher &
Garman, 1986), showed that mothers' speech to their babies was slower and more
repetitive than their normal speech to adults. They used various
simplifications and modifications in their speech and these were shown to be
very helpful in making the input comprehensible to children.
The role of Universal Grammar
The
famous linguist Noam Chomsky argued that children often produced language that
they could not have heard in natural interactions with others.
All children who learn English as their mother tongue produce
past tense words such as looked and tired. They attach regular past tense clues
to irregular verbs.
The influence of school on first
language development
Language use at home
At home most of the communication is embedded in a shared
direct context, the use of school language is more independent of the direct
context.
Parents/Caregivers naturally scaffold their children's
language in dialogue.
It is often difficult for children to make the leap from
using home language to school, from implicit to more explicit ways of using
their first language.
Language use at school
With more complex grammar, children will learn to deal with types of
clauses, complex sentences, and rules for connecting ideas in speaking and
writing. They will also acquire formal, literary, historical, and ancient
phrases and relate variations of their mother tongue, as well as other regional
accents.
Children will continue to learn about their first language in school, and
they may find a standard version of their first language that may be very
different from the dialect spoken at home.
Sources:
Teaching Young Language Learners (Second Edition). Annamaria
Pinter. Oxford University Press 2017
Children
First Language Acquisition At Age 1-3 Years Old In Balata. Bertaria Sohnata Hutauruk. IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social
Science
How Young Children Learn Language. Dr. Bruce D.
Perry. https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/how-young-children-learn-language/
Language Use At Home And School: A Synthesis Of Research For
Pacific Educators. Zoe
Ann Brown,
Ormond W. Hammond,
and Denise L. Onikama. Pacific Resources for Education and Learning. 1997
Linguistic Society of America. https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/faq-how-do-we-learn-language
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