LANGUAGE ACQUISITION



Language Acquisition: Topics and Issues



Language Acquisition: Topics and Issues

Topic 8

Discuss environmental factors in early bilingual development analyzing the role of parental beliefs and attitudes.

Introduction

Language is the medium through which human beings communicate. Every person uses language in their daily conversation and uses it to express ideas, share feelings, find out answers to different questions and transmit information to others. All the nations in the world have multiple languages, and there are numerous kinds of language spoken globally. Language is learned through the culture and the society one resides in. The debate starts on how do children learn the language and do them have natural capabilities to observe and speak languages. Throughout the literature present on language acquisition and linguistics, many studies have been conducted to find out the possible answers to these questions (Clark, 2009, p. 1). Environmental Factors

Similar questions are raised when we talk about bilingual children and which language they predominantly speak. Children born in a bilingual environment are exposed to two or more kinds of language. Researchers and the parents are perplexed when they observe that children do not speak two different languages, instead they would only speak one of the two to which they are exposed and yet they would understand both the languages. One of many capabilities of young children is to observe and pick certain sounds from their environment and break them down into small words (O'Grady, 2005, p. 12). The environmental factors play a vital role which effects the bilingual development of young children. The major environmental factor that has affected the bilingual development of children is the attitudes and believes of the parents. Bilingualism occurs when the child's parents belong to two different communities and do not have the same first language. Inter marriages between different cultural groups is a source for bilingualism.

The shifting and switching in language by the parents and the community is another environmental factor. Other environmental factors such as a child's school, influence of media, and interaction with peers, narratives used by parents and narrative present across culture also affect the linguistic capabilities (Gleason, 2004, p. 397). Therefore, this topic helps to identify the environmental factors that will determine whether bilingual children will grow up to use two different languages or just one. The surroundings of children play an important role in bilingual selection of language. As pointed out earlier, the community and society has a culture and language; children exposed to language outside their home and exposed to a different language inside their home form bilingual tendencies. Young infant's parents might have migrated and settled in a foreign nation; they would speak their mother tongue at homes but at nursery and daycares the caretaker would speak the nation's national language. This scenario depicts our point of exposure to two different environmental factors (Extra et al., 1999, p. 75).

Similar situation occurs when the parents belong to two different backgrounds. The first language of both the parents might have been ...