How is Children Acquiring the Language ( Children Language Acquisition)

Mini Research

Submitted as a final task of Psycholinguistics

Annisa Fitri Irwan

Beto Andrias
Dina Fitma Sari
Dina Ulfa Desta Safda

Advisor:

Prof. Dr. Mukhaiyar, M.Pd.

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
FACULTY OF LANGUAGES AND ARTS
STATE UNIVERSITY OF PADANG

2016
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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Language learning is natural. Babies are born have an ability to learn language

with a natural way. Babies are born with the ability to learn it and that learning

begins at birth. According to Noam Chomsky, children are born with an inherited

ability to learn any human language. He claims that certain linguistic structures which

children use so accurately must be already imprinted on the child’s mind. Chomsky

believes that every child has a ‘language acquisition device which encodes the major

principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain. All

children, no matter what language their parents speak, learn a language much the

same way.

Language acquisition refers to the way children learn their native language.

Children acquire language quickly, easily, and without effort or formal teaching. It

happens automatically, whether their parents try to teach them or not. Although

parents or other caretakers don't teach their children to speak, they do perform an

important role by talking to their children. Children who are never spoken to will not

acquire language. And the language must be used for interaction with the child; for

example, a child who regularly hears language on the TV or radio but nowhere else

will not learn to talk.

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Children acquire language through interaction, not only with their parents and

other adults, but also with other children. All normal children who grow up in normal

households, surrounded by conversation, will acquire the language that is being used

around them. And it is just as easy for a child to acquire two or more languages at the

same time, as long as they are regularly interacting with speakers of those languages.

The special way in which many adults speak to small children also helps them

to acquire language. Studies show that the 'baby talk' that adults naturally use with

infants and toddlers tends to always be just a bit ahead of the level of the child's own

language development, as though pulling the child along. This 'baby talk' has simpler

vocabulary and sentence structure than adult language, exaggerated intonation and

sounds, and lots of repetition and questions. All of these features help the child to sort

out the meanings, sounds, and sentence patterns of his or her language.

Jean Aitchison (1987) identified three stages that occur during a child’s

acquisition of vocabulary: labeling, packaging and network building. Labeling is the

first stage and involves making the link between the sounds of particular words and

the object. Packaging entails understanding a word’s range of meaning.Network

Building involves grasping the connections between words; understanding that some

words are opposite in meaning.

For children learning their native language, linguistic competence develops in

stages, from babbling to one word to two word, then telegraphic speech. Babbling is

now considered the earliest form of language acquisition because infants will produce
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sounds based on what language input they receive. One word sentences (holophrastic

speech) are generally monosyllabic in consonant-vowel clusters. During two word

stage, there are no syntactic or morphological markers, no inflections for plural or

past tense, and pronouns are rare, but the intonation contour extends over the whole

utterance. Telegraphic speech lacks function words and only carries the open class

content words, so that the sentences sound like a telegram.

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CHAPTER II

LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

There are many definitions of speaking that have been proposed by some

experts in language learning.

Brown (2001: 267) cites that when someone can speak a language it means

that he can carry on a conversation reasonably competently. In addition, he states that

the benchmark of successful acquisition of language is almost always the

demonstration of an ability to accomplish pragmatic goals through an interactive

discourse with other language speakers.

Richards and Renandya (2002: 204) state that effective oral communication

requires the ability to use the language appropriately in social interactions that

involves not only verbal communication but also paralinguistic elements of speech

such as pitch, stress, and intonation. Moreover, nonlinguistic elements such as

gestures, body language, and expressions are needed in conveying messages directly

without any accompanying speech. Brown (2007: 237) states that social contact in

interactive language functions is a key importance and in which it is not what you say

that counts but how you say it what you convey with body language, gestures, eye

contact, physical distance and other nonverbal messages.

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In their discussion on the nature of spoken language, Brown and Yule in

Nunan (1989: 26) distinguish spoken language from written language. They point out

that for most of its history. This language comprises short, often fragmentary

utterances, in pronunciation range. On the contrary, written language is characterized

by well-formed sentences which are integrated into highly structured paragraphs.

Brown and Yule in Nunan (1989) also differentiate between two basic language

functions, i.e. the transactional and the interactional functions. The former basically

concerns the transfer of information. According to Nunan (1989: 32) successful oral

communication involves:

a) the ability to articulate phonological features of the language

comprehensibly

b) mastery of stress, rhythm, intonation patterns

c) an acceptable degree of fluency

d) transactional and interpersonal skills

e) skills in taking short and long speaking turns

f) skills in the management of interaction

g) skills in negotiating meaning h. conversational listening skills

(successful conversations require good listeners as well as good speakers)

h) skills in knowing about and negotiating purposes for conversations j.

using appropriate conversational formulae and fillers.

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Moreover, he states that parents can apply the bottom-up-top-down approach

to speaking. The bottom-up approach to speaking means that the learners begin with

the smallest units of language, i.e. individual sounds, and move through the mastery

of words and sentences to discourse. The top-down view, on the other hand, proposes

that the learners start with the larger chunks of language, which are embedded in

meaningful contexts, and use their knowledge of the contexts to comprehend and use

the smaller language elements correctly.

Brown (2001: 271) adds in teaching oral communication, micro skills are very

important. One implication is the importance of focusing on both the forms of

language and the functions of the language. He also mentions that the pieces of

language should be given attention for more that make up to the whole. Furthermore

he mentions micro skills of oral communication:

1. Produce chunks of language of different lengths.

2. Orally produces differences among the English phonemes and

allophonic variants.

3. Produce English patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions

rhythmic structure, and into national contours.

4. Produce reduced forms if words and phrases.

5. Use an adequate number of lexical units (words) in order to

accomplish pragmatic purpose.

6. Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery.

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7. Monitor your own oral production and use various strategic

devicespauses, fillers, self-corrections, backtracking- to enhance the clarity of the

message.

8. Use grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc), system (e.g. tense,

agreement, and pluralization), word order, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.

9. Produce speech in natural constituent in appropriate phrases, pause

groups, breath groups, and sentences.

10. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.

11. Use cohesive devices in spoken discourse.

12. Accomplish appropriately communicative functions according to the

situation, participants and goals.

13. Use appropriate registers, implicative, pragmatic conventions, and

other sociolinguistics features in face to face conversations.

14. Convey links and connections between events and communicate such

relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information,

generalization, and exemplification.

15. Use facial features, kinetics, body languages, and other non verbal

cues among with verbal language to convey meanings.

16. Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies such as emphasizing

key words, rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of words,

appealing for help, and accurately assessing how well interlocutor is understanding

you.
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From some definitions above it can be concluded that speaking skill is always

related to communication. Speaking skill itself can be stated as the skill to use the

language accurately to express meanings in order to transfer or to get knowledge and

information from other people in the whole life situation.

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CHAPTER III

DISCUSSION

The sample of this mini research is a 2 year-old child whose name is Habib. In

his age, he can utter words, sentences, and even long sentences. He tends to tell

everything that he experienced to others, but the pronunciation is unclear. It is quite

difficult for listeners to understand what he is talking about. He will keep talking

even people doesn’t listen to him. Sometimes, when he feels ignored by people

around him, he tried to catch attention by hitting the people. In this situation, he

wants people to listen and response him.

The basic principle of children in acquiring language is imitative. Imitative

means that children tend to imitate everything around them. In this case, Habib also

do the basic principle of acquiring language. He tends to imitate everything that he

listens and looks: people utterances, new things, environment, and media.

First, he likes to imitate what people said even he doesn’t know the meaning.

When his mother talks to his father, he tries to imitate the words. For example: his

mother said “uda kalau nio makan, nasi jo samba alah diateh meja”, then he imitates

by repeat the same sentence and talk it to his father. He tends to imitate the things that

he often listens from people around him. His mother calls his father “uda” and he

imitates it by calling his father “uda” too. Habib should not call his father “uda”. So,
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his mother do not call “uda” to his father anymore, but she calls his father “ayah” to

make he calls his father as it should be.

Second, he is interested with the new things that he never met before. The new

things can improve his language acquisition. He feels curious about something that he

never knew and met before. When he sees his mother is cooking in the kitchen, he

will ask the ingredients that he never met before, such as fish, chicken, and

vegetables. He is curious with that such things and he never stop to ask about those

things. For example: his mother is frying a fish, then he asked “apa itu bunda?” then,

his mother said “ikan” and he repeats it. He never seen the fresh fish before and he

only knew the fried fish, so he is curious with the fresh fish and ask about it to his

mother. In this case, Habib language acquisition is develop through something new

that make him curious to know about that.

Third, he tends to influenced by the environment and by the people whom he

met every day. It means that he acquires the words by the people that often he met,

and it makes him tend to utter the same word that he listened without he knows the

meaning itself. For example, when he is playing every day with the children in

neighborhood, that children often utter impolite words then Habib also imitate it. He

utters that words to his mother even he does not know the meaning.

Forth, he tends to be influenced by the media such as television and gadget.

He tends to imitate the unique words that he never heard before. When he always
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watches the same TV program every day, automatically he will hear the same words

such as Cartoon movie. Then, he imitates the words and says it to others. For

example: he watched Upin Ipin and he heard Upin said “nasi lemak”, then he says

“nasi lemak” to his mother. His mother doesn’t understand what does he mean by

“nasi lemak”, then his mother asks him about the meaning of “nasi lemak”. Then, he

says “Upin Ipin”. Here, what he means by “nasi lemak” is something that he has

heard from Upin Ipin movie.

Fifth, he tends to imitate the songs. When he listens to the song for the first

time, he listens to the song carefully. Then, after listen to the song for several times,

he starts to sing the song. In imitating the songs, he cannot imitate the whole words,

but he only utter the last sounds of each sentence of the songs. For example, Habib

listens to “Cicak di dinding” song; he sings the song by uttering the last sounds.

When the song plays “cicak cicak di dinding”, he sings “ding”. In several songs, he

cannot utter the words clearly especially the words that consist of “r” letter. In “Cicak

di Dinding” song, there’s a sentence “diam diam merayap”. This sentence consists of

“r” letter. He sings “meayap”, he omits the “r” letter. He cannot remember the whole

words of the song, but he only remember the last sound of the song.
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CHAPTER IV

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the language acquisition of the children may come from many

others aspects, such as the family, environment, media like television and gadget and

even songs. It can occur because we know that the children tend to imitate all of the

things that he listen and looks every day. As much as he does the interaction with

many people, so the language acquisitions tend to increase every time.

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REFERENCES

Brown. 2000. Principle of Language Learning and Teaching. Sanfrancisco: Addison

Wesley Longman.

Brown. 2001. Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to

Language Pedagogy. New York: Wesley Longman, Inc.

Brown, et al. 1977. Audio Visual Instruction: Techniques, Media, and Methods. New
York: Mc Graw-Hill, Inc.

Richards and Renandya 2002

Brown and Yule in Nunan. 1989