From "Natural Communication Methodology", by María S. C. de Cantiello and Haydée S. de Fabricant. Ediciones Braga, Buenos Aires, 1987.

SECTION 1. ACQUISITION AND LEARNING.

What is acquiring one's mother tongue?

Since we will be using the term "acquiring" rather than "learning" when referring to our mother tongue or L1 we had better clarify what we understand by "acquiring" and by "learning".

"Acquiring" is closely related to "mother tongue acquisition" because it is an unconscious, unintentional, unsystematic, informal process.

On the other hand, we are going to use "learning" to refer to a conscious, formal, systematic, intentional process, basically carried out with the aid of a tutor. That is why we speak of "2nd. or foreign language learning".

We are starting our work with some important considerations on 1st. language acquisition because researchers in this field have elaborated new strategies to study child speech and have arrived at some conclusions which have proved useful when analysing the process of 2nd. or foreign language learning.

In dealing with "1st. language acquisition" we could decide on one of two extreme positions:

a) The environmentalist or behaviourist position which upholds that the child is born with no innate predisposition; he is a "tabula rasa" which will be conditioned or "shaped" by the environment. Language, for this group, is not a mental phenomenon but verbal behaviour which is acquired by a process of habit-formation (imitation, analogy).

b) The innate knowledge position states, on the other hand, that the child is born with very specific innate endowments: knowledge of the nature of language, and knowledge of the basic grammatical relations. This knowledge is universal, that is to say that "all grammatical categories and relations do exist in all human language and all human beings are born with knowledge of them". This means that the child's language is not just shaped by the environment: it is "creatively constructed" by the child as he interacts with those around him.

c) A third group adopts a compromising position: they believe that the child's language development is the result of the interaction between his/her innate potentialities and the kind of experiences he/she undergoes in contact with a given environment.

The environmentalist position prevailed before the'60' s and B.F. Skinner¹ was its main representative. For him, language is not a mental process but behaviour acquired through habit-formation. This process consists of these stages:

a) Child's imitation of the sounds and patterns of the language environment.

b) People's reward (reinforcement) of the child's correct, acceptable responses by adequate approval.

c) Repetition —on the part of the child— of sounds and patterns in order to be rewarded, and at the same time establish the "habit". In this way, the child is being "conditioned" by the environment and his ultimate goal is the adult model.

Chomsky's² linguistic theories —1957— and cognitive psychology strongly attacked the behaviourist view on account of the following principles:

a) Language acquisition is not verbal behaviour based on imitation and analogy because when the child speaks he/she is making use of a complex system of rules which enables him/her to create and understand an infinite number of sentences —whether he/she has been exposed to them before or not.

The knowledge of these rules governing a language is called "linguistic competence" in contrast to "performance" which is observable and which changes from individual to individual, according to personality, topic, emotions, situations, etc.

b) Though children are not exposed to rules but to people's speech (performance) they are able to develop an abstract system of rules which will enable them to use a given language creatively. This process cannot be accounted for by habit-formation.

Moreover, if we analyse children or adult speech we will see that rules are not clearly reflected in the "surface" of performance³.

But what is really striking is that at a very early age —3 to 5— all normal children have already internalized the basic rules of a language at a time in their lives when they have not yet learnt how to read or write.

Research has demonstrated that all normal children, though exposed to different speech, go through the same stages in the development of language acquisition and arrive at the same underlying rules.

The fact that language is acquired by infants so rapidly also shows that human beings are born with some "grammatical universal features" such as "word order" to signal meaning and basic relationships such as the one between subject and predicate.

All these findings have contributed to the notion that "human beings are the only species born with an innate capacity for speech".

WHAT IS THE CHRONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF CHILD SPEECH?

·         From birth to 3 months: "cooing": exercises his speech organs, plays with vocal chords.

·         3 to 6 months: "babbling"; the baby produces syllable-like sounds, exercises speech organs.

·         9 months: "babbling with intonation'; produces all varieties of sound and sound combination.

·         12 months: reacts to simple commands. Engages in verbal play. Gives the first few words as conditioned responses.

·         18 months: points to simple things. Uses a dozen words or more. Moves towards "naming" explosion.

·         2 years: understands about several hundred words. Jargon dropped. Vocabulary in the hundreds. Simple phrases. Verbalizes "wants".

·         3 years: large increase in vocabulary. Gets structure right. Speaks of the past.

·         4 years: Though his/her range of understanding is wide, he/she still confuses periods of time. AGE OF LOCUACITY.

·         5 years: More complex sentences and larger vocabulary. Begins counting and printing.

·         6 to 8: Begins reading and writing and increases passive vocabulary. Perfects his knowledge of the language and attains full command of it.⁴

What is the grammatical development of child speech?

We can distinguish three stages in the development of child speech as we read in "the grammatical development of children".⁵

A) "Telegraphic" speech

B) The development of inflections and function words

C) The development of transformations.

A) Telegraphic speech is called so because it is very limited. As the utterance is so brief (one or two words), topic, setting and situation become very important in conveying meaning. For example, "Daddy shoe" may mean "he is picking up his father's shoe" or "his father is dressing him".

Lois Bloom (1970) found that sentences made up of two nouns (2-noun-utterances) showed five different relationships:

1) Conjunction (e.g. "cup glass", cup and glass)

2) Description (e.g. "party hat", c.f. a party hat)

3) Possession (e.g. "daddy shoe", c.f. daddy's shoe)

4) Location (e.g. "coat chair" indicating where the coat is)

5) Agent-object (e.g. "mommy book", mommy is reading a book).

Dan Slobin (1979) distinguished seven very important types of functions expressed by two-word utterances (not necessarily two nouns) in child speech:

1) Locating or naming (e.g. "there ball")

2) Demanding or desiring ("More chocolate").

3) Negating (e.g. "Not tired")

4) Describing an event or situation (e.g. "finger cut")

5) Describing a person or thing (e.g. "pretty doll")

6) Indicating possession ("my shoe")

7) Questioning (e.g. "where book")

We would not like to leave out⁶ Halliday's analysis of child speech development because of its direct incidence on communicative teaching and learning.

Halliday contends that "language acquisition takes place because the child realizes he can 'do' certain things with language" and that the different functions are acquired in the same predictable order by all normal children in any language environment or community".

Thus, a child 1) uses language to get what he needs (instrumental function); 2) uses language to control other people's behaviour (regulatory function)

Research on the meanings and functions of children's speech has convinced many people that all languages share universal characteristics which are the result of the common way in which all human beings think and interact. For these people, the child's growing mental capacity and communicative needs play as important a role as language acquisition capacity.

B) The development of inflections and function words. The moment the child handles longer utterances, though still telegraphic, e.g. "Peter want that", he begins to master inflections, "Peter wants that" and function words like "a" or "the".

Roger Brown⁷ studied how children acquired 14 of these "morphemes", and came to the conclusion that the acquisition of these "morphemes" was a gradual process, following a given order. Brown found that the average order was the following:

1) Present progressive with "ing" as in "running".

2) Preposition "on"

3) Preposition "in"

4) Plural "s" as in "3 rats"

5) Irregular past forms (went)

6) Possessive "s" as in "daddy's hat"

7) Uncontractible copula (no use of contractions)

8) Articles "the" and "a" (differentiation)

9) Regular past "ed" as in "talked"

10) Regular 3rd. person singular "s" as in "plays"

11) Irregular 3rd. person singular forms (e.g. "she has")

12) Uncontractible "be" as in "she was coming"

13) Contractible copula as in "she's tired"

14) Contractible auxiliary "be" as in "she's coming".

Researchers have also found out that the acquisition of these morphemes does not correlate with their frequency in his/her parents' speech and that this process of acquisition of verb inflections correlates with his/her own internal learning process.

There is also evidence that the child produces the regular past inflection after having mastered some irregular past forms such as "went" and "came". At this stage the child seems to regress when, after that, he produces "comed". This is not a sign of regression but of progress since he is making use of a rule he has already mastered: that for forming the "regular past tense".

So overgeneralization of this rule leads him to produce "goed" and "comed'.

C) The development of transformations (negatives and interrogatives).

·         At first the child places the negative particle at the beginning or at the end (regardless of the forms he is being exposed to in this environment):
e. g. "no the boy running".

·         Then children tend to insert '"no" into the sentence
e.g. "I no want chocolate"
"She don't want it".

·         Later on the child uses the negative particle correctly
"I am not hungry"
"Betty didn't do it".

Interrogatives:

·         At first, children use intonation
"See dog?"

·         In the case of "wh" questions the "wh" word opens the question
e.g. "Why my ball goed?"
"Where you put it?"

·         Later on, they begin to master the inversion with "do" as in the adult system.

These findings have influenced 2nd. language teaching and learning in at least one important sense: teachers are becoming more tolerant of students' developmental errors.

Later development of child speech

Some more difficult grammatical distinctions will not be mastered before the child reaches the age of 10.

e.g. Mary asked Tom to come
Betty promised Susan to come.

It has been proved that 2nd. language learners also become aware of these distinctions at a much later stage in their learning process.

It has also been established that children develop a capacity to use different speech according to different social situations. Between 2 and 4 a child is able to choose different styles of speech for addressing other children and adults, and at the age of 7, children can make use of different speech for making requests like the ones used by adults.⁸

This development of both the acquisition of more complex language and various styles to interact socially will continue into adult life.

Language development

When using language children depend a good deal on the concepts they form about the world around them. Therefore, they will not use in their communication what is not meaningful for them, e.g. despite the frequent use of the perfect tense in adult speech, the child seems not to find it meaningful at first, so this tense is not used by the child before the age of 4.

These L1 studies have also proved useful in second-language teaching and learning.

1st. Language-acquisition mechanisms

When acquiring their mother tongue children seem to develop their own grammatical system until it corresponds to the adult one:

a) which is rule-governed

b) where meaning is clearly shown

c) where different items have definite communicative functions in conveying meaning.

These principles have proved to be highly relevant for 2nd. language learning.

How does the environment influence child speech?

"Caretaker" speech —the language used by parents, adults or older children when speaking to small children— has special features: e.g. it contains shorter utterances and reduced vocabulary and it is connected with the "here" and "now".

This speech or "input" gets the child started in the acquisition of his/her mother tongue.

Analogy plays a secondary role in L1 acquisition, the primary role being that of creative rule-forming processes.

Talking about the contribution of the environment to child speech, Elizabeth Ingram states that what "drives children to talk is the need to communicate, to relate to the people around them".

We do know that children need to acquire their mother tongue for survival: the highest of motivations. Approval on the part of people encourages children to try again. If, on the other hand, children experience failure, they may stop their speech development for a while. The child's behaviour at home may be repeated at school, that is to say, he will be encouraged to keep on trying only if his efforts are stimulated by the teacher in class.

What is the native speaker's knowledge about his native tongue?

The following may be considered the main features which characterize what is meant by "knowing a language".

1) A native speaker has a "sense for right or wrong use of the language".

Knowledge of these rules is intuitive. Any native speaker is capable of distinguishing phonological, grammatical or lexical mistakes in any wrong utterance.

2) Native speakers possess communicative competence —the fusion of form, meaning, and function.

3) Native speakers have an intuitive grasp of their own language. This is according to Hymes "their intuitive knowledge of social, contextual, and functional aspects of their L1"

4) Native speakers use their mother tongue creatively. They can produce an infinite number of sentences never heard or produced before.

What is learning?

Elizabeth Ingram says in her paper "Psychology and Language Learning"⁹ that: "learning occurs when an individual comes to know something he did not know before or becomes able to do something he couldn't do before".

Learning may be informal or systematic.

Informal learning takes place all the time in all areas throughout an individual's life.

In systematic learning there is a teacher or instructor, and a conscious, formal, process.

What is learning a second or foreign language? What is teaching a second or foreign language?

If we accept that language serves a communicative purpose, foreign language learners should achieve communicative competence in the L2, that is to say knowledge of the rules of grammar and phonology (linguistic code: usage) and knowledge of the sociolinguistic rules of appropriacy (use) which will enable them to understand the native speakers' language in both the oral and the written media and be understood as well. Teachers who want to help learners in this direction stimulate interaction in the classroom and place the emphasis on meaning, on the message, on what learners can do with language rather than on form.

In his book Explorations in Applied Linguistics 2, Widdowson¹⁰ corrects himself by explaining that the title of his book "Teaching Language as Communication" may be misleading. He would rather use "Teaching Language for Communication": in this way teachers will tend to move from course contents with reference to the communicative properties of language (notional and functional categories: time, space, etc., identification, description) to the "actual process whereby such notions and functions are realized in acts of communication. What is then involved in the teaching of language for communication? Communication is a function of the discourse process: unless a discourse is enacted no communication takes place and discourse is not enacted by the simple expedient of expressing individual notions and functions. It is done by the extension of utterance by negotiation".

"Communication works by the operation of what we can call the cooperative imperative: a necessary requirement for social life".

We agree with Widdowson that communication "is not just a question of acquiring a knowledge of language items however they are labelled. It must involve the use of procedures for negotiating meaning within predictable routines". Teachers ought, then, to develop a methodology which stimulates the learner "to engage in language use as a dynamic problem-solving activity within the confines of the classroom".

Teachers should become conscious that syllabus content is just half the process; it only provides a framework for learning activities which are teachers' responsibility.

So, presentation of language as communication will not automatically lead to the use of language for communication. Teachers must create conditions to favour learners' use of what they already know from their mastery of the L1 and apply it in the learning process of a foreign language. Teachers should, therefore, foster the natural language capacity of the learners rather than focus attention on their achieving linguistic or communicative competence.

We have agreed with Christopher Brumfit's¹¹ ideas since the very moment we started working "communicatively". As far back as 1981 we understood that learning a foreign language was not just a question of building a different syllabus, a semantic syllabus instead of a grammatical one, but that of creating conditions in the classroom for learners to be able to use the foreign language to communicate naturally. What makes learning "communicative" is not only a matter of teaching and learning content but a methodology which provides opportunities for the learners to learn a second or foreign language in use.

What is "acquiring" a second language?

This is a new concept developed by Stephen D. Krashen,¹² a well-known American scholar in the field of second-language acquisition, who states that subconscious acquisition of a 2nd. language is a more important, pleasant, successful and lasting way of learning than systematic, conscious learning because learners are not aware of what they are incorporating. What he is actually suggesting is that foreign language learning should be more like 1st. language acquisition: "natural". Krashen thinks that acquisition is more important than learning to develop communicative ability.

Comprehensible input helps language acquisition: acquisition only takes place when people understand what is said in the target language. Of course, the learner must be ready and "open" to the input, he must be relaxed to make the most of the situation: the learners' affective filter must be low, in Krashen's words. Learners mustn't be compelled to speak until they are ready. So, a "silent period" should be accepted at the beginning, the duration of this "period" will vary depending on the age, situation, and temperament of the learner. Activities in the classroom should foster communication.

NOTES

1. B.F. Skinner: main representative of the "behaviouristic school" which takes account only of the physical manifestations that are outwardly observable. The Behaviourist Theory of Stimulus-Response Learning considers all learning to be the establishment of habits as the result of reinforcement or reward. By a trial-and-error process, in which acceptable utterances are reinforced by comprehension and approval and unacceptable utterances are inhibited by lack of reward, a child gradually learns to make finer discriminations until his utterances resemble more and more closely the speech of the environment in which he is growing up. For Skinner, "verbal behaviour" consists of stimulus-response associations which depend upon another organism for their reinforcement. Skinner's book Verbal Behaviour was published in 1948 by Harvard University Press.

2. Chomsky attacks the empiricist point of view that language is learned as a set of habits and argues that that theory is inadequate to account for one of the most important facts about language —its "creativity". At any moment, a speaker may produce an utterance which he has never heard before. To Chomsky, it is this "creative property of languages which cannot possibly be explained in terms of stimulus-response and habit-formation. This "creative aspect" can be explained in terms of an internalized system of rules which can generate an infinite number of grammatical sentences which will be understood and accepted when uttered with the appropriate vocabulary in a communication situation. Chomsky considers that a language is learned through the formation of a set of rules of great generality that are used to generate and interpret new sentences. Chomsky calls this internal rule system the speaker's "linguistic competence". A linguist's rule system —a generative grammar— is a model of the speaker's linguistic competence. For these rules to be sufficiently general, they must be very abstract. Chomsky then asks whether rules of this abstraction are learned or inherent. He concludes that the human mind has an "intrinsic intellectual organization" which is inherently predisposed to make linguistic abstractions. Both linguistic and psychological research have determined man's innate capacity for speech.

3. Basic to Chomsky's transformational-generative theory is the distinction between competence and performance. The competence of a speaker-hearer is his intuitive knowledge of the complex system of rules of his language. His performance is his own production of utterances in actual situations. As with "parole", performance is very variable and may not conform at all times with the speaker-hearer's competences.

4. Erick H. Lenneberg "The Biological Foundations of Language" (1967) in Mark Lester's Readings in Applied Transformational Grammar. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Inc. 1970. W. F. Mackey. "Language Teaching Analysis" Longmans - 1966.

5. William Littlewood, Foreign and Second Language Learning: Language acquisition research and its implication for the classroom, Cambridge Language Library. 1984. (Adapted from Chapter One).

6. Halliday, Michael. 1975: Learning How to Mean, London. Edward Arnold.

7. Brown, R.: A first Language: The Early Stages. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1973.

8. Erwin-Tripp, S.M.: Wait For Me, Roller Skate!, 1977.

9. Elizabeth Ingram: "Psychology and Language Learning", from The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics. Volume 2. O.U.P., 1975.

10. H. G. Widdowson: Explorations in Applied Linguistics 2. O.U.P., 1984.

11. Paper by Christopher Brumfit in Communication in the Classroom, edited by Keith Johnson and Keith Morrow (page 51). Longman, 1981.

12. Stephen D. Krashen and Tracy D. Terrell:·The Natural Approach. Language Acquisition in the·Classroom. The Alemany Press, 1983. Pergamon Press.