A language is a form of communication conveyed by using words, gestures, writing, and symbols. Language acquisition is the process during which individuals gain the ability to utilize and make sense of certain language elements. Second language acquisition refers to the process of learning or acquiring another language after one has mastered the first one. The acquisition of both the first and second languages involves stages that systematically lead to developing the mastery of a tongue. In learning the first language, children would start from babbling to uttering one word, then double words, and after that, formulating simple and broken sentences. Eventually, they achieve full sentences that meet the language grammatical rules.
The language learning process occurs in two ways, either through acquisition or learning. The former is the natural process of adopting a language within one’s environmental setting, where one interacts with people speaking the targeted language. Over time, one understands the tongue and adopt its patterns fully, therefore being able to speak it as the natives. The former, however, involves a classroom setup, which can be formal or informal. In a formal setting, one grasps the language by attending classes, listening to the professional teacher, and doing the necessary tasks, while in an informal setup, one is taught by a proficient speaker of the target language, who is within the learner’s interaction circle.
Language learning has theoretical perspectives that provide general guidelines on how languages are learned. Cognitivism is a theory that considers language acquisition to be more reasonable in the process of strategizing the learning standards and levels of processing information to meet to the students’ expectations. It further elaborates that learning skills are essential in processing the information since the students may need additional explanations of key points. They also ought to be able to remember what they learn so that they could use this knowledge in the future, either in mind or during the class. It will also help the student to limit the new information that may hinder them from retaining what was learned earlier, thus a proper understanding of acquisition language information.
Cognitivism school of thought informs language teaching through strategizing the tongue observed by the learners, which will later limit the amount of information that could overfeed their minds. This will render them unable to understand the language well; hence, in this theory, the teacher always ensures that the trainee transfers the right information into their memory that will be of more importance for them.
Constructivism theory is another orientation that explains how creative a learner behaves and the ability to come up with ideas, with or without any assistance, targeting to ensure social knowledge. This school of thought contributes to the language acquisition in a way that the novices are expected to gain more experience in their learning environment. Considering that the teacher will give out a rough idea, their task will be to provide the professor with details about specified language. This, in turn, makes the student learn fast.
Constructivism informs language teaching through engaging the learners with class-based research on the target languages. This approach is considered to be of help to the student by allowing them to receive firsthand information through various research, which does not require the teacher to explain much in the classroom. The professors just need to expound basing on each question from a student to help boost the understanding skills and to become more creative in learning several new languages.
Behaviorism school of thought is another way that tends to explain the behaviors of the learners at their tender age. They are considered to be influenced by their elders as role models to them, where they get to learn and understand their mother tongue.
The principle in this theory is that the children at their tender age can learn oral languages from a person who is older than them. The elderly individual is a model, from whom they can imitate and repeat words several times until it sticks into their minds. The learner then qualifies to be a behavioral erudite and considered to have learned language acquisition at a personal level. Behaviorism school of thought informs language teaching through behavior that is presumed to be conditional as an outcome of several repetitions in the field of understanding the conversation and be able to communicate well through many repetitions.
Another way that behaviorism influences a learner is in their ecology, where social interactions and understanding of knowledge are considered basic. Babies are expected to understand the language at a certain point of age, which will be mandatory. Thus, it becomes crucial for a person to know at least one language. Growing day by day, people may learn some other languages, which will be of importance to their personality.
The process of learning a language is always affected by historical influences. This is the same for both the first and second tongue learning. These influences are developed in the process of acquiring the accents, morphological patterns, and vowel sounds of the first language. For example, a person who speaks English as a native language will have difficulty in learning Swahili due to the differences in their vowel sound systems (Lightbown & Spada, 2019). In Swahili pronunciations, vowels are short and are not diphthongized, unlike in English.
Another historical impact is language family, and it can affect one’s ability to learn a second language. Learning a second language, which is from the same family as that of one’s first, is much easier than learning one from a different family. For example, a Spanish student will learn Portuguese more quickly than a Turkish student (Lightbown & Spada, 2019). Culture and status also can influence language learning ability. It is believed that a learner’s second language acquisition capacity is decreased if their own culture has a lower status than that of the culture which they are trying to learn.
The other example is based on a story of a language tutor who narrates his journey on language learning, and it is based on cognitivism theory. From the narration, one gets to learn and even see how he started and eventually grasped the words of the various languages he has delved into learning (Lampariello, 2020). Follow this link www.youtube.com to watch the video on the narration.
In conclusion, language learning is an important aspect of human society as it forms a basis for building different communication channels. People of distinct cultures use these to understand each other during interactions and, which is the most important, make certain individuals, such as newborns and people frequently use the language, become encultured into a community.
References
Lampariello, L. (2020). My language learning history (in 6 languages) [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. (2019). How languages are learned. Oxford University Press.