Materials For Language And Literacy in Early Year

 This post will be talking about a course I join, Materials For Language and Literacy in Early Year ELE 226, which is taught by Dr. Vijaya in English Foreign and Languages University Hyderabad, India. I just want to share it to my classmate and you all, readers, so that a mistake which I may show here can be corrected. At the same time, this page can be an area of discussion.
Well, it was begun with a picture below ;


Materials based upon the picture
Teaching positive and negative simple sentence using Have and Don't / Doesn't Have.

 



We are instructed to watch the picture carefully and make a material for language teaching either for speaking class or writing class with our own group. For my friends, just don't forget to make it and hand it in to the teacher in the coming class.
Today Dr. Vijaya was starting with a question about what vocalization is, then continued with explaination of Developmental Sequences, stages in language acquisition. There are Stephen Krashen and Peter Eiimas who concerned about this. Peter Eiimas said that comprehension comes before noun.
When do you think a baby start acquiring language? 
Harvard University, based upon its research, found that a baby starts acquiring language 3 months before its birth. In other words, S/He starts acquiring language while S/He is in her/his mother's womb. Well, scientifically, a baby can listen to a sound in the age of 6 month pregnancy, a classic music such as Bach & Bethoven, can stimulate a baby brain in a positive way and for some parents, they just start talking her/him.
How to teach children vocabulary?
Dr. Vijaya explained that there will be mapping performance for teaching vocabulary in English. Teacher is supposed to start from Concrete to Abstract, from Noun to Verb. For instance, 
1. Table : It's a noun & concrete/stable, has referents and shape
2. Sand : It's a noun & Unstable
3. Give : It's a verb. Abstract
We can start teaching vocabulary from a type of number one to a type of number three.

The next slide of Dr. Vijaya's was about Nativist and Empirist which showed off a dialogue taken from Pinker 1994, 281 – attributed to Martin Braine ;

Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy
Adult: You mean, you want the other spoon.
Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please Daddy.
Adult: Can you say “the other spoon”?
Child: Other … one … spoon
Adult: Say “other”
Child: other
Adult: “spoon”
Child: Spoon.
Adult: “other … spoon”
Child: other … spoon. Now give me other one spoon
Source: Poverty of Stimulus

Then from this dialogue, she asked about what Poverty of stimulus is. Based upon a book V.J. Cook and Mark Newson titled Universal Grammar, poverty stimulus is explainded like the following ;
How does the poverty-of-the-stimulus argument apply to L2 acquisition? If L2 learners possess knowledge of language they could not have acquired from the evidence they have encountered, its source must be within their own minds : the same logic applies as to L1 Acquisition. Innateness can be established in the same fashion in L2 learning as in L1 acquisition. In other words, without any stimulus, children are having a capability in acquiring language. In contrast with BF Skinner who said that stimulus results respond. Stimulus can be created through both negative reinforcement and positive reinforcement such as drilling, imitation, repetition, and punishment which eventually result habit formation. It concludes that Noam Chomsky criticized B.F Skinner’s notion.
The evidences available to the second language learner are
1. Imitation
2. Direct Teaching : explanation, correction, and approval

Imitation
Examples and explanation :
1. Ten times, repetition, does not confer a knowledge
Oscar fancies himself
It does not give any knowledge that Oscar and himself refers to the same person
2. They correct content not form:
(from Marcus et al. 1992)
Adult: Where is that big piece of paper I gave you yesterday?
Child: Remember? I writed on it.
Adult: Oh that’s right, don’t you have any paper down here, buddy?
Sheer imitation only provides positive evidence of what is heard. The word “writed” on the dialogue above is spoken by the child. In fact adults never say such a word. The question is that how come a child acquire such a word. Doesn’t it prove that there is poverty-of-stimulus.
Language develops spontaneously by exposure to Linguistic input, that is on the basis of what children hear. Children are rarely corrected, and even then they are, they resist the correction.
Source :Poverty of Stimulus

Last but not least Children hear a finite number of sentences but they produce infinite number of sentences.

Proses
  • Early vocalization
  • Language like sound
  • Words (one-word, two words stages)
  • Sentences
     Role of shape

Extended Vocabulary and Language Development
Mapping : Ortography (sounds and symbols) and concept

Stages of Acquisiton

1. Year 1
  • Biological noises
  • Cooing and laughing
  • Vocal Play
  • Babling
  • Melodic Utterances
(repetition and language play)

2. Year 2
Holophrastic Stage
  • 12-18 months
  • Single Word : Teddy, gone more
  • 60% Utterances Noun-Names
  • Katherine Nelson
Errors
1. Over extension : One word is used for different contexts
examples :
  • Ball : 1st applied to describe balls but then due to its shape, it is applied to apples, grapes, squash etc.
  • Tee : 1st applied to stick, but then Cane, umbrella, and old-fashioned razor.
  • Mum: 1st applied to horse, then to a cow, calf, pig, moose, and all four-legged animals.
2. Underextension :
example : White - it is used for describing snow

Babies' ability to discriminate between languages

  • Development trend between birth and 2 months of age newborn discriminated between two foreign languages, 2 month-olds didn't.
  • Nazzi Bertoncini and Mehler (1999) : French newborn could discriminate sentences in English and Japanese.

Two- word stage
Mommy Juice - (argument : object - subject / Noun)
Mommy go.

3. Year 2-3 Telegraph stage
  • String words
  • Lack of function words ( preposition, conjunction, article)
  • "Mama want that"
  • After three dramatic change, use of "and"
  • Happens in pre-school year
Significant Vocabulary used in literature on early acquisition
  • World clases / parts of speech
  • Closed classes vs Open classes
  • Concrete Concept vs Relational Concept
  • Functional words
  • Grammatical morphemes
  • Predicates and nominals
  • Arguments
  • Irregular plurals
  • regular/irregular words (ending)
  • Word Order 

Question : Is it regular or irregular verbs which is more common for children?
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