Language Acquisition the Ways in Term Paper

In the final analysis, people have been learning how to acquire language for millennia without the assistance of scientific investigation, but the need for young people to do so quickly in an increasingly multicultural country and globalized marketplace is more important than ever before because they will probably have to learn a second (or third) language at their earliest opportunity.

References

Birdsong, D. (1999). Second language acquisition and the critical period hypothesis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. This book examines reasons why very young learners might be subject to a critical period for language acquisition.

Costa, A.R., Mcilvane, W.J., & Wilkinson, K.M. (2001). Emergent word-object mapping by children: Further studies using the blank comparison technique. The Psychological Record, 51(3), 343. This study confirmed the usefulness of the blank comparison technique in emergent mapping research and provided the first data set from school-aged children.

Danby, S. (2002). The communicative competence of young children. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 27(3), 25. The author is a classroom teacher who emphasized the importance of individual differences in learning ability and how these affect the teacher's need for judicious application of classroom management techniques to avoid frustrating early language acquisition.

Dixon, W.E., Jr., & Smith, P.H. (2000). Links between early temperament and language acquisition. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 46(3), 417. This was a study of mothers and 40 toddlers to investigate relationships between language acquisition and temperamental attentional control and positive affectivity.

Levy, Y. (1994). Other children, other languages: Issues in the theory of language acquisition.Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. This cross-cultural investigation concerned the theoretical contributions of cross-linguistic and cross-populations studies to language acquisition. The author reports, "This book presents cross-linguistic and cross-population studies of language acquisition" (p. 1).

Mcdonald, J.L. (1997). Language acquisition: The acquisition of linguistic structure in normal and special populations. Annual Review of Psychology, 48, 215. This study analyzed the body of evidence that learners use the routes of prosodic and phonological information, function words, and morphological decomposition in order to achieve mastery of the structure of their language.

Nowak-Fabrykowski, K., & Shkandrij, M. (2004). The symbolic world of the bilingual child: Digressions on language acquisition, culture and the process of thinking. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 31(4), 284. These authors stress the importance of recognizing the cultural venue in which language is acquired because language uses a special type of symbolism that comprises all social objects and actions, and which ultimately constructs the individual's cultural identity and perspective. They note that, "Research has shown the importance of analyzing the culture of a child in order to understand what material he/she uses in his/her thought process. Culture as the dominant factor influences his/her knowledge by importing values, norms and beliefs" (p. 285).

Tager-Flusberg, H. (1994). Constraints on language acquisition: Studies of atypical children. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. This edition was a compilation of studies of atypical children to develop support for a modularity approach to language, while they illustrate some of the ways in which.....