First Language Acquisition: Revisiting the Social Interactionist Paradigm
Mansoor Fahim and Mohammad Amerian, Iran
Mansoor Fahim is an associate professor of TEFL at Allameh Tabataba’i university, Iran. He has run Research Methods, Psycholinguistics, Applied Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and seminar classes at M.A. level and also, First Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, and discourse Analysis at Ph.D. level. Fahim has published several articles and books mostly in the field of TEFL and has translated some books into Persian. E-mail: dr.manfahim@yahoo.com
Mohammad Amerian is a Ph.D. candidate in TEFL at Allameh Tabataba’i university, Iran. He has taught English in various levels and currently is a lecturer in university. Amerian’s research interests include Psycholinguistics, Language and Socio-Cultural Studies, Dynamic Curriculum Development and Content-Based Instruction, Pragmatics, Teacher Education and Critical Pedagogy. E-mail: amerian921@atu.ac.ir
Menu
Abastract
Introduction
Background
Behavioristic accounts
Nativist and cognitive statements
Socio-constructivist explanations
Social interactionist paradigm
Vygotskyan ZPD and scaffolding
Bruner’s contributions
Narrative construction of reality
Early language and child talk
Conclusion
References
One of the main concerns of language practitioners and developmental psychologists has been the nature and quality of children’s mother language acquisition (or first language acquisition; FLA). Furthermore, the developmental stages which children undergo to acquire and absorb their L1 together with the categorizations included (acquisition of speech sounds, words, syntax and semantics) have been among the seriously focused-on trends by the scholars in the field. Skinnerian Behaviorist claims, Chomskyan Nativist propositions and Vygotskyan Social Constructivist explanations are among the major corresponding assertions. In this paper, the Social Interactionist paradigm of first language acquisition mainly associated with the Vygotskyan tradition is the concentration which emphasizes the undisputable role of interaction with the surrounding environment in children’s linguistic development and progress. The role of feedback and outside reinforcement in an interpersonal give and take, seeking advantage of modeling the adult speakers, and assistance and guidance given from the adults are correspondingly discussed.
As one of the main concerns for the language practitioners and interested developmental psychologists, explaining the what-and-how of children’s language (L1) progression towards a native version (their mother language) has been vastly debated and variously looked upon. The problem has its many sides with focusing on the essence, rate and successfulness of acquiring different linguistic segments such as minute speech sounds, morphemes, word and syntax. Apart from that, just to mention some of the other sides, semantic and pragmatic explanations for the act were of serious debate in the discussions and propositions. Moreover, in explaining the influential elements on children’s first language advancement, some scholars took the “sociocultural” side saying that interaction plays a key role in developing skills and strategies in a meditative process (Vygotsky, 1978) and that human competence is both biological and cultural (Bruner, 1983). These viewpoints are included in the broad “Social Interactionist” paradigm about language acquisition. The Social Interactionist theory supposes that Children are social beings who acquire language in service of their needs to communicate. It assumes that language is acquired from an interaction of a human’s innate biological capabilities to acquire language with exposure to language in the environment in which the child is developing, with more emphasis on the latter; the outside experience.
Naturally grown out of the parallel psychological descriptions, the early depictions of the image took the Skinnerian Behaviorist shape. For the behaviorists, language is learned via a form of operant conditioning (i.e. OC: a type of learning in which an individual’s behavior is modified by its antecedents and consequences). In his Verbal Behavior (1957), B. F. Skinner suggested that given a certain stimulus, the successful use of a sign such as a word or lexical unit reinforces its momentary or contextual probability. Since operant conditioning is contingent on reinforcement by rewards, a child would learn that a specific combination of sounds stands for a specific thing through repeated successful associations made between the two. A “successful” use of a sign would be one in which the child is understood (for example, a child saying “up” when he or she wants to be picked up) and rewarded with the desired response from another person, thereby reinforcing the child’s understanding of the meaning of that word and making it more likely that he or she will use that word in a similar situation in future (Skinner, 1957).
Skinner’s behaviouristic ideas were severely attacked by Noam Chomsky in his review article (A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, 1959) calling it “largely mythology” and a “serious delusion”. As a pioneering nativist, Chomsky believed that Skinner failed to account for the central role of syntactic knowledge in language competence. He also rejected the term “learning” which Skinner used to claim that children “learn” language through operant conditioning. Instead, Chomsky argued for a mathematical approach to language acquisition, based on a study of syntax (Chomsky, 1959).
Nativists such as Noam Chomsky have focused on the hugely complex nature of human grammars, the finiteness and complexity of the input that children receive, and the relatively limited cognitive abilities of an infant. From these characteristics, they concluded that the process of language acquisition in infants must be tightly constrained and guided by the biologically given characteristics of the human brain. For them, certain aspects of language acquisition must result from the specific ways in which the human brain is “wired” into the brain (the “nature” component as opposed to interactionist socio-constructivist paradigms emphasizing “nurture”).
In addition, cognitively-oriented scholars dealt with the central role of “mind” in children’s cognitive development. Chiefly, the theory of children’s cognitive development by Piaget and his constructivist notion of “psychomotor intelligence” (1973) was proposed to take account of each aspect of cognitive development in children (including their linguistic development). In his theory (Piaget, 1973; Piaget et al., 1977), Piaget mainly argued that learning is the function of the environment and that we use our muscles to learn about the world through action-based (sensori-motor) perceptions in a four-stage procedure (a. sensori-motor, b. pre-operational, c. concrete operational and d. formal operational steps). Actually, it can be said that these claims considering a part for the environment set the needed framework for more serious inclusions of the “outside” experience in children’s cognitive development.
Social constructivist views of first language acquisition explain language development with strong emphases on the role of social interaction between the developing child and linguistically knowledgeable adults. The main approach is largely based on the socio-cultural theories of the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978), though the Psychologist Jerome Bruner (1983) also made it prominent in the Western world. Below, the main tenets of the socio-constructivist approach towards human L1 acquisition will be elaborated in more details.
As mentioned, the early roots of what is named as “Social Constructivist” approach to language acquisition can be traced in the cognitive approaches to language development like the developmental cognitive theory of Jean Piaget (1973) and some other information processing or emergentist trends (such as Brian McWhinney’s competition model, 1989). But the main body of the paradigm is what constitutes the social interactionist approach or social interaction model of Lev Vygotsky (socio-cultural theory; SCT).
Unlike other approaches, the socio-constructivist view of human language development emphasizes the role of feedback and reinforcement in language acquisition. Specifically, it asserts that much of the child’s linguistic growth stems from modeling of and interaction with parents and other adults, who very frequently provide instructive correction. Thus, it is somewhat similar to behaviorist accounts of language, though it differs substantially in that it posits the existence of a “social-cognitive” model and other mental structures within children (a sharp contrast to the “black box” approach of the classical behaviorism).
A key idea within the theory of social interactionism is the notion of “zone of proximal development” (ZPD; Vygotsky, 1978). It is a theoretical construct denoting the set of tasks a child is capable of performing with guidance, but not alone. As applied to language, it describes the linguistic tasks (proper syntax, suitable vocabulary usage, etc.) a child cannot carry out on his own at a given time, but can learn to carry out if assisted by an able adult. In brief, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is where learners construct the new language through socially mediated interaction via the process of “scaffolding” (Vygotsky, 1978).
As a psychologist and social constructivist, Vygotsky laid the foundations for the interactionist view of language acquisition. According to him, social interaction plays a vital role in the learning process. He believed that all cultural development in children is visible in two stages. First, the child observes the interaction between other people and then the behavior develops inside the child. This means that the child first observes the adults around him communicating amongst themselves and then later develops the ability himself to communicate (Vygotsky, 1978).
Gerome Bruner, the former professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, is considered the other major contributor to the Social Interactionist theory of first language acquisition. He is famous for his belief in the importance of parental input and scaffolding to create shared meaning. In fact, like Vygotsky, Bruner emphasized the social nature of learning, citing that other people should help a child develop skills through the process of scaffolding (Bruner, 1983).
Bruner argued that a huge amount of the activity of the child is extraordinarily social and communicative (1983, p. 27) and that the interaction between an adult and an infant, such as games and non-verbal communication, builds the structure of language long before the child is able to communicate verbally. Accordingly, he developed a social interactionist theory of language development. Bruner worked on his Language Acquisition Support System (LASS) where he postulated that language is acquired through conversation and its various codes (in antithesis to Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device (LAD) that allows us to learn the rules of grammar when we are exposed to human speech). LASS was seen as framing our interaction in mastering the uses of language (p. 120). For Bruner, “it is the interaction between LAD and LASS that makes it possible for the infant to enter the linguistic community –and, at the same time, the culture to which the language gives access” (p. 19).
Btuner’s next relevant phase of career was his developing a “narrative construction of reality”. In it, he used recent research in anthropology, psychology, philosophy of language, literary theory and linguistics to formulate the kinds of mental processes involved in our creation of world-versions. In his opinion, there are two distinct “modes” of cognitive functioning (thought): the “paradigmatic mode” which uses causal explanation and has its most sophisticated realisation in the sciences, and the “narrative mode” which proceeds by way of storytelling and encompasses how to endow experience with meaning (Bruner, 1991). In Bruner’s view, narrative construction of reality has important roles in our linguistic development.
In contrast to the theoretical positions of behaviourism, the social interactionist approaches rest on the premises of social-cognitive model, emphasizing the child’s construction of a social world which then serves as the context of language development. Vygotsky (1978) also theorized that a child learns best when interacting with those around him to solve a problem. At first, the adult interacting with the child is responsible for leading the child, and eventually, the child becomes more capable of problem solving on his own. This is true with language, as the adult first talks at the child and eventually the child learns to respond in turn. The child moves from gurgling, to baby-talk, to more complete and correct sentences.
The essential component of the Social Interactionist theory is that language acquisition can easily be realized by emphasizing the role of the environment in child language. Social-interactionists claim that interaction with the adults plays an important role in children’s language acquisition. In addition, they criticize the claim made by Noam Chomsky according to which the linguistic input children are presented with by adults addressing them is full of errors and discontinuities. Another argument of the nativists on which interactionists provide contrary empirical evidence is the availability of negative feedback on, and corrections of, children’s errors.
From the birth, children are surrounded by others who talk to them or with them. For the Social Interactionists, this communication plays an important role in how the baby learns to speak his or her native language. Some scholars argue that “nature” is entirely responsible for how a baby learns a language, while some others argue that “nurture” is responsible for how a baby picks up his or her mother tongue. Social interactionists argue that the way a baby learns a language is both biological and social (i.e. nature AND nurture).
Everyone loves to coo at babies, and this “baby talk” is exposing the child to language, whether we realize it or not. Interactionists believe that children are born with brains that predispose them to the ability to pick up languages as well as with a desire to communicate. Some Interactionists even argue that babies and children cue their parents and other adults into giving them the linguistic exposure they need to learn a language. The Social Interactionist theory posits that children can only learn language from someone who wants to communicate with them. They believe that language is a byproduct of children’s social interactions with the important people in their lives. As one of the scholars in the realm, Michael Halliday also pointed to the issue in his 1975 paper entitled Learning How to Mean putting it in another way. His account of language development in children is “social” and “meaning-based”. For him, children construct a system of meanings to show their own model of social reality; a cognitive process taking place in social interaction (Cattell, 2007).
According to social interactionists, child talk or baby talk may influence language learning, perhaps even enables it. Several studies support the claim (Ferguson, 1977; Snow, 1972 or Fernald, 1993) Infants would rather listen to child-directed speech (CDS) than to adult-directed speech (Fernald & Kuhl, 1987). Parents make efforts to tailor articulation to young children to maximize phonemic contrasts and respond to children’s immature pronunciation by repeating them in the correct form (Bernstein Ratner, 1992). Young children’s vocabulary acquisition seems inherently tied to external experience Joint attention focus (the time that a mother spends talking about topics that the child is already focused on) highly correlates with early vocabulary size. Baby talk may possibly allow children to “bootstrap” their progress in language acquisition (i.e. starting of the self-sustained process of language development without an external input, Cattell, 2007).
Social Interactionist theory of human language development argues that the development is both biological and social, and that language learning is influenced by the desire of children to communicate with others. The theory adds that children are born with a powerful brain that matures slowly and predisposes them to acquire new understandings that they are motivated to share with others.
The main theory associated with Interactionist theory is Lev Vygotsky’s model of collaborative learning (1978); the idea that conversations with older people can help children both cognitively and linguistically. The interaction theory of language development is a compromise between the nativist theory and the behaviorist theory of language development. It recognizes that both environmental and biological factors are important in language development.
The basic appeal of the Social Interactionist approach is the importance it places on the home and the cultural environment in early-childhood language acquisition. According to this theory, language develops in negotiating the environment. Hence, vocabulary is bound by context-or, alternatively, by the culture within which speech is necessary and understandable. Within this theory of compromise are theorists who are closer to one end of the extreme than the other. However, all interactionists believe that language acquisition occurs as a result of the natural interaction between children and their environment, more specifically, their parents or caregivers.
In sum, the Interactionist approach to linguistic development suggests that language is acquired from an interaction of a human’s innate biological capabilities to acquire language with exposure to language in the environment in which the child is developing. It is a compromise between the nativist theory and the behaviorist theory of language development (Goldstein & Naglieri, 2011, pp. 830-831).
Bernstein Ratner, N. (1992). Measurable outcomes of instructions to change maternal speech style to children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 35, 14-20.
Bruner, J. (1983). Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bruner, J. (1991). The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry, 18, 1, 1-21.
Cattell, R. (2007). Children’s Language: Consensus and Controversy. London: Continuum.
Chomsky, N. A. (1959). A Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Language, 35, 1, 26-58.
Fernald, A. & Kuhl, P. (1987). Acoustic determinants of infant preference for motherese speech. Infant Behavior and Development, 10, 279–293.
Goldstein, S. & Naglieri, J. A. (Eds.). (2011). Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and Development. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Piaget, J. & Inhelder, B. (1973). Memory and intelligence. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Piaget, J., Gruber, H. E. & Voneche, J. J., (Eds.). (1977). The essential Piaget. New York: Basic Books.
Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press.
retrieved from: www.brighthubeducation.com on 2014, 7, 7
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