Under Reconstruction

Now, we’re trying to develop our second language, and let’s think about how children develop their first language. What we know about babies develop their language and communication ability?. We know that babies are able to communicate soon after they’re born. First, they communicate by crying, this crying makes their parents know while they’re hungry or unhappy or uncomfortable. However, they soon begin a process of acquiring their language, the first stage of languages position just a few weeks after birth. At this stage, babies start to make cooing noises when they are happy, then around 4 months of age they begin to babble. Babies all the world are begin to babble around the same age and they all begin to make the same kinds of babbling noises. Now, about the time around 10 months, older, babbling of the babies from different backgrounds sounds different. For example, the babbling of the babies in the Chinese background, sound different with the babbling of the babies in English background. Babies become a new stage of language development when they begin to speak their first word. At first, they invent their own language for a thing, for example, the baby in English background may say ‘baba’ for ‘bottle’ or ‘kiki, for ‘cat’. In the next few months babies will acquire a lack of words. These words are usually the name of things that are in the baby’s environment, words for food or words for toys, they will begin to use this word to communicate with others. For example, if a baby holds an empty juice bottle and he may say ‘juz’ to his father, the baby seems to be saying ‘I want more juice, daddy’ or ‘May I have more juice, daddy?’, this word ‘juice’ is really a one word sentence. The next stages of languages position begin around the age of 18 months when the babies begin to say 2 words sentences. They begin to use a kind of grammar with these words together. The speech they produce is called ‘Telegraphic Speech’, because the baby omits all except the most essential words. An English speaking child may say something like, ‘Daddy up !!’, which actually could mean ‘Daddy pick me up, please’. Then between 2&3 years of age, young children begin to learn more and more grammar. For example, they begin to use the past tense of verb. Another words, they begin to learn a rule for making the past tense of many verbs. The children begin to say a thing, such as ‘I walked home’ and ‘I kissed mommy’. They also begin to over generalize these grammar rules and make a lot of grammar mistakes, for example, children often say such things like ‘I goed to bed’ it state of ‘I went to bed’, or ‘I eated ice cream’. In other words the children have learn the past tense through for regular verbs, such as, ‘walked and kissed’, but they have to learn that they can’t use this rule for over. Some verb like ‘eat’, are irregular and the past tense forms for irregular verbs must be learn individually. Anyway, these mistakes are normal and the children are soon learned to use the past tense for regular and irregular verbs correctly. The children then continue to learn other grammatical structures in the same way. Now, if we stop to think about it, actually it’s quite amazing how quickly babies and children in the world learn their language and how similar the process of babies all over the world. Do you remember anything how you learn your first language during a thoroughly years of your live?, think about the process for a minute. What was your very first word?, was it ‘Mama’ or maybe ‘Papa’. Now think also about the process of learning English as the second language, can you remember your first word you learn in English?. I doubt that it was ‘Mama’, now think about some of the similarity and differences about the process of children learning their first language and if we learn English for our second language.