Teach English in Fredericton - TEFL Courses

Child Development (25) A British philosopher in the 1700's, John Locke characterized the child as a tabula rasa, which is Latin for ‘blank slate' (Winkler, 1996). If this is true, then one cannot neglect the influence that internal factors (biology), and external factors (social environment) have in the development of a child (Berk, 2004; Berger & Luckmann, 1967). Thus, guidance, structure and purpose are vital in a child's development. These elements help shape and mould the child into a thoughtful, caring, responsible, and knowledgeable individual. Moreover, by incorporating flexibility into these elements, allows the child to develop independently. This paper focuses on the topic of child development, but more specific, native language and foreign language acquisition in child development. It is found that children start to produce words between the ages of eight to twelve months, where from this point their language ability progressively increases (O'Grady, 2005). According to Chomsky's nativist theory, the acquisition of a native language is a natural process (see Chomsky, 1965). This means that the acquisition takes place with no direct instruction, practice and drills, and with no clear difficulty (Chomsky, 1965). children are able to listen to words that are spoken around them, and without knowing the definitions, are able to both understand these words and construct sentences (O'Grady, 2005). Escamilla and Grassi (2000) argue that, when asked if we remember learning how to speak our first language, most people cannot remember this, as it happened naturally. Subsequently, the acquisition of a foreign language is not a natural process. It requires pedagogical input to be successfully acquired (Escamilla & Grassi, 2000).