SOME THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE LEARNING AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

1.1 Diffeerences and similarities between (a) the child's acquisition of his f i r s t language, (b) the child's acquisition of a second language, and (c) the adult's acquisition of a second language. The infant-child acquires his first language in the most natural o r least artificial manner possible. There is normally nothing in his mind to prevent him from ultimately learning a native language; on the contrary, if Chomsky is correct in his 20th century version of the 16th century notion of innate ideas: the infant brain is predisposed towards the acquisition of the grammar of natural language. On the basis of his contacts with parole--the outer, surface manifestations of the speech of his home and community-and regardless of how fragmentary, uninventive, or degenerate this corpus may be, the child internalizes a highly complex, abstract set of interrelated systems, minimally a phonological system, a syntactic system, and a semantic system. Vygotsky2 has shown how the speech function and the thought function have two separate origins in the developing infant, speech having its roots in babbling and emoting through sound, and thought deriving from problem solving and the use of tools. Vygotsky concludes that apes a r e capable of both types of behavior, but that only human beings learn to fuse the two separate functions into a single use, i.e., that combination of vocalizing and thinking which leads to the creation of symbolic language and eventually to the formation of concepts. Vygotsky shows experimentally how the child's thinking develops from (a) an initial primitive mental organization of the environment into "heaps" o r unorganized congeries through (b) several different types of thinking in complexes (still a primitive type of thinking) until it reaches in about the twelfth year of the child's life the final stage (c) where abstract concepts a r e understood and used.