首页
登录
职称英语
Learning a languageWhen Do We Learn a Language? Ch
Learning a languageWhen Do We Learn a Language? Ch
游客
2023-07-16
34
管理
问题
Learning a language
When Do We Learn a Language?
Children begin learning languages at birth (infants pay attention to their parents’ voices, as opposed to random noises or even other languages), and haven’t really mastered it subtleties before the age of ten years. Indeed. we never really stop learning our language. This isn’t exactly the sort of behavior (like foals walking an hour after birth) that we call ’instinct’ in animals.
Do We learn When We Don’t Have to?
But at least it’s effortless, isn’t it? Well, no, as we can see when children have a choice of languages to learn. What’s found is that, to be frank, children don’t learn a language if they can get away with not learning it.
Many an immigrant family in the U.S. intends to teach their child their native language; and for the first few years il goes swimmingly so much so that the parents worry that the child won’t learn English. Then the child goes to school, picks up English, and within a few years the worry is reversed: the child still understands his parents, but responds in English. Eventually the parents may give up, and the home language becomes English.
People’s Influence
A child is likely to end up as a fluent speaker of a language only if there are significant people in her life who speak it: a nanny who only speaks Spanish, a relative who doesn’t speak English, etc. Once a child discovers that his parents understand English perfectly well, he’s likely to give up on the home language, even in the face of strong disapproval from the parents.
It’s a myth that children learn to speak mainly from their parents. They don’t: they learn mostly from their peers. This is most easily seen among children of immigrants, whether they come from differing language backgrounds or merely different dialect areas: the children invariably come to speak the dialect of their neighborhood and school, not that of their parents. (I found a neat example of this in my college’s alumni magazine: A liberal family in Mississippi sent their daughter to the public schools, which except for her were all black. She grew up speaking fluent African-American Vernacular English. )
Do We Need Grammar?
Supporters of the ’language instinct’ make much of the fact that children learn to speak without formal instruction --- indeed, they notoriously ignore explicit corrections.
Very little of what we learn is through formal instruction. Children aren’t schooled in video games, either, yet they pick them up with the same seeming ease.
The apparent effortlessness is largely an illusion caused by psychological distance. We just don’t remember how hard it was to learn language. (In fact, there’s some studies suggesting that memory is tied to language, so that we can’t remember the language learning process. ) The perception of effortlessness should be balanced, anyway, by the universal amusement (which some cartoonists have been mining for nearly half a century) over children’s language mistakes.
Do Children Learn Faster?
One may fall back on the position that languages may be hard for children to learn, but at least they do it better than adults. This, however, turns out to be surprisingly difficult to prove. Singleton examined hundreds of studies, and found them resoundingly ambiguous. Quite a few studies, in fact, find that adult learners progress faster than children. Even in phonetics, sometimes tile last stronghold of the kids-learn-free position, there are studies finding that adults are better at recognizing and producing foreign sounds.
Now, I think Singleton misses a key point in understanding this discrepancy: the studies he reviews compare children vs. adults who are learning languages. That’s quite reasonable, and indeed it’s hard to imagine an alternative approach, but the two groups are not really comparable! All children have to learn at least one language; but few adults do. So the studies compare the situation of all children with that of the minority of adults motivated to formally learn other languages.
Why?
Why do children learn languages well, when even adults who want to learn them have trouble with them? Innate abilities aside, children have a number of powerful advantages:
They can devote almost their full time to it. Adults consider half an hour’s study a day to be onerous.
Their motivation is intense. Adults rarely have to spend much of their time in the company of people they need to talk to but can’t children can get very little of what they want without learning language(s).
Their peers are nastier. Embarrassment is a prime motivating factor for human beings (I owe this insight to Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind, but it was most memorably expressed by David Berlinski (in Black Mischief, p. 129), who noted that of all emotions, from rage to depression to first love, only embarrassment can recur, decades later, with its full original intensity). Dealing with a French waiter is nothing compared with the vicious reception in store for a child who speaks funny.
If adults could be placed in a similar situation, they might well learn languages as readily as children. The closest such situation is cross- cultural marriage. And indeed, this works quite well. My wife, for instance, a native Spanish speaker who came here in her late 20s, has learned exceptional English, since we speak it at home. By contrast, some of her Spanish-speaking friends of the same age, married to other Spanish speakers, speak English haltingly and with a strong accent. [br] Three advantages that children have over adults in language learning include: ______ , and ______.
选项
答案
time,motivation,embarrassment
解析
Three advantages that children have over adults in language learning include:_____,_____ and _____.词汇线索为advantages,文章里仅一处列举了儿童学习语言的优势,则答案应该是time,motivation,embarrassment。
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/2841221.html
相关试题推荐
Sharingonline,associalmediaenthusiastsarelearning,canhaveallsorts
[originaltext]FewwordsintheEnglishlanguagehavesuchaspecialmeaning
[originaltext]FewwordsintheEnglishlanguagehavesuchaspecialmeaning
Whilemorepeoplethaneverbeforearelearningforeignlanguagesinpublic
Whilemorepeoplethaneverbeforearelearningforeignlanguagesinpublic
Whilemorepeoplethaneverbeforearelearningforeignlanguagesinpublic
Whilemorepeoplethaneverbeforearelearningforeignlanguagesinpublic
Whilemorepeoplethaneverbeforearelearningforeignlanguagesinpublic
Whilemorepeoplethaneverbeforearelearningforeignlanguagesinpublic
Whilemorepeoplethaneverbeforearelearningforeignlanguagesinpublic
随机试题
[originaltext]W:Whereareyougoingtospendyourholidaythisyear?George?M
建设中国特色社会主义法治体系,建设社会主义法治国家是( )A.全面深化经济体
甲公司与乙公司约定:为满足甲公司开发住宅小区观景的需要,甲公司向乙公司支付100
根据《机电产品采购国际竞争性招标文件》,关于交付设备检验的说法,正确的是( )。
患者,男,70岁。有慢性咳嗽咳痰史20年,近1年来呼吸困难逐渐加重,发绀,伴双下
2021年4月,我国本外币贷款余额187.85万亿元,同比增长12%;人民币贷款
肺痿虚热证的治疗主方是A.沙参麦冬汤 B.百合固金汤 C.麦门冬汤 D.月
根据《企业投资项目核准和备案管理条例》规定,对()等项目,实行核准管理。
工程网络计划费用优化的基本思路是,在网络计划中,当有多条关键线路时,应通过不断
(2014年真题)关于施工中一般特种作业人员应具备条件的说法,正确的是()。A
最新回复
(
0
)