First Language Acquisition

Throughout history, innovative educators have looked to L1 acquisition for inspiration for teaching a second language. A good place to start is evolutionary biology, which posits that we use our primary biological skills of watching and listening to learn our first language. However, we learn second languages in school mostly through our secondary biological skills of reading and writing and learning is much less successful. Two of the most well-known explanations of child language development are Jean Piaget’s Constructivism and Lev Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory. Constructivism posits that children learn implicitly by interacting with their environment. Sociocultural Theory posits that children learn explicitly in the Zone of Proximal Development with the help of a More Knowledgeable Other. Sociocultural Theory is often co-opted by communicative language teachers as a rationale for pairwork and groupwork. Language learners negotiate meaning and their interlocutors correct their language forms. However, research shows that the vast majority of language is not explicitly taught. A more recent theory, Michael Tomasello’s Social-Pragmatic Theory, posits that children read the intentions of their interlocutors, and then use domain-general learning skills such as imitation, association, categorization, analogy, abstraction, and schematization to learn language.