Essay
AQA A LEVEL ENG LANG CLA ANSWER
- Module
- Child language
- Institution
- AQA
An example answer from the child language acquisition section of English Language AQA A level paper 1. Was marked by my teacher and scored an A*.
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There are many arguments as to how children learn and develop their language. Some agree with thestatement that the stimulus of contexts has a significant influence on children's development of
language, whereas some people see this as meaningless and playing no part.
Social interactionists would agree with this statement as they see different routine activities as
stimulating a child's language growth. Bruner argues children have a language acquisition support
system (LASS) where the routine activities children share with their caregiver acts as scaffolding to
support children and give them different contexts for wider development. In this extract, Erin and her
Mum are pretending to plant a garden, the Mum is seen to use what Cazden calls sequential
scaffolding. The Mum does this by supporting Erin’s imagination on how seeds should be planted,
Erin’s Mum states “I’ll plant the seeds if you water them,” and then uses the interrogative, which is
vertical scaffolding, “what are you doing?”. Erin replies to this with “patting the water in”, this shows
how in the context of pretending to water plants paired with her Mum’s support, Erin is able to use the
dynamic verb “patting” to describe what she’s doing. This means in future cases, Erin’s language in
this context will be more developed and she will be knowledgeable on the types of words needing to
be used. However, the sequential scaffolding does not seem to be useful in the fact Erin begins to dig
up the plants, and when her Mum uses the mitigated imperative “shall we leave them to grow”, Erin
replies with the minor sentence “no”. This shows how perhaps the contexts are not strong enough to
override children’s impulses and wants so despite the caregiver supporting Erin in this routine activity
of play, Erin, as a child, is selfish and will do what suits her own needs. As mentioned before, the
mitigated imperative is a feature of child directed speech, which Snow uses to define how adults
speak to children to guide their language. However, in this case it was unsuccessful as Erin rejected
the idea. Child directed speech is also used when Erin’s mum elongates ‘ouch’ to “ouchy”, to use it as
an adjective. This shows how children's language is affected by different contexts as child directed
speech often means changing words word classes to expand their meaning and so the children can
understand it. Social interactionists would agree with this statement that contexts such as play and
imagination with caregivers supports children's language development.
Behaviourists would also agree with this statement, as they believe input from caregivers is crucial to
children's language development. Skinner uses the idea of reinforcement to say children learn
through being positively reinforced by praise to repeat correct language, or negatively reinforced by
correction, to avoid using incorrect language. When Erin uses the interrogative “Can I have some?”
To refer to seeds, Erin’s Mum replies with the relative pronoun “what” to negatively reinforce Erin’s
language in order to make her be more specific. However, this is ineffective as Erin replies with the
common concrete noun “bucket”, ignoring her Mum. Also, Erin's Mum is not seen to correct Erin’s
incorrect statement of “I hurted it”. This shows how despite behaviourists agreeing with the statement
that children need contexts of praise and punishment to learn, it may actually not be effective.
Behaviourists are also criticised for attempting to generalise findings from studies using rats to the
complex behaviour of humans.
Cognitivists believe that language acquisition in children is part of a wider development and children
need to understand concepts before they can use language. This partly agrees with the statement as
the more exposed children are to different concepts such as time and seriation the more their
language will develop. This can be shown when Erin uses the declarative “I didn’t do it”, this indicates
Erin does not understand the concept of time. The auxiliary “didn’t” is in the past tense which is
correct, however this has subsequently influenced the main verb “do” to become the incorrect past
tense form “did”. Erin should have used the present tense verb “do”, this indicates to cognitivists she
is beginning to develop an understanding of time but is not able to apply it to language. Erin also
seems to have a lack of understanding of death and how seeds grow. Vygotsky would refer to her
Mum as a more knowledgeable other who understands that “flowers won’t grow”, if they are dug up.
Erin’s Mum is seen to attempt to explain this to Erin yet Erin insists on moving the seeds and digging
them up, demonstrating her zone of proximal development, meaning the difference of the concepts
she understands on her own and her understanding when with her MKO. This could also indicate her
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