Language Acquistion

The acquisition of language is a silent feat for language. Most of us have no recollection of the acquisition of our initial language. It helps if we accept that students will not necessarily enter the classroom knowing how to communicate with their peers. Effective instruction in language and the content areas begins with thoughtful organization and planning. The best opportunities for language development occur when most but not all, of the language is familiar.

"In many respects, the feat is essentially accomplished by the time children are three years old". W to read in the native Language is not an option, so teachers of English Language Learners must confront the dual challenge of helping children learn to read and write English while learning to speak and understand it.

In many situations teaching students h The study of language has a long and rich history, extending over thousands of years, and will most likely be studied for thousands more to come. Children have a fundamental problem to solve at the very start of language: how to break up the stream of speech into meaningful units. In the following paper I will review development of language and language structure, language acquisition theories and theorists, age of acquisition, and second language acquisition.

"It is common to talk of 'milestones' in relation to child development in general, but this metaphor does not work as precisely for the development of language. Sounds, grammar, vocabulary, and social linguistic skills are emerging simultaneously but at different rates, and significant progress can be made on several fronts in a matter of days. There are also many individual differences in the order of acquisition of specific features of language which need to be taken into account. However, most children appear to follow what appears to be counterproductive to dissect language in the same way that biology students might dissect a frog" (Maurice 1987, p. 9)".

People who speak different languages should communicate, by using various methods that are open to them, the obvious being second-language learning and teaching. While it is not possible to cover all the topics on Second Language Acquisition, there are a many different ideas that could help. The term acquisition is ideal to learning, for reasons that learning has a tendency to be used by psychologists in a technical sense. Although many educators may recognize techniques in order to achieve high academic outcomes with English language learners (ELLs), many also need help designing the classroom environment so that neither language acquisition nor content literacy learning is impeded by linguistic obstacles (Wong Fillmore & Snow, 2000). ELLs do not come to us as blank slates. Difficulties ELLs experience may not be a matter of lack of content knowledge, but rather a lack of linguistic complexity in English