Characteristics & Language Development Stages in Children

Characteristics of Young Learners

Young learners have distinct characteristics that influence their learning process:

• Short attention and concentration span
• Weak memory
• Very active and dynamic
• Respond to praise
• Imaginative but have difficulties distinguishing between reality and imagination
• Enjoy learning through games
• Like rewards and prizes
• Love imitating, playing with sounds, and repeating things
• Love working in groups
• Competitive
• Not shy, but sometimes embarrassed in front of unknown people
• Acquire language through hearing it
• Barely have background knowledge of the world
• Don’t have literacy and numeracy skills (they start learning it at school)
• Don’t have a clear motivation

Development of Language Stages

First Language Acquisition

1. Pre-Linguistic Stages (0-6 months): Cries and whimpers.
2. Linguistic Stages:
   • Babbling Stage (around the sixth month): First human sounds. They need auditory input. Examples: [p], [b], [m], [d].
   • Holophrastic Stage (around 1 year): Children use one word to express a sentence. E.g., "doggie" (there is a dog there).
   • Two-Word Stage: Two-word utterances without any syntactic or morphological markers such as tense, inflection, or person. E.g., "Daddy out" (my dad is out).
   • Telegraphic Stage to Infinity: Children make sentences and become aware of some principles of sentence formation, but function words such as prepositions, articles, or auxiliary verbs are missing. E.g., "No sit here" (don’t sit here) or "Daddy build house" (daddy is building a house).
   • Last Stage: Little by little, children gradually acquire more and more language such as prepositions, derivational morphemes, in a predictable order, the first of which is –ing.

Second Language Acquisition

The same process, but it is more difficult because:

1. Children already know a language to communicate.
2. They aren’t usually surrounded by the second language.
3. The Critical Period Hypothesis: The younger you are, the better to acquire a language. After puberty, it is not possible to acquire a language perfectly, but we still can learn it. Acquisition implies native-like mastery in:

• Pronunciation
• Grammar
• Lexis