LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Languages are learned mainly through Imitation

“Languages are learned mainly through Imitation”

Introduction

The process of learning is much more creative and sophisticated than this opinion or fact about teaching and learning languages assumes. If a child sees his father turning on the light using his head instead of his hand, will he/she assume that this is the only way to turn on the light? If children learn purely by imitating others, then this is certainly the case. However, the inherent fallacy in this assumption that children learns mainly through imitation can be proved wrong when we see children routinely saying things with which they are not familiar and have never heard or encountered them before, such as improvising cute and brilliant answers we hear from them which simply indicates that they do not learn mainly through imitating what they see and hear (Young, et al., 2011, pp. 356-360).

Creativity and imagination that are inherent in human nature also comes into play and contributes considerably in language learning and acquisition, especially in early childhood developmental stage. Children unconsciously observe, see and hear things which make up their memory to which they refer to whenever they come across with the same phenomenon they have encountered before or the phenomenon which triggers those memory due to its close-relatedness in some aspects. However, children do not always use that memory or information in the same context in which they receive information which goes into their short or long term memory. This give rise to their imagination and creativity which they put into the situation and as a result, receive appreciation from parents or other family members and unconsciously, and those words and sentences becomes a part of the vocabulary of their primary language or mother tongue.

Discussion

Children are shown the ways to do things mainly by their parents or the person who take care of them such as babysitter or nanny. If the learning takes place in them mainly through imitation, they will act like a robot that takes command and do exactly what it is told to do. On the other hand, children see and observe things and use them out of the context. For instance, in a research study that took place in an elementary school in Western Australia, children were shown how to drink water from a running stream by getting their respective glasses under it and let the water pour into their glasses and then drink it. a native Australian child was taught to do it and he imitated or showed it to his classmates that consisted of other students who were native Australians and immigrants whose parents immigrated to Australia for seizing better economic opportunities. Each of his classmates who were made to observe him successfully imitated him by getting the water into his/her glass from a running stream. Now what researchers did, they took the glass from the hands of student and then asked them to drink the water from running stream. Researchers also made sure that other children do not ...