The Social Context of Early Child Second Language Acquisition (SLA)

This article addresses the material on language acquisition in a social context and focuses on the gradual shift in the child's use of words, from labeling specific and often single referents to the use of words for signifying categories of objects, actions, or attributes. The aims of this study are to search and explore the information whether the social context of second language acquisition occurred and whether it gives consequences toward cognitive development of the children. It can be seen from the results of this study that the rate and breadth of this shift varies from one social context to another, and that it has differential consequences for cognitive development dependent on the social context in which it occurs. The crucial significance of actively stimulating language growth in the classroom, especially by teachers of the socially disadvantaged, is stressed.


Introduction
Children, surrounded by a sea of words, sequentially and selectively acquires the nouns, verbs, and phrases of their language as well as the gestures, intonations and dialect of those with whom he interacts. The rate and breadth of this complex acquisition is proportional to the scope of their verbal interactions with those charged with their care.
Language is so pervasive in human behavior that the process of language acquisition is often taken for granted. A comprehensive treatment of this process is obviously beyond the scope of this paper. There are too many gaps in our current knowledge to make such an attempt feasible.
In consideration of such limitations, therefore, this paper will focus upon social conditions that affect language acquisition. More specifically, it ZLOO IRFXV XSRQ WKH JUDGXDO VKLIW LQ WKH FKLOG ¶V XVH RI ZRUGV IURP ODEHOLQJ specific and often single referents to the use of words for signifying categories of objects, actions, or attributes. The hypothesis advanced here is that the rate and breadth of this shift varies from one social context to another, and that it has differential consequences for cognitive development dependent on the social context in which it occurs. This hypothesis will be examined and discussed chiefly in terms of the pertinent literature, with occasional reference to empirical studies.
The need to modify the cognitive growth patterns of young childrenparticularly of those children who live in the slum areas of our major cities-has added new impetus to the search for a clarification of the relationship between language and thought. It is our intention to examine aspects of word acquisition as related to conceptual development of verbal mediation.
The literature on the development of language, structured largely in terms of maturational theory and based on the congruent findings of careful LQYHVWLJDWRUV VSHFLILHV DQ DSSUR[LPDWH VHTXHQFH DQG WLPHWDEOH RI FKLOGUHQ ¶V verbal development. The focus of many of these studies has been on the rate of language acquisition, the unit studied being the number of different words elicited from the young child in a standard setting. Here, the social environment is viewed either as a hampering or as enhancing medium in which the development of speech occurs, and the basic process of growth is considered neurophysiologically determined.
Although these studies have given us more facts about the increase of WKH FKLOG ¶V DFWLYH YRFDEXODU\ WKH\ develop within the context of modern psychological theories such as those of Hebb and Hunt (1992). Similarities in the quantitative features of overt behavior (i.e., the size of spoken vocabulary) are assumed, by normatively oriented researchers, to be behaviors functionally equivalent for groups of children differing in background. However, studies limited to word counting afford little insight into the dynamic relationship between social experience and language. While many of these investigators (Gesell & Templin: 1997) may be aware that the content of speech is culturally determined, too often their writings have not reflected this awareness.
In contradistinction to the maturational approach to language development as exemplified by the investigators meQWLRQHG DERYH 2VJRRG ¶V model of language conceptualizes words as abbreviated motor behavior (Osgood: 1999) .While his approach permits a simplified description of the complex behavior of language, it focuses on variables which would appear to be tangential to language acquisition. More importantly, motor learning requires little social interaction, but language cannot be acquired in an interpersonal vacuum.
On the other hand, the theoretical writings of Bernstein (1990), and the recently translated book of Vygotsky (2000), present approaches which are useful in the study of language acquisition in a social context. In his writings, Berstein (1990) emphasized status as a major social determinant of speech patterns within social groups. More centrally related to the approach taken in this paper are hypotheses advanced by Vygotsky (1970)

The Acquisition of Label
Social interaction with verbally mature individuals, which affects

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responses. Some findings have illustrated the effects of social environment on vocalization in children as young as six month (Brodbeck and Irwin, 1996).

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the nature of increasing comprehension of speech of those around him. By age two, a child has developed speaking vocabulary, which may range from 3 to 300 words. In the next two years, the child shifts from using words exclusively as labels with singles referents to the use of words, which have multiple referents (rudimentary categories).
This process of acquiring and enlarging the use of labels can be sketched in general terms. At an elementary stage of language acquisition, before first birthday, the child perceives a word as being one of a multitude of attributes of an object (shape, weight, color, and name). By the repeated association of seeing and touching the object, and hearing the name of the object, the child acquires a bond between word and referent. Usually, the source of auditory stimulation is the mother. In addition, children engage in communicative interaction with siblings, relatives, other children, teachers and neighbors. The role of more impersonal sources of communication, e.g.,

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acquisition of words. For example, simple learning is well understood by advertisers. The highly predictable association between the picture of the Coca Cola bottle and its name from the TV sound track is a fact of great utility in label acquisition of words.
Put on a more technical level, in describing language acquisition, some researchers rely on the conditioning paradigm. However, such a model presents certain difficulties in that it emphasizes a one-to-one relationship between stimulus and response. In reality, the word to be learned is usually embedded in a sentence (the verbal context) and its referent (the object that is to be paired with the word) is surrounded by a multitude of extraneous features in the environment. Learning labels requires selective attention-the inhibition of irrelevant aspects of the learning environment.
This learning of new verbal responses, particularly by young children, can be facilitated by a relative invariance in the environment. One of the major characteristics of the home, a natural setting for language acquisition, is its intrinsic variability. This is particularly true of lower-class homes that have been described, and transient in their inhabitants than middle-class homes.
Children raised in such lower-class homes participated in the studies reported below.
In spite of the complexities and difficulties involved in the process of ODEHO DFTXLVLWLRQ FKLOGUHQ GR DFTXLUH ZRUGV LQ WKH PLGVW RI WKH ³QRLVH´ RI WKH natural environment. Some accomplish this more readily than others do. The abundance of opportunities for hearing the names of objects while seeing and touching them is such that most two-year-old can understand and use effectively a number of labels.

Receptive Labeling
Children from different social classes vary in their knowledge of words.
Some studies of social class differences have recorded systematic variations in verbal indices of children grouped according to fathers and/or education.
Children from high-in-come, high-status families have been found to speak in longer sentences, more articulately, and with a more varied vocabulary than do their lower-class peers (Templin, 1997 (1991) However, if the lower-class child has to rely upon the frequency of cooccurrence of label and referent to a greater extent than the middle-class child, then, for him, the invariance between word and referent must also be greater.
Yet, the learning of verbs and gerunds by frequency of occurrence instead of by active dialogue is more difficult than is the learning of labels for specific REMHFWV *HUXQGV VXFK DV ³WU\LQJ´ ZHUH IDLOHG QRW EHFDXVH WKH FKLOGUen were deficient in experience with the referent but rather because they had difficulty in fitting the label to the varying forms of action observed and experienced.
This fitting process, which consists of selecting the specific connection between word and referent, occurs more easily when there is a variety of verbal interaction with adults. The middle-class child learns by feedback, by being heard, corrected, and modified-E\ JDLQLQJ ³RSHUDQW FRQWURO´ RYHU KLV KHU social environment by using words that they hear. The child learns by interacting with and adult teacher who plays an active role in simplifying the various components of word-referent relation-ships.
In this discussion, the acquisition of labels has been conceptualized as the result of the interaction of two major variables. One, the stability of the word-referent relationship, refers to the features of the referent and the degree of its invariance within the learning context in the natural environment. The second variable, derived from the frequency and type of verbal interaction during language acquisition, refers to the amount of corrective feedback the child receives while learning a new label, i.e., the consistency with which his speech is listened to, corrected, and modified. This relationship is postulated for words that are abundant in the natural environment of lower class as well as middle-class children-but not for words VXFK DV ³FDERRVH ´ DQG ³DFFLGHQW´ ZKLFK PD\ RFFXU LQIUHTXHQWO\ LQ WKH ORZHUclass setting. Therefore, the postulated interaction rather than experiential rarity may explain more simply the slower rate acquisition of labels and action words by lower-class children.

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shifting and complex referents will be impeded if required adult-child verbal interaction is insufficient or lacking.

The Acquisition of Categories
While the child acquiring new labels he also is gaining additional referents for those labels already in his repertoire. Young children, unskilled in the used of words, often reveal their understanding of the nuances of a label, i.e., the multiplicity of their referents, though non-verbal behavior.

Example from As-Salaam Kindergarten, Bandungan, Semarang, Indonesia
Some examples of the verbalizations of lower-class and middle-class of As-Salaam Kindergarten are given below. (The concept was represented by pictures of four men at work: a policeman, a doctor, a farmer, and a sailor). The examples given above illustrate the general tenor of responses given by the children. The middle-class children tended to produce category labels more often than their lower-class peers who instead were inclined to focus on non-essential attributes. We may say that those children who were successful on this task were those who had developed skills for discovering the crucial, invariant features of objects having the same name. In this paper, the reseracher posit, that while the children gains practice in correctly identifying objects having the same name, and while they develop their knowledge about the hierarchy of category-names, they also develop skills of used in verbal mediation. Again, we ascribe a crucial role in the development of verbal mediation to the availability of adults, who serve as language models, and who participate in an ongoing dialogue with the children.

Lower-class first-graders
Evidence currently available suggests that some children who can be described as proficient in overt language skills, also rely upon covert language-  In our analysis, the child from a lower socio-economic background may experience a deficient amount of verbal interaction. He learns most of his language by means of receptive exposure-by hearing, rather than by the correction of his own active speech. Words acquired with little corrective feedback in a stable learning environment will be the minimum use as mediators, at a later stage of development. In contrast, the child whose language acquisition is characterized by active participation with a more verbally mature individual not only develops greater verbal proficiency-as a result of being listened to and corrected but also is more likely to rely on, and use effectively words as mediators.
Language is a socially-conditLRQHG UHODWLRQVKLS EHWZHQ WKH FKLOG ¶V internal and external worlds. Once able to use words as mediators, the child can effectively change his own social and material reality.

Conclusion
Can educational implications for pre-school programs be drawn from a theoretical statement on language acquisition? Though some of the ideas presented in this paper may be utilized by the early childhood educator, primarily, this treatment of verbal behavior is presented as a model of label acquisition. Ideas developed with in the context of a simplified and abstract treatment of language may have to undergo substantial modification in order to be applied in the classroom. However, some general points related to enrichment can be made, based upon the above discussion.
Certainly, the crucial importance of actively stimulating language growth in the classroom is recognized by teachers of the socially disavantaged.
But the felling of urgency they bring to the task of increasing the verbal repertoire of children sometimes results in a stress on quantitative growth only.
This emphasis on vocabulary expansion is not surprising in light of the maturational approach to language.
If the communicative and cognitive functions are significantly related at the beginning of language acquisition, it becomes important to discover ways for these aspects of language to be maintained interrelatedly in enrichment programs. A mechanical approach to vocabulary building will not produce the desired end of developing useful verbal skills. The teacher should XWLOL]HG VWXGHQW ¶V GHHSO\ SHUVRQDO H[SHULHQFHV DV EDVLF content while imparting the mechanics of letters. Similary, the teacher in the enrichment classroom can discover the interests and concerns of her children by being sensitive to their products. In this case, In an enrichment program combining instruction and research, the researcher and her teacher-colleagues worked with the children.
Each child was asked to re-tell a standard story in front of a tape recorder. In studying the modifications of the story made by each child, much was learned about sequential language as well as about the themes of particular interest to young children raised in low-LQFRPH DUHDV 7KHVH FKLOGUHQ DOVR WROG D ³PDGH XS´ VWRU\ DQG LQ WKHVH IDQWDV\ SURGXFWV WKH\ RIWHQ related events of concern.
Though some of the children spoke with poor articulation and others could not WKLQN XS WKHLU ³RZQ´ VWRU\ PDQ\ FKLOGUHQ LQ WKLV JURXS GLVSOD\HG IRUFHIXOQHVV of style and communicative strength in their descriptions.
As was the researcher purpose, this paper has stressed the acquisition of highly developed linguistic patterns as being crucial to young children.
Because language is both a highly personal and an objectively necessary tool, however, the educator must be wary lest children learn to resent the acquisition of verbal skills. The teaching of words must be carried out with originality, flexibility, and restraint.
In becoming aware of some of the feature underlying label acquisition, the classroom teacher can create a variety of learning contexts built around experience of significance to the children. The teacher who is aware of the importance of verbal dialogue in the shift from labeling to categorizing, can direct learning not only by her own interactions, but, also, by helping children in the classroom to be effective speakers as well as active listeners.