#TheStruggleIsRealInL2Learning (Language Acquisition: Philippines)

By Czarmaine Belmonte Ledina

Acquisition of language is a long process of trial and error built from confidence and

reinforcement. During the formative years, when a child starts to develop his senses, and recognize

patterns of the sound that people or the environment produce, he also become aware of the

possibility of imitating these sounds and subconsciously reproducing them.

The ability of speech is one of the major reasons why humans are separated from other

beings, aside from our mental abilities to reason. This ability is remarkable in itself. What makes

it even more remarkable is that researchers are finding evidence for mastery of this complex skill

in increasingly younger children. Infants as young as 12 months are reported to have sensitivity to

the grammar needed to understand causative sentences (who did what to whom; e.g. the bunny

pushed the frog (Rowland & Noble, 2010).

One of the earliest scientific explanations of language acquisition was provided by Skinner

(1957). As one of the pioneers of behaviorism, he accounted for language development by means

of environmental influence.

Skinner argued that children learn language based on behaviorist reinforcement principles

by associating words with meanings. Correct utterances are positively reinforced when the child

realizes the communicative value of words and phrases. Various studies, principles and approaches

have been made to understand further how the human speech works. Assumptions have been made

that as transfer of messages occur, it may elicit different effects to the students’ metacognitive

process of producing words. However, it is also evident that interferences may hinder language

acquisition.
 As great as it can be, language acquisition may have been available for everyone’s expense

but not everyone can develop these to the fullest extent. There were millions of cases all throughout

the world on a child’s underdevelopment in language use. Most of these are results of socio-

cultural factors, some are from physiological, and very minimal of these accounts have been caused

by extreme environmental factors.

From the assumption that language acquisition can indeed be hindered, it is imperative that

causes for these cases should be studied and taken into consideration. According to studies, since

language can be learned, unlearned and relearned, acknowledging and recognizing L2 learners

who are in one of these cases must be done immediately because diagnosis and treatment for these

is now available and can be accessible. There are many cases of such all over the country. L2

learners are basically having difficulties in the field of language acquisition for many varying

factors that are mentioned, however, learners are not the only ones who should be aware of these.

Accepting its existence among the academe here in the country must be a priority for institutions

to conduct a mass prognosis of its effect on the further development of the students not only in the

field of language but in all aspects of education, may it be in the core subjects, reading, writing,

and arithmetic, but as well with other subject areas.

References:

https://chomsky.info
http://cogprints.org/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
https://vkim22.wordpress.com/
http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/
http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/
http://hhd.psu.edu/