LANGUAGE+ACQUISITION+PROCESS

VIGOTSKY´S THEORIES
 About Vigotsky´s theries we know:

**Sccafolding**
 * ** Mediators **
 * ** Language **
 * ** Shared activity **

**Zone Proximal Development (ZPD):** refers to the distance between what a child can do with assistance and what the child can accomplish without assistance. During the learning process, a child begins by basically copying an adult's example; the child is initially unable to achieve a given task without assistance.

However the child is, at that time, capable of achieving more complex tasks with adult assistance. The difference between these two accomplishments is called the Zone of Proximal Development.

A child's ZPD is constantly changing as he or she masters increasingly challenging tasks with time.

In Education, consideration of the concept of ZPD is useful because it reminds teachers of how children can be stretched to reach higher level learning goals with adult guidance and support.

Everybody build their own knowledge.

As Vigotsky said there are some **different kinds of language** in our lives:


 * **Public speech:** exchange between two or more people.
 * **Private speech:** talk to themselves repeating instructions. We need to sound the language.
 * **Inner language:** Instructions inside their minds without speaking it at loud.
 * ** Verbal thought **: The highest level of language (in Vigotsky´s theory).

Perhaps Vygotsky's most important contribution concerns the inter-relationship of language development and thought. This concept, explored in Vygotsky's book Thought and Language, (alternative translation: Thinking and Speaking) establishes the explicit and profound connection between speech (both silent inner speech and oral language), and the development of mental concepts and cognitive awareness. It should be noted that Vygotsky described inner speech as being qualitatively different from normal (external) speech. Although Vygotsky believed inner speech developed from external speech via a gradual process of internalization, with younger children only really able to "think out loud," he claimed that in its mature form inner speech would be unintelligible to anyone except the thinker, and would not resemble spoken language as we know it (in particular, being greatly compressed). Hence, thought itself develops socially.

An infant learns the meaning of signs through interaction with its main care-givers, e.g., pointing, cries, and gurgles can express what is wanted. How verbal sounds can be used to conduct social interaction is learned through this activity, and the child begins to utilize, build, and develop this faculty, e.g., using names for objects, etc. Language starts as a tool external to the child used for social interaction. The child guides personal behavior by using this tool in a kind of self-talk or "thinking out loud." Initially, self-talk is very much a tool of social interaction and it tapers to negligible levels when the child is alone or with deaf children. Gradually self-talk is used more as a tool for self-directed and self-regulating behavior. Then, because speaking has been appropriated and internalized, self-talk is no longer present around the time the child starts school. Self-talk "develops along a rising not a declining, curve; it goes through an evolution, not an involution. In the end, it becomes inner speech" (Vygotsky, 1987, pg 57). Inner speech develops through its differentiation from social speech.

Speaking has thus developed along two lines, the line of social communication and the line of inner speech, by which the child mediates and regulates their activity through their thoughts which in turn are mediated by the semiotics (the meaningful signs) of inner speech. This is not to say that thinking cannot take place without language, but rather that it is mediated by it and thus develops to a much higher level of sophistication. Just as the birthday cake as a sign provides much deeper meaning than its physical properties allow, inner speech as signs provides much deeper meaning than the lower psychological functions would otherwise allow.

Inner speech is not comparable in form to external speech. External speech is the process of turning thought into words. Inner speech is the opposite; it is the conversion of speech into inward thought. Inner speech for example contains predicates only. Subjects are superfluous. Words too are used much more economically. One word in inner speech may be so replete with sense to the individual that it would take many words to express it in external speech.

Language helps children to organize their minds and to be independent. In the same way, music helps children to organize their language because it uses the rhythm.

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** GARDNER´S THEORY **
Howard Gardner's work around multiple intelligences has had a profound impact on thinking and practice in education - especially in the United States. Here we explore the theory of multiple intelligences; why it has found a ready audience amongst educationalists; and some of the issues around its conceptualization and realization.

Howard Gardner viewed intelligence as 'the capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural setting' (Gardner & Hatch, 1989). He reviewed the literature using eight criteria or 'signs' of an intelligence: > Potential isolation by brain damage.The existence of idiots savants, prodigies and other exceptional individuals. > An identifiable core operation or set of operations. > A distinctive development history, along with a definable set of 'end-state' performances. > An evolutionary history and evolutionary plausibility. > Support from experimental psychological tasks. > Support from psychometric findings. > Susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system. > Candidates for the title 'an intelligence' had to satisfy a range of these criteria and must include, as a prerequisite, the ability to resolve 'genuine problems or difficulties' within certain cultural settings. Making judgements about this was, however, 'reminiscent more of an artistic judgement than of a scientific a

ssessment'

Howard Gardner initially formulated a list of seven intelligences. His listing was provisional. The first two have been typically valued in schools; the next three are usually associated with the arts; and the final two are what Howard Gardner called 'personal intelligences'


 * **Linguistic intelligence** involves sensitivity to spoken and written language, the ability to learn languages, and the capacity to use language to accomplish certain goals. This intelligence includes the ability to effectively use language to express oneself rhetorically or poetically; and language as a means to remember information. Writers, poets, lawyers and speakers are among those that Howard Gardner sees as having high linguistic intelligence.
 * **Logical-mathematical intelligence** consists of the capacity to analyze problems logically, carry out mathematical operations, and investigate issues scientifically. In Howard Gardner's words, it entails the ability to detect patterns, reason deductively and think logically. This intelligence is most often associated with scientific and mathematical thinking.
 * **Musical intelligence** involves skill in the performance, composition, and appreciation of musical patterns. It encompasses the capacity to recognize and compose musical pitches, tones, and rhythms. According to Howard Gardner musical intelligence runs in an almost structural parallel to linguistic intelligence.
 * **Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence** entails the potential of using one's whole body or parts of the body to solve problems. It is the ability to use mental abilities to coordinate bodily movements. Howard Gardner sees mental and physical activity as related.
 * **Spatial intelligence** involves the potential to recognize and use the patterns of wide space and more confined areas.
 * **Interpersonal intelligence** is concerned with the capacity to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people. It allows people to work effectively with others. Educators, salespeople, religious and political leaders and counsellors all need a well-developed interpersonal intelligence.
 * **Intrapersonal intelligence** entails the capacity to understand oneself, to appreciate one's feelings, fears and motivations. In Howard Gardner's view it involves having an effective working model of ourselves, and to be able to use such information to regulate our lives.

In //Frames of Mind// Howard Gardner treated the personal intelligences 'as a piece'. Because of their close association in most cultures, they are often linked together. However, he still argues that it makes sense to think of two forms of personal intelligence. Gardner claimed that the seven intelligences rarely operate independently. They are used at the same time and tend to complement each other as people develop skills or solve problems.

Since Howard Gardner's original listing of the intelligences in //Frames of Mind// (1983) there has been a great deal of discussion as to other possible candidates for inclusion (or candidates for exclusion). Subsequent research and reflection by Howard Gardner and his colleagues has looked to three particular possibilities: a naturalist intelligence, a spiritual intelligence and an existential intelligence. He has concluded that the first of these 'merits addition to the list of the original seven intelligences'

The case for inclusion of naturalist intelligence appears pretty strai
 * **Naturalist intelligence** enables human beings to recognize, categorize and draw upon certain features of the environment. It 'combines a description of the core ability with a characterization of the role that many cultures value'.

ghtforward, the position with regard to **spiritual intelligence** is far more complex. According to Howard Gardner there are problems, for example, around the 'content' of spiritual intelligence, its privileged but unsubstantiated claims with regard to truth value, 'and the need for it to be partially identified through its effect on other people'.

**OTHER THEORIES (NOAH CHOMSKY AND JEROME BRUNER)**
Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best known and the most influential linguist of the second half of the Twentieth Century. He has made a number of strong claims about language : in particular, he suggests that language is an innate faculty - that is to say that we are born with a set of rules about language in our heads which he refers to as the 'Universal Grammar'. The universal grammar is the basis upon which all human languages build. If a Martian linguist were to visit Earth, he would deduce from the evidence that there was only one language, with a number of local variants. Chomsky gives a number of reasons why this should be so. Among the most important of these reasons is the ease with which children acquire their mother tongue. He claims that it would be little short of a miracle if children learnt their language in the same way that they learn mathematics or how to ride a bicycle. This, he says, is because:
 * Children are exposed to very little correctly formed language. When people speak, they constantly interrupt themselves, change their minds, make slips of the tongue and so on. Yet children manage to learn their language all the same. This claim is usually referred to as the Argument from Poverty of the Stimulus.
 * Children do not simply copy the language that they hear around them. They deduce rules from it, which they can then use to produce sentences that they have never heard before. They do not learn a repertoire of phrases and sayings, as the behaviourists believe, but a grammar that generates an infinity of new sentences.

Children are born, then, with the Universal Grammar wired into their brains. This grammar offers a certain limited number of possibilities - for example, over the word order of a typical sentence.

Let us look closely at this fourth objection. The psychologist, Jerome Bruner, holds that while there very well may be, as Chomsky suggests, a Language Acquisition Device, or LAD, there must also be a Language Acquisition Support System, or LASS. He is referring to the family and entourage of the child.

If we watch closely the way a child interacts with the adults around her, we will see that they constantly provide opportunities for her to acquire her mother - tongue. Mother or father provide ritualised scenarios - the ceremony of having a bath, eating a meal, getting dressed, or playing a game - in which the phases of interaction are rapidly recognised and predicted by the infant.

It is within such clear and emotionally charged contexts that the child first becomes aware of the way in which language is used. The utterances of the mother or father are themselves ritualised, and accompany the activity in predictable, and comprehensible ways. Gradually, the child moves from a passive position to an active one, taking over the movements of the caretaker, and, eventually, the language as well.

Bruner cites the example of a well-known childhood game, in which the mother, or other caretaker, disappears and then reappears. Through this ritual, which at first may be accompanied by simple noises, or 'Bye-bye .... Hello', and later by lengthier commentaries, the child is both learning about separation and return and being offered a context within which language, charged with emotive content, may be acquired. It is this reciprocal, and affective nature of language that Chomsky appears to leave out of his hypotheses.

Bruner's conception of the way children learn language is taken a little further by John Macnamara, who holds that children, rather than having an in-built language device, have an innate capacity to read meaning into social situations. It is this capacity that makes them capable of understanding language, and therefore learning it with ease, rather than an LAD.