Language aquisition

After reading the Wikipedia article on language acquisition, I went out Friday night with it in the back of my mind. I ended up discussing the matter with a friend of mine. He had limited knowledge of reading and language acquisition, but had theories nonetheless. I told him about Noam Chomsky's theory that children are born with the innate ability to acquire language, which he agreed with. We ended up discussing that oral language is innate and a natural characteristic of being human, like having opposable thumbs. Reading, on the other hand, is skill that we evolved into acquiring, since systems of writing were "invented" far after our hominid ancestors were communicating orally. Reading has to be taught (beyond the stage of word recognition, anyway), and if someone fails to learn it, they can still communicate fluently.

This brings me to the third article "Mama teached me to talk." While children have the innate ability to pick and use the most meaningful words when just beginning to speak (see the example "daddy go" instead of "daddy is going"), they still learn to speak by modeling adult language. Reading must be somewhat similar. I remember the hours I spent with my mother, her reading books to me like "Are you my Mother," "Harry the Dirty Dog," and my favorite, "Never talk to Strangers" (which may or may not have crippled me socially- but hey, I was never kidnapped!) I recall listening to the rise and fall of her voice and struggling to make sense of the groups of letters on the page. I also remember sitting next to my father holding up the newspaper and pretending to read. In retrospect, I was beginning to learn to read by watching and copying my parents.

Ciaran O'Riodan's site also brought back memories. There was a time when I wanted nothing more than to speak, curse, breath, eat and dream in Italian. I took courses here, none of which helped all that much. I moved to Florence to immerse myself in the language, and at the same time I took Italian language courses. I stayed for four months and at the end, I was just starting to be able to take part in conversations. I moved home, and lost it all at once.

Therefore, the difficulty of "second language acquisition" to me only serves to emphasize that true, easy, language acquisition does happen only in childhood. When adults to endeavor to learn a second language, we just flounder in trying to bend our minds to absorb something that used to come as easily and naturally as learning to chew and swallow.

Yet, I every day I spend reading text, I become a better reader, just as I did when I was a child.