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A child's most complex and remarkable accomplishment is perhaps the acquisition of language. Language learning is crucial for a child since it serves various functions. It is a main mode of communication of information, intentions, thoughts and feelings and also it helps to organize one's ideas and think systematically. Hence, it is basic to all cognitive processes like thinking, memory, reasoning and problem solving. Later on it also helps in the child's scholastic performance in all subjects.
A child's language evolves at an incredible rate from babbling to one word communication to complex sentences. A child’s language acquisition is a social communicative competence, i.e, it is the ability of the child to effectively communicate an intended message to others. A child’s use of language involves symbols. Children start using symbols for words by the age of 2, to understand the things they represent and they become competent speakers of their native language by the age of 5.
The common explanations or beliefs about child’s language acquisition are
Through Reinforcement: The child learns the language when he or she is reinforced or encouraged for it. Some theorists believe that during the babbling period, infants utter sounds either spontaneously, randomly or through imitation. At that time their parents and others reinforce certain sounds that resemble adult speech by paying attention and praise. These sounds become the dominant sounds in the child’s vocabulary. Whenever the child is asked to utter a word or utters that matches the adult's sounds he is rewarded by attention or praise. Hence the child learns to discriminate matched sounds from unmatched sounds and tries to match his utterances to that of the adult's. Therefore to learn language skills effectively praise and encouragement must be given to the child at all stages to help him in shaping his language .
Through imitation: Another common belief is that a child learns the language through imitation. That means he learns through observation and imitation of others’ (mostly parents) behaviour around him. That is the reason why Telugu children learn Telugu, Tamil children learn Tamil, Japanese children learn Japanese and so on, since he hears the respective languages being spoken all around him. Hence parents and teachers should act as good role models for the child to imitate.
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