Applied Linguistics Emma Dafouz

A summary of the different theories of child L1 acquisition

Interactionist perspectives/Socio-constructivist views of learning

Major premise: Innatist views of L1 learning cannot explain adequately the complex nature of
human language learning and its dependence on the context/environment. Language learning is
fundamentally a SOCIAL EXPERIENCE.
The infant acquires his cognitive capacities (language being one of them) through interaction
with the environment (the social context; family, peers, caregivers, etc). The child needs to be
flexible in order to deal with a changing environment.
Important figure: Jean Piaget. According to Piaget, there is a relationship between cognitive
development and L1 acquisition. In order words, linguistic structures will emerge only if
there is an already established cognitive foundation.
For example, before children can use structures of comparison (e.g. my car is bigger
than yours), they need to make relative judgments of size.
Piaget claimed that cognitive development is at the very centre of the human organism and
that language is dependent on cognitive development.