Major Language Theories

Introduction

Language is the means to transfer the intended message to the receiver.

Everyone as human being uses it. Language is regarded an exclusively human
method of communicating ideas, emotions by means of system of symbols.
Language plays a significant role in unifying a vast and complex notion and in
providing individuals with outlets for developing various skills and abilities.

In fact language is one attribute that sets humans apart from all other creatures
and binds humans together across all geographic barriers. Language can be the
tool for great achievement in any discipline. Good understanding of what
individuals need and are able to do and also a sound knowledge and belief in the
goals of language acts program are essential factor in successful individualization
of instruction.

Language is a means through which thought is organized, refined, and expressed.

In short, language helps in the formation of concepts, analysis of complex ideas,
and to focus attention on ideas which would otherwise be difficult to
comprehend.

Here, the theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, Chomsky are considered.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited ability to learn any
human language. He claims that certain linguistic structures which children use so
accurately must be already imprinted on the child's mind. Chomsky believes that
every child has a 'language acquisition device' or LAD which encodes the major
principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child's brain.
Children have then only to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic
structures from the LAD to form sentences. Chomsky points out that a child could
not possibly learn a language through imitation alone because the language
spoken around them is highly irregular-adult's speech is often broken up and
often sometimes ungrammatical. Chomsky's theory applied to all languages as
they all contain nouns, verbs, consonants and vowels and children appear to be
'hard-wired' to acquire the grammar. Every language is extremely complex, often
with subtle distinctions which even native speakers are unaware of. However, all
children, regardless of their intellectual ability, become fluent in their native
language within five or six years.

Chomsky's view of competence, deals primarily with abstract grammatical

knowledge. He believes that linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal
speaker and listener in completely homogeneous speech community, which
knows its language perfectly, and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant
conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest and
errors in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance (Chomsky.
1965).

According to Chomsky, basic form of language is stored in human brain. Language

is a competency that is unique for human. For Chomsky, the focus of linguistic
theory was to characterize the abstract abilities speaker possess that enable them
to produce grammatically correct sentences in a language. Chomsky considered
language as a highly abstract generative phenomenon. He arrested that human
beings are born biologically equipped to learn a language and proposed his theory
of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD)- an inborn mechanism or process that
facilitates the learning of a language.
 According to Chomsky, there are infinite numbers of sentences in any language;
all possible sentences would be impossible to learn through imitation and
reinforcement. In his view, to study language is to study a part of human nature
manifested in the human mind.
One of the fundamental aspects of human language according to Chomsky is its
creative nature. He argues that something specifically about human language
must be innate, that is available to us by virtue of being human, specified
somehow in our genetic make up. The most commonly accepted viewpoint on
language acquisition suggests human learn language by observing and
memorizing grammatical cues. This theory posits that our understanding of
language is built solely on experience, not an internal language processing
feature.

As Chomsky puts it, "Evidently, development of language in the individual must

involve three factors: (1) genetic endowment, which sets limits on the attainable
languages, thereby making language acquisition possible; (2) external data,
converted to the experience that selects on or another language within a narrow
range; (3) principles not specific to the faculty of language.
Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

Jean Piaget, emphasized the significance of social interaction to intellectual

development. Piaget saw interaction as the key to how overcome the instability
of the symbols as individually construct. Piaget tied the role of language an
integral part of his ideas on intellectual development. Piaget linked the role of
social interaction in intellectual development to the role of language.

According to Piaget, language is inherently a social factor partly because of the

conventional nature of words and this conventional nature of words is crucial for
conceptual development. Piaget argued that formation of mental structures
underlying feelings of logical necessity requires social interaction using a
conventional sign system.

Piaget theorized that language was simply one of children's ways of

representing their familiar worlds, a reflection of thought, and that language did
not contribute to the development of thinking. In fact he argued that cognitive
development proceeded language.

Piaget's theory states that children's cognitive development goes through four
stages of cognition as they actively synthesize new information with current
knowledge. Reaching equilibrium between new and current knowledge is key,
requiring the child to actively assimilate or accommodate all that is learned. He
became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers to the
questions that required logical thinking. He belived that these incorrect answers
revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children.

Piaget (1936) described his work as genetic epistemology (i.e. Origins of

thinking). Genetics is the scientific study of where things come from (their
origins). Epistemology is concerned with the basic categories of thinking, that is to
say, the framework or structural properties of intelligence. Piaget (1936) was the
first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development. His
contributions include a theory of child cognitive development, detailed
observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious
tests to reveal different cognitive abilities. According to Piaget, children are born
with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all
subsequent learning and knowledge is based.

To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental

processes as a result of biological maturation and experience. Children construct
an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies
between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.

Through his study of the field of education, Piaget focused on two processes,
which he named assimilation and accommodation. To Piaget, assimilation meant
integrating external elements into structures of lives or environments, or those
we could have through experience.
Assimilation is how humans perceive and adapt to new information. It is the
process of fitting new information into pre existing cognitive schemas. In contrast,
accommodation is the process of taking new information in one's environment
and altering pre-existing schemas in order to fit in the new information. This
happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be
changed to deal with a new object or situation. Piaget's understanding was that
assimilation and accommodation cannot exist without the other. When they are
in balance with each other, assimilation and accommodation generate mental
schemas of the operative intelligence.

Cognitive development is Piaget's theory. Through a series of stages, Piaget

proposed four stages of cognitive development: the sensorimotor, pre
operational, concrete operational and formal operational period.
 Lev Vygotsky

Lev Vygotsky is regarded as the founder of socio-cultural theory or the socio

historical approach in psychology. Unlike Chomsky and Piaget, Vygotsky's central
concern was the relationship between the development of thought and that of
language. He was interested in the ways in which different languages might
impact on how a person thinks. Vygotsky's theory views language first as social
communication, gradually promoting both language itself and cognition.
According to Vygotsky, a word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought
unembodied in words remains a shadow. The speech structures mastered by the
child become the basic structure of his thinking. The structure of the language
one habitually uses influences the way he perceives his environment. A child first
seems to use language for superficial social interaction, but at some point, this
language goes underground to become the structure of the child's thinking.

In Vygotsky's view point, language is critical for cognitive development. He

argues that language in the form of private speech guides cognitive development.
The corner stone of Vygotsky's theory are the social significance of education and
its relation to societal involvement. According to him, language and culture play
essential roles both in human intellectual development and in how humans
perceive the world.

The main difference between the ideas of Vygotsky and his contemporaries
was regarding emphasis on an individual's interaction with his social environment.
For Vygotsky, thinking and language are key as the child develops through social
interactions such as conversing and playing.
 An expert teacher is central to Vygotsky theory. The teacher's role is to identify
the student's current mode of representation and then through the use of good
discourse, questioning or learning situations, provoke the student to move
forward in thinking. The recognition of a student's representation or thinking was
seen as his zone of proximal development and the teacher's actions for
supporting learning was described as scaffolding. When working in the zone of
proximal development particular attention is paid to the language being used
since the language of the student influences how he will interpret and build
understandings.

According to Vygotsky, cognitive skills and patterns of thinking are the products
of the activities practiced in the social institutions of culture in which the
individual grows up. A clear understanding of the interaction between thought
and language is necessary for the understanding of intellectual development.
Language is essential in forming thought and determining personality features.

One important tenet in Vygotsky's theory is the notion of the existence of what
he called the Zone of proximal development, zone of proximal development is the
difference between the child's capacity to solve problems of his own, and his
capacity to solve them in assistance. Zone of proximal development includes all
the functions and activities that a child or a learner can perform only with the
assistance of someone else.

An essential feature of learning is that, it awakens a variety of internal

developmental processes which are able to operate only when child is in the
action of interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with
peers.

By explaining human language development and cognitive development,

Vygotsky's social interactionist theory serves as a strong foundation of the
modern trends in applied linguistics. It lends support to less structured and more
natural communicative and experiential approaches and points to the importance
of early world human interaction in foreign language learning.

Unlike Piaget's notion that children's development must necessarily precede

their learning. Vygotsky argued "learning is a necessary and universal aspect of
the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological
function" (1978, p. 90). As a matter of fact, the major theme of Vygotsky's
theoretical framework is that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the
development of cognition. Vygotsky (1978) states:"Every function in the child's
cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the
individual level: first, between people (inter psychological) and then inside the
child ( intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical
memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as
actual relationship s between individuals.

Vygotsky's theory was an attempt to explain consciousness as the end product

of socialization. For example, in the learning of language, our first utterances s
with peers or adults are for the purpose of communication but once mastered
they become internalized and allow "inner speech".

Comparing and contrasting Piaget's and Vygotsky's theory of cognitive

development

Piaget and Vygotsky were contemporaries, both studying child psychological

developmental during the early 20th century. Although both men studies the
same subject, their theories contained more differences than similarities. Piaget's
research emphasized "nature," or innate capabilities, while Vygotsky's theories
revolved around "nature," or the connection between environment and
development.
 Piaget believed there were four stages that every child goes through before
they are able to fully receive, process, and return information. They are the
sensorimotor stage, pre operational stage, concrete operations, and lastly formal
operations. He believed that each stage had its limits and that until a child
reached the next stage trying to explain something beyond their grasp was futile.

Jean Piaget shaped a new way of thinking and looking at the stages of
development. Piaget's research proved that the way children think is qualitatively
different from the thinking patterns of adults. According to Piaget's theory, even
young children attempt to make sense of their world by constructing reality,
rather than simply acquiring knowledge. Social interaction is a factor in Piaget's
theory of cognitive development. Piaget defines social interaction as the
interchange of ideas to the construction of knowledge, which is incorporated into
the individual 's schemata. Schemata evolve over time as new ideas are
constantly being integrated and schemata change or adapt to fit new ideas.
Piaget's theory outlines a continuum of development where new schemata do
not replace old schemata or add to them.

Through this process social knowledge is formed. Piaget argues that social
knowledge, such as the concept of honesty, such as the concept of a tree. For
example, a child develops the socially acceptable concept of tree through physical
knowledge, which is relatively independent of others. In contrast, the child cannot
develop a socially acceptable independent construct of the concept of honesty.
The child depends on social interaction for the construction and validation of
social knowledge.

Piaget states that social interaction exists on multiple levels; it can take place
in the classroom or at home. Social interaction occurs between students,
teachers, parents, and others within the environment. Piaget's theory supports
the claim that all forms of social interaction and experience are equally important
in the child's intellectual development. Like Piaget, Vygotsky is particularly
interested in the intersection between individual development and social
relations. One of the most important points Vygotsky addresses is that of
scaffolding, which views children as actively constructing themselves and their
environment. The social environment acts as the framing that permits a child to
move forward and continue growth.

Vygotsky argues that one of the most important components of scaffolding is

the engagement of children in interesting and culturally meaningful problem
solving activities. This leads into what Vygotsky terms the Zone of Proximal
Development. Vygotsky took a much more hands on approach to child
development. He believed that children grew through sociocultural development,
meaning it was their culture and social encounters that taught them to behave
and what was acceptable. The biggest difference between them is their approach
to discovery learning. Piaget believed children should be left alone to discover the
world and interpret it themselves while Vygotsky believed that a child would be
guided in their discovery.

Similarities between Vygotsky and Piaget

Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky were both developmental psychologists who
studied how language develops in children. Piaget and Vygotsky both believed
that children's inquisitive natures give them them the ability to develop language
skills from an early age.

Evidence to support Chomsky's theory

 * Children learning to speak never make grammatical errors such as getting
their subjects, verbs, and objects in the wrong order.

* If an adult deliberately said a grammatically incorrect sentence, the child

would notice.

* Children often say things that are ungrammatical such as 'mama ball' , which
they cannot have learnt passively.
* Mistakes such as 'I drawed' instead of 'I drew' show they are not learning
through imitation alone.
* Chomsky used the sentence 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously' , which is
grammatical although it does not make sense, to prove his grammatical without
having any meaning, that we can tell the difference between a grammatical and
an ungrammatical sentence without ever having heard the sentence before, and
that we can produce and understand brand new sentences that no one ever said
before.

Evidence against Chomsky's theory

> Critics of Chomsky's theory say that although it is clear that children don't
learn language through imitation alone, this does not prove that they must have
an LAD -language learning could merely be through general learning and
understanding abilities and interactions with other people.