See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/335489786

First Language Acquisition: Revisiting the Social Interactionist Paradigm

Article · January 2015

CITATION READS
1 8,160

2 authors, including:

Mohammad Amerian

18 PUBLICATIONS 23 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Developing a Profile of Profession-Oriented EAP Needs of Iranian University Students in Business and Economics: A Triangular Approach View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Mohammad Amerian on 30 August 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

8/30/2019 Humanising Language Teaching Magazine for teachers and teacher trainers

CONTENTS
EDITORIAL
MAJOR ARTICLES Year 17; Issue 3; June 2015, ISSN 1755-9715
MAJOR ARTICLES
JOKES
SHORT ARTICLES First Language Acquisition: Revisiting the Social Interactionist
CORPORA IDEAS Paradigm
LESSON OUTLINES
STUDENT VOICES Mansoor Fahim and Mohammad Amerian, Iran
PUBLICATIONS
Mansoor Fahim is an associate professor of TEFL at Allameh Tabataba’i university, Iran. He
AN OLD EXERCISE
has run Research Methods, Psycholinguistics, Applied Linguistics, Second Language
COURSE OUTLINE
Acquisition, and seminar classes at M.A. level and also, First Language Acquisition,
READERS’ LETTERS Psycholinguistics, and discourse Analysis at Ph.D. level. Fahim has published several articles
PREVIOUS EDITIONS and books mostly in the field of TEFL and has translated some books into Persian. E-mail:
BOOK PREVIEW dr.manfahim@yahoo.com
POEMS
C FOR CREATIVITY Mohammad Amerian is a Ph.D. candidate in TEFL at Allameh Tabataba’i university, Iran. He
has taught English in various levels and currently is a lecturer in university. Amerian’s
Would you like to receive research interests include Psycholinguistics, Language and Socio-Cultural Studies, Dynamic
publication updates from HLT? Curriculum Development and Content-Based Instruction, Pragmatics, Teacher Education and
Join our free mailing list Critical Pedagogy. E-mail: amerian921@atu.ac.ir

Refer this page to a friend Menu

Abastract
Introduction
Background
Behavioristic accounts
Nativist and cognitive statements
Socio-constructivist explanations
Social interactionist paradigm
Vygotskyan ZPD and scaffolding
Bruner’s contributions
Narrative construction of reality
Early language and child talk
Conclusion
SITE SEARCH References

AND to find all words entered Abastract

OR to find any words entered
One of the main concerns of language practitioners and developmental psychologists has
AND been the nature and quality of children’s mother language acquisition (or first language
acquisition; FLA). Furthermore, the developmental stages which children undergo to acquire
Search Reset and absorb their L1 together with the categorizations included (acquisition of speech sounds,
words, syntax and semantics) have been among the seriously focused-on trends by the
scholars in the field. Skinnerian Behaviorist claims, Chomskyan Nativist propositions and
Vygotskyan Social Constructivist explanations are among the major corresponding assertions.
In this paper, the Social Interactionist paradigm of first language acquisition mainly associated
with the Vygotskyan tradition is the concentration which emphasizes the undisputable role of
interaction with the surrounding environment in children’s linguistic development and

old.hltmag.co.uk/jun15/mart02.htm 1/6
8/30/2019 Humanising Language Teaching Magazine for teachers and teacher trainers

progress. The role of feedback and outside reinforcement in an interpersonal give and take,
seeking advantage of modeling the adult speakers, and assistance and guidance given from
the adults are correspondingly discussed.

Introduction

As one of the main concerns for the language practitioners and interested developmental
psychologists, explaining the what-and-how of children’s language (L1) progression towards a
native version (their mother language) has been vastly debated and variously looked upon.
The problem has its many sides with focusing on the essence, rate and successfulness of
acquiring different linguistic segments such as minute speech sounds, morphemes, word and
syntax. Apart from that, just to mention some of the other sides, semantic and pragmatic
explanations for the act were of serious debate in the discussions and propositions. Moreover,
in explaining the influential elements on children’s first language advancement, some scholars
took the “sociocultural” side saying that interaction plays a key role in developing skills and
strategies in a meditative process (Vygotsky, 1978) and that human competence is both
biological and cultural (Bruner, 1983). These viewpoints are included in the broad “Social
Interactionist” paradigm about language acquisition. The Social Interactionist theory supposes
that Children are social beings who acquire language in service of their needs to
communicate. It assumes that language is acquired from an interaction of a human’s innate
biological capabilities to acquire language with exposure to language in the environment in
which the child is developing, with more emphasis on the latter; the outside experience.

Background

Behavioristic accounts

Naturally grown out of the parallel psychological descriptions, the early depictions of the
image took the Skinnerian Behaviorist shape. For the behaviorists, language is learned via a
form of operant conditioning (i.e. OC: a type of learning in which an individual’s behavior is
modified by its antecedents and consequences). In his Verbal Behavior (1957), B. F. Skinner
suggested that given a certain stimulus, the successful use of a sign such as a word or lexical
unit reinforces its momentary or contextual probability. Since operant conditioning is
contingent on reinforcement by rewards, a child would learn that a specific combination of
sounds stands for a specific thing through repeated successful associations made between
the two. A “successful” use of a sign would be one in which the child is understood (for
example, a child saying “up” when he or she wants to be picked up) and rewarded with the
desired response from another person, thereby reinforcing the child’s understanding of the
meaning of that word and making it more likely that he or she will use that word in a similar
situation in future (Skinner, 1957).

Nativist and cognitive statements

Skinner’s behaviouristic ideas were severely attacked by Noam Chomsky in his review article
(A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, 1959) calling it “largely mythology” and a
“serious delusion”. As a pioneering nativist, Chomsky believed that Skinner failed to account
for the central role of syntactic knowledge in language competence. He also rejected the term
“learning” which Skinner used to claim that children “learn” language through operant
conditioning. Instead, Chomsky argued for a mathematical approach to language acquisition,
based on a study of syntax (Chomsky, 1959).

Nativists such as Noam Chomsky have focused on the hugely complex nature of human
grammars, the finiteness and complexity of the input that children receive, and the relatively
limited cognitive abilities of an infant. From these characteristics, they concluded that the
process of language acquisition in infants must be tightly constrained and guided by the
biologically given characteristics of the human brain. For them, certain aspects of language
acquisition must result from the specific ways in which the human brain is “wired” into the

old.hltmag.co.uk/jun15/mart02.htm 2/6
8/30/2019 Humanising Language Teaching Magazine for teachers and teacher trainers

brain (the “nature” component as opposed to interactionist socio-constructivist paradigms

emphasizing “nurture”).

In addition, cognitively-oriented scholars dealt with the central role of “mind” in children’s
cognitive development. Chiefly, the theory of children’s cognitive development by Piaget and
his constructivist notion of “psychomotor intelligence” (1973) was proposed to take account of
each aspect of cognitive development in children (including their linguistic development). In
his theory (Piaget, 1973; Piaget et al., 1977), Piaget mainly argued that learning is the
function of the environment and that we use our muscles to learn about the world through
action-based (sensori-motor) perceptions in a four-stage procedure (a. sensori-motor, b. pre-
operational, c. concrete operational and d. formal operational steps). Actually, it can be said
that these claims considering a part for the environment set the needed framework for more
serious inclusions of the “outside” experience in children’s cognitive development.

Socio-constructivist explanations

Social constructivist views of first language acquisition explain language development with
strong emphases on the role of social interaction between the developing child and
linguistically knowledgeable adults. The main approach is largely based on the socio-cultural
theories of the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978), though the Psychologist Jerome
Bruner (1983) also made it prominent in the Western world. Below, the main tenets of the
socio-constructivist approach towards human L1 acquisition will be elaborated in more details.

Social interactionist paradigm

As mentioned, the early roots of what is named as “Social Constructivist” approach to

language acquisition can be traced in the cognitive approaches to language development like
the developmental cognitive theory of Jean Piaget (1973) and some other information
processing or emergentist trends (such as Brian McWhinney’s competition model, 1989). But
the main body of the paradigm is what constitutes the social interactionist approach or social
interaction model of Lev Vygotsky (socio-cultural theory; SCT).

Unlike other approaches, the socio-constructivist view of human language development

emphasizes the role of feedback and reinforcement in language acquisition. Specifically, it
asserts that much of the child’s linguistic growth stems from modeling of and interaction with
parents and other adults, who very frequently provide instructive correction. Thus, it is
somewhat similar to behaviorist accounts of language, though it differs substantially in that it
posits the existence of a “social-cognitive” model and other mental structures within children
(a sharp contrast to the “black box” approach of the classical behaviorism).

Vygotskyan ZPD and scaffolding

A key idea within the theory of social interactionism is the notion of “zone of proximal
development” (ZPD; Vygotsky, 1978). It is a theoretical construct denoting the set of tasks a
child is capable of performing with guidance, but not alone. As applied to language, it
describes the linguistic tasks (proper syntax, suitable vocabulary usage, etc.) a child cannot
carry out on his own at a given time, but can learn to carry out if assisted by an able adult. In
brief, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is where learners construct the new language
through socially mediated interaction via the process of “scaffolding” (Vygotsky, 1978).

As a psychologist and social constructivist, Vygotsky laid the foundations for the interactionist
view of language acquisition. According to him, social interaction plays a vital role in the
learning process. He believed that all cultural development in children is visible in two stages.
First, the child observes the interaction between other people and then the behavior develops
inside the child. This means that the child first observes the adults around him communicating
amongst themselves and then later develops the ability himself to communicate (Vygotsky,
1978).

old.hltmag.co.uk/jun15/mart02.htm 3/6
8/30/2019 Humanising Language Teaching Magazine for teachers and teacher trainers

Bruner’s contributions

Gerome Bruner, the former professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, is

considered the other major contributor to the Social Interactionist theory of first language
acquisition. He is famous for his belief in the importance of parental input and scaffolding to
create shared meaning. In fact, like Vygotsky, Bruner emphasized the social nature of
learning, citing that other people should help a child develop skills through the process of
scaffolding (Bruner, 1983).

Bruner argued that a huge amount of the activity of the child is extraordinarily social and
communicative (1983, p. 27) and that the interaction between an adult and an infant, such as
games and non-verbal communication, builds the structure of language long before the child
is able to communicate verbally. Accordingly, he developed a social interactionist theory of
language development. Bruner worked on his Language Acquisition Support System (LASS)
where he postulated that language is acquired through conversation and its various codes (in
antithesis to Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device (LAD) that allows us to learn the rules
of grammar when we are exposed to human speech). LASS was seen as framing our
interaction in mastering the uses of language (p. 120). For Bruner, “it is the interaction
between LAD and LASS that makes it possible for the infant to enter the linguistic community
–and, at the same time, the culture to which the language gives access” (p. 19).

Narrative construction of reality

Btuner’s next relevant phase of career was his developing a “narrative construction of reality”.
In it, he used recent research in anthropology, psychology, philosophy of language, literary
theory and linguistics to formulate the kinds of mental processes involved in our creation of
world-versions. In his opinion, there are two distinct “modes” of cognitive functioning
(thought): the “paradigmatic mode” which uses causal explanation and has its most
sophisticated realisation in the sciences, and the “narrative mode” which proceeds by way of
storytelling and encompasses how to endow experience with meaning (Bruner, 1991). In
Bruner’s view, narrative construction of reality has important roles in our linguistic
development.

In contrast to the theoretical positions of behaviourism, the social interactionist approaches

rest on the premises of social-cognitive model, emphasizing the child’s construction of a
social world which then serves as the context of language development. Vygotsky (1978) also
theorized that a child learns best when interacting with those around him to solve a problem.
At first, the adult interacting with the child is responsible for leading the child, and eventually,
the child becomes more capable of problem solving on his own. This is true with language, as
the adult first talks at the child and eventually the child learns to respond in turn. The child
moves from gurgling, to baby-talk, to more complete and correct sentences.

The essential component of the Social Interactionist theory is that language acquisition can
easily be realized by emphasizing the role of the environment in child language. Social-
interactionists claim that interaction with the adults plays an important role in children’s
language acquisition. In addition, they criticize the claim made by Noam Chomsky according
to which the linguistic input children are presented with by adults addressing them is full of
errors and discontinuities. Another argument of the nativists on which interactionists provide
contrary empirical evidence is the availability of negative feedback on, and corrections of,
children’s errors.

Early language and child talk

From the birth, children are surrounded by others who talk to them or with them. For the
Social Interactionists, this communication plays an important role in how the baby learns to
speak his or her native language. Some scholars argue that “nature” is entirely responsible for
how a baby learns a language, while some others argue that “nurture” is responsible for how

old.hltmag.co.uk/jun15/mart02.htm 4/6
8/30/2019 Humanising Language Teaching Magazine for teachers and teacher trainers

a baby picks up his or her mother tongue. Social interactionists argue that the way a baby
learns a language is both biological and social (i.e. nature AND nurture).

Everyone loves to coo at babies, and this “baby talk” is exposing the child to language,
whether we realize it or not. Interactionists believe that children are born with brains that
predispose them to the ability to pick up languages as well as with a desire to communicate.
Some Interactionists even argue that babies and children cue their parents and other adults
into giving them the linguistic exposure they need to learn a language. The Social
Interactionist theory posits that children can only learn language from someone who wants to
communicate with them. They believe that language is a byproduct of children’s social
interactions with the important people in their lives. As one of the scholars in the realm,
Michael Halliday also pointed to the issue in his 1975 paper entitled Learning How to Mean
putting it in another way. His account of language development in children is “social” and
“meaning-based”. For him, children construct a system of meanings to show their own model
of social reality; a cognitive process taking place in social interaction (Cattell, 2007).

According to social interactionists, child talk or baby talk may influence language learning,
perhaps even enables it. Several studies support the claim (Ferguson, 1977; Snow, 1972 or
Fernald, 1993) Infants would rather listen to child-directed speech (CDS) than to adult-
directed speech (Fernald & Kuhl, 1987). Parents make efforts to tailor articulation to young
children to maximize phonemic contrasts and respond to children’s immature pronunciation
by repeating them in the correct form (Bernstein Ratner, 1992). Young children’s vocabulary
acquisition seems inherently tied to external experience Joint attention focus (the time that a
mother spends talking about topics that the child is already focused on) highly correlates with
early vocabulary size. Baby talk may possibly allow children to “bootstrap” their progress in
language acquisition (i.e. starting of the self-sustained process of language development
without an external input, Cattell, 2007).

Conclusion

Social Interactionist theory of human language development argues that the development is
both biological and social, and that language learning is influenced by the desire of children to
communicate with others. The theory adds that children are born with a powerful brain that
matures slowly and predisposes them to acquire new understandings that they are motivated
to share with others.

The main theory associated with Interactionist theory is Lev Vygotsky’s model of collaborative
learning (1978); the idea that conversations with older people can help children both
cognitively and linguistically. The interaction theory of language development is a compromise
between the nativist theory and the behaviorist theory of language development. It recognizes
that both environmental and biological factors are important in language development.

The basic appeal of the Social Interactionist approach is the importance it places on the home
and the cultural environment in early-childhood language acquisition. According to this theory,
language develops in negotiating the environment. Hence, vocabulary is bound by context-or,
alternatively, by the culture within which speech is necessary and understandable. Within this
theory of compromise are theorists who are closer to one end of the extreme than the other.
However, all interactionists believe that language acquisition occurs as a result of the natural
interaction between children and their environment, more specifically, their parents or
caregivers.

In sum, the Interactionist approach to linguistic development suggests that language is

acquired from an interaction of a human’s innate biological capabilities to acquire language
with exposure to language in the environment in which the child is developing. It is a
compromise between the nativist theory and the behaviorist theory of language development
(Goldstein & Naglieri, 2011, pp. 830-831).

References

old.hltmag.co.uk/jun15/mart02.htm 5/6
View publication stats

8/30/2019 Humanising Language Teaching Magazine for teachers and teacher trainers

Bernstein Ratner, N. (1992). Measurable outcomes of instructions to change maternal speech

style to children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 35, 14-20.

Bruner, J. (1983). Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bruner, J. (1991). The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry, 18, 1, 1-21.

Cattell, R. (2007). Children’s Language: Consensus and Controversy. London: Continuum.

Chomsky, N. A. (1959). A Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Language, 35, 1, 26-58.

Fernald, A. & Kuhl, P. (1987). Acoustic determinants of infant preference for motherese
speech. Infant Behavior and Development, 10, 279–293.

Goldstein, S. & Naglieri, J. A. (Eds.). (2011). Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and

Development. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Piaget, J. & Inhelder, B. (1973). Memory and intelligence. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.

Piaget, J., Gruber, H. E. & Voneche, J. J., (Eds.). (1977). The essential Piaget. New York:
Basic Books.

Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.

Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press.

retrieved from: www.brighthubeducation.com on 2014, 7, 7

retrieved from: https://sites.google.com on 2014, 7, 7

retrieved from: http://languagedevelopment.tripod.com/id15.html on 2014, 7, 7

retrieved from: www.teachingtimes.com/kb/75/jerome-bruner.htm on 2014, 7, 7

Please check the Methodology & Language for Kindergarten Teachers course at Pilgrims
website.
Please check the Methodology & Language for Primary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.

Website design and hosting by Ampheon © HLT Magazine and Pilgrims Limited

old.hltmag.co.uk/jun15/mart02.htm 6/6