Essay on Dispeling the Myth that Parents Teach Their...

In the article titled Nine Ideas About Language by Harvey Daniels, one of the fundamental ideas that he presents is Children learn their native language swiftly, efficiently, and largely without instruction. This dispels the myth that parents â€Å"teach† their children to talk. Many linguist believe that the human brain is pre wired to learn language based on the theory that there are commonalities found in all languages which is nature. Some include the way questions are asked or ways of referring to past times or past events. In addition, my personal thoughts are that on a very basic level of being we are all the same, no matter how vastly different the languages we speak are. Other linguist believe that we are conditioned to learn†¦show more content†¦Even if the child has no understanding of language yet, the constant socializing between infant and their caretaker creates a need for the infant to imitate them to bring balance to the socializing. Beyond infancy language learning is continued by listening and practicing what they hear. As they progress the rules are learnt by hearing the correct way. Another idea of how language is learnt without being â€Å"taught†, is by early age social interaction with similarly aged peers. For example two year olds playing in a sandbox would not be having in depth conversations. Their vocabulary do not contain that many words but interaction is not lessened. They use whatever they know at the time and upon hearing a new word or sound, they try to imitate each other. This interaction helps children learn from each other without formal teaching. Further evidence supporting Daniels idea that children learn language without instruction is when it comes to the use of tense. Daniels gives an example of his own son who was in the process of working on the -ed problem. His son only used present tense verbs, for example â€Å"Daddy go work?† instead of saying â€Å"Did daddy go to work?†. This shows speech in its simplest form without the impact of formal teaching. Instinctively a parent might try to correct the child because the y have been exposed to some sort of formal language training (parts of speech). Correcting a child’s grammatical