The Processes of the Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is the process of learning a language (native or foreign). Thus, there are two types of language acquisition that are studied by specialists in different areas (psychology and linguistics).
The process of the first language acquisition is considered to be a psycholinguistic process, while the second language acquisition is the area for study for linguists. Though, it is not fully studied how children learn to speak, it is clear that the processes of the first and second language acquisition are different. In the focus of this essay are the issues related to the processes of the language acquisition with children.
First of all, it is considered to be that child’s learning of its first language is painless. On the one hand, it is true as the natural ability to imitation and memorizing quickly help children learn to speak very quickly. However, one can meet such problems as over generalizing grammatical rules and face difficulties with pronunciation of certain sounds. Moreover, some children with the bradgenesis or some psychological problems that slows down the language acquisition process.
There are considerable differences when learning to communicate in native and second language. These processes are different due to several considerable factors. First of all, the language environment; second, psychological and linguistic processes involved into the process of language learning and time factor (children learn native language since very early age, the learning of the second language is introduced a bit later).
The stages of the first and second language learning are almost the same, but the difference is that a child is always surrounded by the native language surrounding, which influence greatly on his memorizing processes. In this light, we can conclude that it is impossible to achieve the same fluently and knowledge in a second language as in the native one.
Cross Cultural Communication
When learning a foreign language, it is quite possible to learn all rules, many words and learn much information about native speakers and their country. However, there are still barriers that can cause difficulties in cross-cultural communication. Thus, talking to a not a first language-user, there can be some misconceptions related to the different cultural backgrounds, pronunciation, use of words and grammar.
First of all, the organ of speech of every person are adjusted to his/her native language and every language has its specific phonetic structure and pronunciation peculiarities. Thus, a person who is not a native speaker can hear no differences between two different words which can cause misunderstanding and confusion.
For example, a word “volcano” is pronounced as [vol’keinəu]. The diphthongs [ei] and [əu] may be not perceived by a Spanish speaker for example. Thus, his/her [volkΛno] may be absolutely not understandable for the native speaker.
The second reason is the non-verbal message which is form under the influence of the cultural background. The word and the meaning behind the word can be absolutely different for people from different countries and can influence the communication process. “What do you mean?” is a common question when talking to a person with non-English-speaking background. The reason is that different people (with different language backgrounds) understand many words in different ways, as they have different cultural stereotypes.
Thus, communicating with the non-English-speaking background should make native speakers more tolerant of linguistic-communicative problems. In fact, it is a common situation when in such communication situations, people take into consideration cross-cultural differences.