Similarity and Difference between Child and Adult Language Acquisition

How Children and Adults learn language differently

Before we get into this essay, I want to make sure that 'child' I am referring to is about five to eight years old, who may or may not receive academic service on language. 'Adult', on the other side, means a classroom learner who is a teenager or a grown-up, taking a language course.

Often, Youtube commercials by English academies say people need special ways of learning for each age. About this opinion, many language experts published theories and formalized research results. Consequently, we agree that there are similarities and differences between the way a child acquires a language and the way a classroom learner does. The First similarity is that the physical environment is important for both child and adult when learning a language. Secondly, language learning process sequence is all the same, regardless of age and environment. Lastly, young and old are alike when language is related to thinking process and ego. On the other hand, child have better background environment to learn a language naturally. The curricula for the adult and the child acquiring a language are dissimilar too, through explicit and implicit studies. Final point of differences is that the defensive mechanism is quite leaned especially to the adult, when developing a language ego. Let us take a look on similarities in advance.

Obviously, a basic environment is one of the most momentous factors of learning a language, whether the age of a learner is young or old. If the physical environment is not fundamentally settled enough to help one study and the limits of resources matter, surely the learner would not be able to acquire anything well. For example, 'Mencius's mother moving three times' is a proverb throughout the North East Asia. The saying means that Mencius was affected by each place's environment he stayed. Learning materials and supplements, even simple as a piece of paper and a pen, are necessary. An education is not possible without environment physically and economically ready. In short, environment influences the learners in ways of language learning.

Moreover, both a child and an adult have a same sequence when learning a language. This is a view of Krashen and his Natural Order Hypothesis states that all learners acquire a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition(1). Simply, for instance, we can see that kids under the age of five speak words first. Like them, classroom learners first concentrate on memorizing new vocabularies. Some rules and elements of grammar are acquired early and others late, no matter the age and environment. In sum, the stages of learning a language are all the same.

Further, a language is always related to a speaker's thought and ego. For every language learned, one builds a new identity. A language as a system of signs and symbols plays a determinative role in ego formation: the ego is developed through the entry into linguistic symbolization(2). Whether learning a first language or second, language users display their identities within. A research done by the University of Iowa is an excellent example of building the identity. There, English and Russian speaking university students including the monolinguals and the bilinguals were in an online language exchange experiment. The speakers shifting between English and Russian enable the traditional L2 learners to negotiate their online identities at the critical moments of the exchange(3). These similarities are very general aspects of learning.

Conversely, differences between a child and an adult are found in detail. We all know the mother tongue is easier to learn. This is because the native speakers are around when a child takes his or her first step. The native speakers including caregivers provide rich languages in various situations. In contrast, the classroom learners do not get input as much as the children. They also have less opportunity to practice language than the children. In particular, even my father had less chance than my sister, when my family lived in New Zealand. She practiced her first language with family and second language with the native speakers freely whenever she went to shops, restaurants, and playgrounds. However, my father did not communicate with the native speakers naturally when his academy class was dismissed. Consequently, the children are surrounded by the language-friendly situation while the adults are not.

Also, the child's curricula are quite different from those of the older classroom learner. Even though the language learning stage is same to everyone, adult's curricula are much more complicated. An adult is capable of understanding complex ideas of language with schema. A kid, on the other hand, learns the first or the second language focused on basic competences. For these reasons, the adult's curricula are explicit and complexed while the child's curricula are implicit and simple. The 2007 official kindergarten curriculum of the Republic of Korea from government works well as an illustration. Rather than teachers teach kids about alphabets systematically, children get to write each other's name, first to take an interest in the letters of one's name(4). The difference in each curriculum's focus brings the difference in a way acquiring a language.

To all ages and circumstances, constructing a language ego is important. However, the adults are more careful than the children. The language ego contributes to inhibition, which impacts adults much more than children(5). Inhibition is a self-defensive mechanism that makes the adult hesitates on using a language. The adults build walls to protect themselves from being discouraged by making errors in language performance. On the contrary, children do not have this mind walls because they have strong egocentricity, therefore the kids are better at the performance. As a result, inhibition blocks adults to perform a language when it's a required key to acquire a language. Hence, the way of adult minds others and is more sensitive than the child, when learning a new language.

In conclusion, the similarities and differences in between child and adult acquiring a language are certain and clear. Both child and adult need solid environment. Their process of language learning stages is the same. Finally, language learning involves in building ego and identity despite age difference. Meanwhile, the child learns a language more naturally. The adult have more explicit and complicated curricula. The adult also has inhibition on the language performance. To sum up, the similarities can be analyzed macroscopically while the differences can be understood microscopically. In other words, a learning method for people should be different throughout detail circumstances like age, just like what the commercial says, yet general way is quite same overall.

Chaeun, the major problems that I see with this research paper stem from the non-academic tone that you have taken in writing the content. As a research paper, the writer is often advised to stay away from first person pronouns such as I and we as this presents a first person point of view instead of a non-bias academic and data driven research presentation. Avoiding the use of any pronoun in a research paper is better for your writing because it allows you to present an objective point of view from both sides of the discussion.

Now, the claims you are making in the paper are good and obviously based on properly researched documents. The problem, is that you lack both an in-text citation for your paraphrased comments and there are not block citations to help strengthen your explanations. You also failed to present a list of sources at the end, which means that your paper has problematic sources and as such, will be questionable in content.

In addition to these problems, you also did not present a clear thesis statement in your opening paragraph. You need to open the paper with a proper explanation of the topic you are going to be discussing, why this discussion is important, what specific question you hope to respond to and what response you look forward to presenting to your reader.

The research paper unto itself is engaging and educational. However, for an academically researched presentation, there are a number of writing and citing rules that you have to follow in order to make the grade as a college student. By the way, avoid capitalizing words that are not proper nouns in your paragraphs. That is an academic writing violation as only the starting word of every sentence and proper nouns may be capitalized in a paragraph presentation.