Wednesday, May 14, 2008

ENA1 child language acquisition revision

Child language acquisition might seem tricky but if you've got the basics of the linguistic framework - lexis, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology and pragmatics (you know it really) - and some idea about the stages and theories, you'll be laughing. Oh, and make sure you have plenty of examples of what children say.

Here's some stuff from the blog 2 years ago about preparing for this topic. The same things apply, but it's probably worth noting that there's been a more recent focus on data-based questions; these are ones that give you some child language data and ask you to comment on what it tells you about "the nature of child language acquisition". It's therefore a good idea to look carefully at the data and think about what it might reveal about issues like imitation, interaction, cognitive and . Check the feedback sheet here for some ideas about the data from a year or two back. Also, check the feedback sheets that I put together for 2 other questions here and here if you want some more detail.

There's also more feedback and some data examples in this powerpoint.

Spilling your Ts

Seeing an article about language use appear in Michael Gove’s The Spectator is usually a bad sign to begin with. Seeing that its title is ‘...