Language Learning, Language Teaching, and the Construction of the Young Child

Abstract

Can we understand first and second language learning among young children in a way that is both scientific and culture free? Both scholarship and teacher education in the fields of foreign and second language teaching are strongly grounded in the scientific theories of linguistics and cognitive psychology. Language learning and language teaching are frequently presented as “knowable” processes about which the truth can be discerned from two sources. One of these sources is direct observation of the process of teaching and learning foreign and second languages. The second source of information, however, often considered more “pure” than classroom observations of second language learning, is theoretical and empirical understandings of how young children learn their first languages as infants and as toddlers.