a level english language child language acquisition essay examples

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Child Language Acquisition Example Student Essay

Subject: English

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Worksheet/Activity

Last updated

9 February 2024

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Top band, student written model answer for A Level English Language. Evaluate the idea that children’s linguistic development is the result of an innate capacity to learn language.

This essay demonstrates how to convey understanding of linguistic ideas by evaluating and challenging the views presented in the question and by other linguists. The model answer shows how to approach an essay question requiring data analysis and application of theory. Students of all abilities will benefit from an example of effective essay writing which they can emulate in their own work.

Why it works:

• Shows how to select, arrange & argue the most important ideas in essays
• Demonstrates how to balance data analysis with theory application
• Produced by a student who achieved an A* in 2017
• Can be reworked as a template for your future (brilliant!) essays

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This essay plus the transcript it is based on and an activity sheet guiding students through writing their own paragraph

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REVIEW on the bundle: A great set of resources in an area of study that is limited for materials. I particularly like the model CLD lesson and essay about Jess. If you have any more materials like this such as good CLD model essays and questions I’d certainly be interested. Thanks for your hard work and excellent value! - EnglishThings

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Paper 1 Revision A Level English Language

This is how I revised and practiced for Paper 1 before achieving an A* in 2017. Revise every section of paper 1 in full with this bundle! Includes: * Child spoken language acquisition summary sheet * Written and multi modal acquisition summary sheet * CLA transcript analysis guided activity and mock question * CLA student example essay answer * 2x model essays for question 1, 2 and 3 to accompany the mock paper with data included Why they work: * Notes are easy to learn, concise, bullet points without sacrificing interesting and meaningful information on CLA * Child language activity shows you how to approach the initially daunting task of combining data analysis with linguistic theory * Essays are top band and student written so show you how to structure your future (brilliant!) essays! [Notes for all six topics in paper 2](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/language-and-diversity-summary-sheets-aqa-a-level-english-language-11972594) [Model essays for **all** topics in A Level English Language ](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/english-language-exemplar-responses-aqa-a-level-new-spec-11874400)

A Level English Language Revision

Looking for a complete revision bundle for Paper 1 and 2? Look no further! I give you the *notes* so you can learn the theory and the *example student written essay* so you can see how to tackle the exam question. All produced by a student who achieved an A* in 2017. No need for super expensive (and over-the-top extensive) revision guides. These notes and essays fully cover the AQA English Language A Level to get you feeling totally prepared for your exam. **Paper 1 Section A: ** * example essay answer for q1,2,3 graded A* **Paper 1 Section B: ** * child language spoken revision notes * child language written and multi modal revision notes * child language example A* essay answer **Paper 2 Section A: ** * gender complete revision notes * accent and dialect complete revision notes * sociolect complete revision notes * occupation complete revision notes * world english complete revision notes * language change complete revision notes * gender A* essay answer * accent and dialect A* essay answer * sociolect A* essay answer * occupation A* essay answer * world english A* essay answer * language change A* essay answer **Paper 2 Section B: ** * language discourses example essay answer * opinion article examples **Plus: ** * bank of practice questions DM me on Twitter @astarlevels if you have any questions ;)

Child Language Acquisition Total Revision

Complete revision for Child Language Acquisition. Revision notes to consolidate knowledge, transcript analysis activity for exam practice & a model essay to see a top band essay response. Why they work: * Easy to learn, concise, bullet point revision notes * Model essay shows how to structure a top band response * Worksheet guides students through analysing a transcript and combining with linguistic theory * Produced by a student who achieved an A* in 2017 * Feel confident for your exam Chat with me on Twitter @astarlevels

Child Language Acquisition Transcript & Example Essay

Includes two transcripts with accompanying activity sheet & top band model essay response based on the data included. Why it works: * Activity sheet guides students through the initially daunting task of analysing large chunks of data * Example essay shows students how to approach the question and balance data analysis with child language acquisition theories * Easily turned into a mock question since data is included * Essay can be used as a marking activity [Notes on spoken & written CLA, transcript activity and example essay bundle ](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/child-language-acquisition-ultimate-revision-a-level-english-language-aqa-new-spec-11874357) Rated 5*!

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This is such a useful resource. Saved me loads of time. It is a well structured response with the exact mark given for each AO listed clearly at the bottom. It leaves plenty of opportunity for discussion with my students and allows them to see the importance of engaging with the data in front of them and THEN using theorists/theories to enhance their ideas rather than just knowledge dropping learned ideas. If you're after more A level English Language resources, there are others provided by astarlevels. Wish I'd discovered this sooner.

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Teacher recommended

• Created by: Marco
• Created on: 09-12-14 21:55
• English Language
• Child language acquisition

Report Fri 19th May, 2017 @ 21:45

Thank you so much this has literally saved my life

Report Wed 24th May, 2017 @ 21:44

This is amazing, thank you (:

Report Thu 27th July, 2017 @ 23:56

Again. A wonderful resource. Used this in preparation for my exam and distributed it throughout my class. Thank you

Report Wed 18th October, 2017 @ 19:56

This is absolutely insane.  But thanks man. 

Report Fri 15th December, 2017 @ 20:36

Definitely saved me time in preparation for my mocks!!

Report Wed 4th April, 2018 @ 16:28

This is truly the best revision documentation I have seen on this topic, thank you!

Report Thu 26th April, 2018 @ 20:05

wow 33 pages, what a G :)))  you da best bro

Report Mon 14th May, 2018 @ 14:12

thank you from the children

Report Mon 14th May, 2018 @ 14:20

Den Backofen auf 200°C vorheizen. Eine Kastenform einfetten, mit Grieß ausstreuen. 

Die trockenen Zutaten gut vermischen, dann die Milch dazugeben und eventuelle Aromen wie Zitronenschale/-öl oder Schokolade. Alles gut verrühren. Die recht flüssige Masse in die vorbereitete Kuchenform geben, ca. 60 min bei 200° C backen. Stäbchenprobe! Den Kuchen erkalten lassen bevor man ihn aus der Form nimmt, er bricht sonst leicht. Den fertigen Kuchen kann man mit Puderzucker überstäuben, mit einer Schokoladenglasur oder einem Guss aus Puderzucker und Zitronen-/Orangensaft versehen. Der Fantasie sind bei diesem Kuchen (fast) keine Grenzen gesetzt und er lädt buchstäblich dazu ein, neue Varianten auszuprobieren.

Report Fri 29th June, 2018 @ 10:43

WHERE have these notes vanished to?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!

Report Sun 6th January, 2019 @ 17:02

For the exam question at the bottom. What exam board is this for?

Report Mon 20th January, 2020 @ 11:50

Thanks so much for creating and sharing this!

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Child Directed Speech

• Separate phrases more distinctly, leaving longer pauses between them.
• Speak more s-l-o-w-l-y.
• Use exaggerated  ‘singsong’ intonation, which helps to emphasise key words.  Also to exaggerate the difference between questions, statements and commands.
• Use a higher and wider pitch range.

Lexis and semantics

• Use of concrete nouns (cat, train) and dynamic verbs (give, put).
• Adopt child’s own words for things (doggie, wickle babbit).
• Frequent use of child’s name and an absence of pronouns.
• Simpler constructions
• Frequent use of imperatives
• High degree of repetition
• Use of personal names instead of pronouns (e.g. ‘Mummy’ not ‘I’)
• Fewer verbs, modifiers and adjectives

Large number of one-word utterances

• Deixis used to point child’s attention to objects or people
• Repeated sentence frames eg. “that’s a ……”
• Use more simple sentences and fewer complex and passives.
• Omission of past tenses, inflections (plurals and possessives).
• Use more commands, questions and tag questions.
• Use of EXPANSIONS – where the adult fills out the child’s utterance.
• Use of RE-CASTINGS – where the child’s vocabulary is put into a new utterance.
• Lots of gesture and warm body language.
• Fewer utterances per turn – stopping frequently for child to respond.
• Supportive language (expansions and re-castings).

Are there are variations due to the gender of the caregiver?

Research has suggested that fathers are more demanding than mothers, using more direct questions and a wider range of vocabulary.

What effects do you think this kind of speech has on children?

Some claim that it retains the attention of the child, others that it makes language more accessible. Some claim that children learn by repetition – can this explain the fact that children can produce sentences which they have never heard before?

Others claim that ‘babytalk’ actually interferes with language development because children learn babyish words and sentences instead of the real language.

Not every culture uses such forms of child-directed speech. In Samoa and Papua New Guinea, adults speak to children as they speak to adults, and children acquire language at the same pace as elsewhere.

Features and purposes of Child Directed Speech

CDS aims to:

• Attract and hold the baby’s attention.
• Help the process of braking down language into understandable chunks.
• Make the conversation more predictable by referring to the here-and-now.

Clarke-Stewart (1973)

Found that children whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies.

Katherine Nelson (1973)

Found that children at the holophrastic stage whose mothers corrected them on word choice and pronunciation actually advanced more slowly than those with mothers who were generally accepting.

(Brown, Cazden and Bellugi 1969)

Found that parents often respond to the TRUTH value of what their baby is saying, rather than its grammatical correctness.  For example, a parent is more likely to respond to “there doggie” with “Yes, it’s a dog!” than “No, it’s there is a dog .”

Berko and Brown (1960)

Brown spoke to a child who referred to a “fis” meaning “fish”.  Brown replied using “fis” and the child corrected him again but saying “fis”.  Finally Brown reverted to “fish” to which the child responded “Yes, fis.”  This shows that babies do not hear themselves in the same way that they hear others and no amount of correction will change this.

Child Directed Speech – some conclusions

• Recent research argues the CDS doesn’t directly help babies learn language, instead it helps parents communicate with children = its purpose is social rather than educational.
• In some cultures (non-western) babies are expected to blend in with adult interaction and no special accommodation is made in speech addressed to them.  These children still go through the same developmental stages at roughly the same time as long as there is EXPOSURE to language.  However Clark & Clark’s research suggests that children who are only exposed to adult speech do not acquire the same standard of language as those whose parents speak to them directly in a modified manner.
• The older argument that baby-talk is ‘harmful’ to a child learning a new language is being replaced.  People now think it’s beneficial to the child.
• A child’s language improves when in contact with an adult who speaks to them directly.

Learning to Talk: The Process of Spoken Acquisition

• Acquisition of spoken language is a natural, albeit complex, process that involves gradual learning and mastering of lexical, phonetic, syntactic, and semantic structures.
• Children typically start with babbling stage and progress to producing single words, then two-word utterances, and later, complex sentences.
• According to several studies, the first sound that infants learn to produce is typically /p/, followed by /b/ and /m/.
• From birth to about 6 months, infants engage in a phase of exploration where they experiment with a multitude of sounds, many of which do not exist in their native language.
• By around 12 months, a stage known as ‘phonetic contraction’ occurs, in which the infant stops producing sounds not in their native language and begins to narrow down to the phonetic range of it.
• Some researches disagree on the exact process of spoken acquisition. Chomsky argued that children have an innate ability to learn language, referred to as the ‘Language Acquisition Device’, whilst social interactionists emphasise the role of environment and interaction.
• The meanings children attach to words tend to develop in a predictable sequence. From 12 to 18 months, children often learn nouns for tangible objects. As they approach their second birthday, they begin to understand verbs, adjectives and prepositions.
• Syntax acquisition also follows a predictable pattern. Children start with ‘pivot’ words and open class words, combining these two to create ‘pivot’ schemas. In time, these ‘pivot’ schemas transform into sentences.
• Brown’s Stages of Language Development is a useful reference point when studying this topic. The five stages demonstrate the manner in which children gradually increase sentence length, use different sentence structures, and improve grammatical accuracy.
• Children also learn the pragmatics of language, gaining skills in conversation, narrative skills, politeness and appropriacy.
• Finally, input and correction affect language development but not in a straightforward way. Parents typically do not correct their children’s grammatical mistakes but do correct mispronunciations or factual errors. This is indicative of the ‘Naturalistic Approach’ to learning, where comprehension is more important than correction.
• Errors in children’s early speech often show that they are actively working on the rules of language, sometimes overgeneralising these rules, which are known as overextension and underextension.
• Lastly, remember that exact ages for each developmental milestone can vary greatly among individuals, and there is often overlap between the stages. Language acquisition is influenced by a host of factors, including the child’s individual temperament, their environmental influences, and the specific language or languages they are learning.

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Child Language Acquisition

Amelia Cairns        Page         9-May-07

English Language             Child Language Acquisition

Linguistically, both of these infants are at different stages of their language development.

The lexical choices made by each child can show what stage they are at in developing their language and applying it to situations and conversations.

Sophie’s use of the word ‘Bissie’, meaning biscuit shows that she hasn’t quite been able to pronounce the sound therefore makes an alternative word up that sounds similar, that is understandable by the child’s carer/parent, but is easier to say than ‘biscuit’. Other lexical choices Sophie uses, tend to be commanding words, such as ‘me want’ ‘No’. As the child is young, she realises to get what she wants; she has to ask for it and by using the commanding words, she is airing the fact that she wants something to her parent/carer. According to Halliday’s functions, this language is regulatory, as well as being instrumental. She is controlling the behaviour of others (telling Fran that she doesn’t want to tidy the dolls house) and she is obtaining material needs (wanting a biscuit).

Katharine has grasped the concept of pronouns. She uses the personal pronoun ‘I’ to refer to herself ‘Now I’ll do Jason’, and she can even use ‘we’ as the collective term for her and her mum together ‘We do Jason again shall we?’

This is a preview of the whole essay

Sophie’s sentences have basic structure to them, as she voices what she needs to say, in the simplest way to say it. They are quite short, and to the point. Her language acquisition is at the stage where she knows how to communicate, speak and use words in a simple sentence to voice what she wants. ‘Mary come me’, meaning ‘Can Mary come and play with me’, is a very simple form of the sentence, but still communicates to her mum what she wants to do. She uses ‘me’ instead of ‘I’ to refer to herself. This confusion of pronoun usage is common among young children.

Some of the words she uses, she omits the prefixes of the sounds, such as ‘nother’ instead of ‘another’. This makes it easier to say, and shortens what she says.

Katharine on the other hand, who is involved in an activity, is communicating with her mum using more structured sentences.

Her mum is constantly questioning what she is doing (Skinners theory of reinforcement and imitation (response)) ‘Where’s his body?’ then Katharine replies; ‘Dere’s his legs, touching his mouf’. The pronunciation of the words isn’t as important as the fact that she is constructing sentences and answering questions herself. A word such as ‘there’ has a consonant cluster at the beginning which is hard to say for young children, therefore they change the pronunciation, so it still sounds like ‘there’ but is easier to pronounce. She understood the question her mum was asking, and actually understood it was a question, maybe because of the intonation her mum would’ve had in her voice. This shows that she is capable enough with language to turn take, in a small conversation with her mum, talking about a subject/activity. This shows that her language acquisition is slightly more advanced than Sophie’s, as Sophie doesn’t turn take, she doesn’t answer questions either, she asks them and is at the stage of using ‘why’ as a questioning word. Sophie’s conversation with her mum doesn’t flow like Katharine’s, it is full of statements and commands rather than a question – answer structure. Turn taking is apparent in both these conversations as the parents are initiating the conversation and getting the children to talk, causing no interruptions.

Sophie’s utterance lengths are longer than Katharine’s on average, but the fact that Katharine is involved in an activity has an affect on her utterances, due to concentration. Comparing the utterance lengths, Katharine’s are more advanced with the syntax structure, as her sentences make more grammatical sense than Sophie’s. This doesn’t make Sophie incorrect in her structure, she is just at a different stage of language acquisition than Katharine, and she is in the middle of developing her sentences. Age isn’t a factor in language development, as every child is different.

Katharine’s mother uses tag questions, such as; ‘isn’t it?’ This encourages Katharine to answer her mum. Katharine does also use tag questions herself, to get a response from her mum, ‘shall we’. She has probably learnt how to use tag questions from listening to the way her mum speaks. This is quite advanced for a child as it shows they use a different way of getting a response, rather than just saying ‘why’ or using commands. She also uses encouraging sounds, which is back channel behaviour; ‘uhuh’ and ‘mmhu’, to show she is listening and taking in what Katharine is saying.

Sophie’s carer/parent however doesn’t use tag questions and neither does Sophie. The conversation between the child and parent/carer is very simple and uses statements rather than questions, encouraging Sophie to talk. It is just a short conversation, with Sophie controlling it, rather then the parent/carer trying to encourage her to talk and say things. Of course, the pragmatics behind the conversations are for the parents/carers to get the children to speak and further their knowledge and understanding of the language. It is merely to get them to practice speaking, so they acquire language.

There is a large difference between the two conversations, as they are in different environments (the contexts are different), with the children taking part in different situations. This is a factor which affects their language use and the way they use it in the context.

After considering all of the factors to do with both conversations, I have come to the conclusion that Katharine is more linguistically developed and seems to be at a more advanced stage of language acquisition than Sophie. Katharine has a wider knowledge of the language and applies it to a conversation better than Sophie, as her sentences are constructed better and flow well.

Document Details

• Word Count 1027
• Page Count 2
• Level AS and A Level
• Subject English

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Analysing a spoken language acquisition transcript

Ideal for exam preparation and to help to scaffold students' written responses to child language data, this writing frame template can be used in a range of ways. It includes a series of prompts around the edge to help students to structure their responses to past paper data or child language transcripts.

Focusing on children's lexical, grammatical, phonological, pragmatic and semantic development, there are also reminders of key linguist studies (Nelson, Rescorla, Bellugi, McNeill, Halliday etc.). Enlarge it to A3 and place past paper questions within the frame or place over the top of their own essays or commentaries.  

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