1 language learning in early childhood preview

zone of proximal development
(ZPD)
.

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Vygotsky observed the importance of conversations that children have with
adults and with other children and saw in these conversations the origins of
both language and thought. The conversations provide the child with
scaffolding
, that is, a kind of supportive structure that helps them make the
most of the knowledge they have and also to acquire new knowledge.
Vygotsky’s view differs from Piaget’s. Piaget saw language as a symbol
system that could be used to express knowledge acquired through interaction
with the physical world. For Vygotsky, thought was essentially internalized
speech, and speech emerged in social interaction. Vygotsky’s views have
become increasingly central in research on L2 development, as we will see in
Chapter 4
.
Cross-cultural research
Since the 1970s, researchers have studied children’s language learning
environments in a great many different cultural communities. The research
has focused not only on the development of language itself, but also on the
ways in which the environment provides what children need for language
acquisition. Between 1985 and 1997, Dan Slobin edited five volumes devoted
to research on the acquisition of 28 languages, providing examples and
analyses of child language and the language-learning environment from
communities around the world (Slobin, 1985–1997). Then, the year 2000 saw
the launch of a resource for child language researchers, which is remarkable
in its scale: the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), where
researchers share child language data in dozens of languages in the form of
audio/video recordings and transcriptions of recorded language samples from
children and their 
interlocutors
 (MacWhinney, 2000). Another recent large-
scale resource on child language learning is the MacArthur-Bates
Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDIs) (Fenson et al., 2007), a
database that brings together information from questionnaires and checklists
completed by parents for a large number of children learning different
languages.
One feature of cross-cultural research on child language development is the
description of child-rearing patterns. Catherine Snow (1995) and others have
studied the apparent effects on language acquisition of the ways in which
adults talk to and interact with young children. In middle-class North
American homes, researchers observed that adults often modify the way they

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speak when talking to little children. This