xeryfyn's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Julia: language acquisition Language acquisition has always been a subject of fascination, at least for me. From the time I was small and struggling with the dichotomy of understanding both major dialects of Chinese but having an incomprehensibly hard time trying to learn any other aspects of it, the idea of learning languages appealed to me. Throughout the rest of my schooling, I made other half-hearted attempts at other linguistic endeavours. French in junior high, German through a friend, and finally Japanese for the sake of a relationship that would eventually kill all other desires to learn/master languages other than English. In the end, I figured that if I was unable to learn languages, I might like to teach other people how to use and enjoy the English language. I was surrounded in high school with ESL (English as a Second Language) learners spanning the entire spectrum of fluency and competency. Their drive to master the nuances of English in turn drove me to my ultimate career goal. And that is essentially how I fell into my degree. Not only did I wanted to see the �a-ha!� moments, I wanted to create them. But all the academia in the world could not have ever prepared me for the ultimate language acquisition: watching my child develop and understand language. First non-verbally, her cues being pretty clear and intelligible to me from quite early on, and then watching her shift and change into a little person who expresses herself first in words, then phrases and now most recently, complete sentences. I have been blessed with a very verbose child and hearing her develop and grow in this respect brings me an unending well of joy. No amount of reading textbooks could have shown me so clearly the benefits of exposing Julia to books, to the magical realm of words that exist outside of our natural environment. You can tell parents �til they are blue in the face that they ought to read to their children from the time they are tiny infants so as to aid in the development of all other aspects of language acquisition, but until you see your child pick out a book that you have read a zillion times and start to �read� it to herself, the point would not be driven home. Like all kids, Julia gets �stuck� on things. And, perhaps owing to the sheer number of animal books out there, her fist obsession was with farm animals. She could quack like a duck from about 8 months onwards. She couldn�t say �duck� or even �mama� but boy could she quack. She moved into a fascination with �The Lion King� and was obsessed for a time with lions. She couldn�t say �lion� for at least 6 months more but she could �roar� every tie she saw a lion. She said �dada� more than �mama� and her first sentence, not more than a month ago, was �I want Daddy�. Its one of those little things that you try not to let get to you but boy, a bit of an ego bash, I tell you. Good thing that a close relationship to her daddy is something that I want to nurture (even more so now that peanut is going to come along and send her little world reeling) SJ and I once sat at the kitchen table when Julia was about a year old drilling polite manners into her �say thank you� �say please� using ice cream as bribery to hear those magical whispers. And, as funny as it seems now it has helped immensely to reinforce the concept of having nice manners. When hubby and I began to respond to Julia�s manners with enthusiastic �You�re Welcome!!!� comments, we found to our amusement that she also started to tack that on to the ends of her thank you�s (a very cute conglomerate �tank oo, �elcome�) and even began to correct cashiers who did not respond in kind. She now waves and says �thank you� when we leave drive through places�even drive through ATMs get a cursory �thank you� as we pull away. I have possibly one of the only self-scolding children. From a very early age we have tried to minimize the number of times we say �no� and instead say �careful� (if she is doing something like climbing furniture) or �hot� (if she wants to touch the stove) or �yucky� (mistakenly when she tried to touch the toilet, this later backfired and is still a bit of an issue we are sorting out). She would open cupboards that she knew were off limits and admonish herself �no, no, no� while opening the door and then closing it again. She would get up to jump on the couch cushions and yell �Careful!� before getting down. As she got older, she admonitions would translate into other situations that she wasn�t directly involved in�most notably while I was driving and a truck would drive close to our little car, she would call out from her car seat �Careful!!�, budding back seat driver that I am raising. And, most recently, as we were getting out of the car she reached out to touch the tires and I told her that they were �Dirty! Don�t touch�. She didn�t say anything and I assumed that it went in one ear and out the other. I should have known better because late that night she awoke in her sleep shouted �Don�t touch! Dirty!� and promptly fell back asleep. She talks about other things in her sleep too and I can generally gauge what she has been absorbing from our days. One of her favourite books is Dr. Suess�s ABC. She has gotten to the point where she can not only read it to herself but recite it in random points of the day, pausing in her imaginative play to announce �camel�c,c,c! alligator..a,a,a! elephant�e,e,e!� It is both gratifying and humbling to hear the impact that reading that book over and over again has had on her. She has some moments these days of regression, as though she knows what we want to hear (most often �peese� and �tank oo�) and is demonstrating her budding independence by choosing not to vocalize them. It is a bit frustration but I have hardly anything to complain about and so I take it in stride. And now, I ought to wrap it up, I can hear her calling for me. 6:45 p.m. - 2004-05-10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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