Ecology of Language Acquisition
By: edited by Jonathan Leather, Jet Dam
Contributors: Dam, Jet
Series: Educational Linguistics -- 1; Educational linguistics -- 1.
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Dordrecht
Language: eng
Format: [electronic resource] /
Number of pages: 225
ISBN-13: 9789048161706; 9789401703413
Subjects: Linguistics; Anthropological linguistics; Artificial intelligence; Psycholinguistics
Description: While most research on language acquisition continues to consider the individual primarily in closed-system terms, Ecology of Language Acquisition emphasizes the emergence of linguistic development through children's and learners' interactions with their environment - spatial, social, cultural, educational, and so on - bringing to light commonalities between primary language development, child and adult second-language learning, and language acquisition by robots. Such a situated, context-responsive perspective on acquisition is able to interrelate insights from a variety of paradigms and disciplines while avoiding unjustifiable appeals to normativity. The theoretical and empirical studies presented here challenge a number of dominant ideas in language acquisition theory and mark an important new research orientation. This work should be of interest to language acquisition researchers and professionals in a wide range of specialisms.
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Table of contents: title: Notes on the Authors; title: Acknowledgements; title: 1. Towards an ecology of language acquisition; title: 2. Critical realism, ecological psychology, and imagined communities: foundations for a naturalist theory of language acquisition; title: 3. A tale of two computer classrooms: the ecology of project-based learning; title: 4. From joint attention to language acquisition: how infants learn to control others' behavior; title: 5. Beyond cognitive determination: interactionism in the acquisition of spatial semantics; title: 6. Language socialization in children's religious education: the discursive and affective construction of identity; title: 7. An integrational linguistic view of coming into language: reflexivity and metonymy; title: 8. The ecology of an SLA community in a computer-mediated environment; title: 9. Robot babies: what can they teach us about language acquisition?- 10. Borrowing words: appropriations in child second language discourse; title: 11. Language acquisition behind the scenes: collusion and play in educational settings; title: Index.