Exploring Language and Learning

Abstract

<p>How do we learn language? Is it the same as how we learn to walk or how we learn to do mathematics? These are the questions that characterise the long theoretical journey by researchers and thinkers which produced the theories of language acquisition which underlie much of the pedagogy of the primary English literacy classroom today. The first section of this chapter outlines the three main language acquisition theories that emerged early in the twentieth century: the behaviourist theory of language acquisition; the cognitivist theory of language acquisition; and the sociocultural theory of language acquisition.</p>