Why Is the Native Language Learnt So Well
How does it happen that children learn their mother tongue so well When we compare them with adults learning a foreign language, we often find this interesting fact. A little child without knowledge or experience often succeeds in a complete mastery of the language. A grown-up person with fully developed mental powers, in most case, may end up with a faulty and inexact command. What accounts for this difference
Despite other explanations, the real answer in my opinion lies partly in the child himself, partly in the behavior of the people around him. In the first place, the time of learning the mother tongue is the most favorable of all, namely, the first years of life. A child hears it spoken from morning till night and, what is more important, always in its genuine form, with the right pronunciation, right intonation, right use of words and right structure. He drinks in all the words and expressions, which come to him in a flash, ever-bubbling spring. There is no resistance:there is perfect assimilation.
Then the child has, as it were, private lessons all the year round, while an adult language-student has each week a limited number of hours, which he generally shares with others. The child has another advantage. he hears the language in all possible situations, always accompanied by the right kind of gestures and facial expressions. Here there is nothing unnatural, such as is often found in language lessons in schools, when one talks about ice and snow in June or scorching heat in January. And what a child hears is generally what immediately interests him. Again and again, when his attempts at speech are successful, his desires are understood and fulfilled.
Finally, though a child’s "teachers" may not have been trained in language teaching, their relations with him are always close and personal. They take great pains to make their lessons easy. So far as language teaching is concerned, the teacher’s close personal relationship with the student is more important than the professional language teaching training he has received.