Immersion. Young children are surrounded by language as it is used by others in their environmenl. Beginning al birth, children hear the conversations of Uieir parents, siblings, and 0U1ers in their environment.
Every language teacher will argue that immersion is the best way to learn a language because it is all around you and your brain begins to comprehend the language that you're constantly hearing. It's cool because we don't think about being immersed in our native language as babies.
hus, language is "taught" through situations in which children are encouraged to imilato others' speech and to devolop associations between verbal stimuli (i.e., words) and objects (Harris, 1992).
I think that it is very interesting that language and speech comes so naturally to humans that we don't even have to worry about teaching a child how to speak, but we have to work to teach children how to read.
In the field of child study, there has been a long-standing debate about the roles of nature and nurture in influencing an individual's development (Karmiloff & Karmiloff-Smilh, 2001; Sanlrock, 2001). This debate has also been evident in the development of theoretical perspectives on language development. Is a child a "blank slate" at birth, and do the experiences or "nurture" provided in the envi-ronment predominantly determine language development'! Or is the child already "preprogrammed" for language develo11ment in such a way that heredity and matu-ration are the major influences, with experience and context exerting only limited influence'?
I love this debate because there is no good answer for it. Part of who we are has to come from our DNA, but our environment plays a huge role in shaping who we are. There is never one trait or characteristic that you can place solidly at one end or the other.
Through lan-guage, we represent the world and l.oarn about the world. Without language, a society and its culture cannot exist.
Every language is so unique. No two people from different cultures can have the same exact thought because of the way their languages work. The language holds the culture of the society.