Language Acquisition and the Teaching and Learning of Writing

Abstract

OVER THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, linguists, psychologists, and educators have achieved an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the process of native oral language acquisition by children.1 For educators, one of the most important results of these years of research has been the implications of child language acquisition for the teaching and learning of aspects of language use, such as reading and foreign language study. Recent models of the reading process, such as those proposed by Kenneth and Yetta Goodman and by Frank Smith,2 have incorporated extensions from children's oral language development to children's acquisition of reading. In foreign language instruction, the code-cognitive approach and the results of error analysis and interlanguage studies also are based, in part, on implications from research on native language acquisition.3 The implications of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of children's oral native language acquisition have proven to be fruitful sources for the development of models, methods, and even materials in the teaching and learning of reading by children and foreign languages by adults. College level writing courses provide another relevant situation for which such implications should be considered. As with foreign language learning, college students studying writing are adults attempting to master an aspect of language use. As