THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH SENTENCES BY CHILDREN OF FOUR AND FIVE YEARS OLD

Yulima Melsipa Lingga

doi:10.20527/jetall.v2i2.7331

Abstract

The objectives of this research were to find out types of English sentences acquired by boys and girls of four and five years old children. This research also aims to find the tendency of English acquisition between boys and girls. The sources or subjects of this research were 20 kindergarten students of K-2 David in TK Kristen Kalam Kudus Pematangsiantar, 11 boys and 9 girls. The research design is qualitative research design. The instrument of data collection used video recording to observe the subjects in real situation and naturally. The result reveals that, the types of English sentences acquired by boys and girls of four and five years old children are declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences, which are boys acquired interrogative sentences much more in their conversation while girls acquired declarative sentences more than other types. Girls or females articulate better and acquire a more extensive vocabulary than males or boys. Keywords: language acquisition, children of four and five, types of sentences

Highlights

Childhood is the golden age for creating simultaneous bilingual children due to the plasticity and virginity of the child’s brain to make for superior ability in acquiring the early sets or units of language’ (Lightbown and Spada 1999: 29)
Sauter (2000) stated that English sentences can be classified according to communicative functions and patterns into four basic finds: Declarative, Interrogative, Imperative and Exclamatory sentence patterns, they added that when people communicate, they communicate for various reasons, but the four main reasons are:
By using purposive or convenience sampling, this study will be conducted the subjects from TK Kristen Kalam Kudus Pematangsiantar, located in Jln

Summary

Introduction

Childhood is the golden age for creating simultaneous bilingual children due to the plasticity and virginity of the child’s brain to make for superior ability in acquiring the early sets or units of language’ (Lightbown and Spada 1999: 29). The English language is considered as a universal language, mainly because it is the most spoken language worldwide. English is one of the most studied languages all across the world, most of the countries teach it as a second language from primary school. Language acquisition can be defined as the study of the process of children in acquiring language. It is such a foreign language for Indonesian people. As an international language or one of spoken worldwide language, it is taught since childhood in many schools. Worldwide we see that most of the communication sources, information and material sold or given to us are in English, for example: films, TV shows, music, documentaries, popular brands, etc.

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