1. Child Language Acquisition

2. David Crystal Born in Holyhead, North Wales
Linguistic, Writer, Editor, Lecturer, & Broadcaster
Attended the University of Reading (England) & University College London
Published 100+ books

3. David Crystal Fields of Study: Linguistics (clinical) Religion
Education (Professor)
Best known for his two encyclopedias for Cambridge University Press, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

4. Children & Language
Crystal believes that language acquisition is not just about producing sounds, but being able to perceive them and to gain an understanding of the utterances that people make.

5. David Crystal’s 5 Stages
Amorphous stages
Trial & Error
Different types of questioning, intonation, and recognizing rhythm of voice
No name or title

6. Stage 1 Children say things for 3 reasons: To get something they want
To get someone’s attention
To draw attention to something
Children don’t have much of a vocabulary
Children use a single word to name things
Children begin to relate objects with other things, places, people, and events

7. Stage 2 Children begin to ask questions
Children become concerned with naming and classifying things by frequently asking “what’s that”
They begin to learn opposites and pairs
Ex. Hot/cold
Ex. Up/down
Their questions often begin with interrogative pronouns (what, where) followed by a noun or verb such as “where gone?”

8. Stage 3
By now children would be asking lots of different questions but often signaling that they are questions with intonation alone
“Sally play in garden mummy?”
-This is made into a question by varying the tone of voice.
Children soon begin to express more complex wants by using more grammatically correct language

9. Stage 4
This is when children use increasingly complex sentence structures and begin to:
Explain things
Ask for explanations using the word: “why?”
Making a wide range of requests: “shall I do it?”

10. Stage 5
By this stage children regularly use language to do all the things that they need it for. They give information, asking and answering questions, requesting directly and indirectly, suggesting, offering, stating and expressing.
As well as making general references to past and future, children now talk about particular times
By this stage children are very comfortable with all questions beginning with words like: “What?” and “When?” where the subject and verb are reversed such as “what does that mean?”

11. Works Cited
Child language acquisition theory- Chomsky, Crystal, Aitchison & Piaget. Wordpress.com. N.d. Web. 11 Apr

12. THE END
GOD BLESS (: