Second Language Acquisition Of Children 3-4 Years Old. Immersion Environment And Development

Child development is the core content of early childhood education, and the language development of a child plays a key role in child's full scale development. The massive research in recent years indicated bilingual develops to a child has the positive influence. Children who were very fluent at two languages did better in all the tests of analyzing inference, concept forming and cognition flexibility than those contemporaries who speak only one language (Hakuta, Ferdman, & Diaz, 1987). However, understanding ourselves seems hard for human beings, although many researchers had been working hard for decades, they still contain different ideas about "How does a child learn a second language?" All the researches have shown one result: language acquisition is a very complicated process. The different conditions of region, nationality, mother tongue, sex, age and education have enriched the child's language development research, and they also have provided broader research areas for it and more research topics as well.After the 80's of the 20^th century, with the background of China's reform and open policy and the global child language education reform, low age tendency in second language learning in China's early bilingual education has become a fact that we must face to. Along with the fast development of bilingual education, China has become the country which has the most second language learners, but our researches still stay at the stage of introduction and transferring (Yang Xueli, 2000), this is obviously not enough to the needs of our society.As we have totally different social and educational conditions from other countries, we must develop our own research of second language education, and start the new period of empirical study in this field. This research just contributes a little for the development of our empirical study on second language acquisition by the supporting of this background.This research focuses on the Study on Second Language Acquisition and Development of 3-4-year-old Child in English Immersion Classes" and analyzes child's second language from the following aspects: phonetics, semantics, grammar and pragmatics, in order to find some characters and rules in child's second language learning process. In addition, error analysis is also used in the research to analyze child's interlanguage and get something worthy in their errors.We first tried the Longitudinal Studies in the field of early childhood second language research in China and the international Child Language Data Exchange System, known as CHILDES, was adopted to analyze the child's language material quantitatively.In the ten-month time, the researcher has collected 21 class hour language materials and all language materials has carried on the writing duplication, and coded in five different items. The researcher has analyzed the pronunciation, the grammar and the syntax, the semantics and the language uses of the child language according to the results of CLAN, which is the analyzing system of CHILDES.This research obtains the valuable research results in child second language acquisition and development, and the conclusions can be summarized as the following:1. 3-4- year-old child has strong ability on distinguishing the English phoneme. The difficulty which displays in the individual phoneme pronunciation possibly dues to the teacher's less emphasizing, or the child's immature speech organs.2. In English immersion classes, child's vocabulary presents a stable growth tendency along with the study progress, but the increasing rate of vocabulary presents a drop tendency after a fixed time of growth.3. The importance of the communicative vocabulary demonstrates the establishment of the child-adult exchange relation is the foundation of a child's study occurring. This discovery makes us to realize thoroughly that a good communication between teachers and students, a healthy, harmonious, equal relationship between teachers and students are extremely important to child's development.4. The development of child's vocabulary constitution, vocabulary and sentence patterns are closely connected with the teacher's language input value, input way, course content and child's cognition level.5. The phenomenon that child obtains some main English grammar morpheme by certain order indicates that the second language acquisition possibly has the Natural Order/Route.6. In English immersion activities, the child's language is not sufficient rich, and this may be affected by the teacher's intelligence and experience, the curriculum resources, and the students' individual differences. For instance, some high frequency English words, which compose the massive commonly used phrases in English, such as more, out, up, gone, for and so on, are common vocabularies for the contemporary child whose mother tongue is English, but very few or even not appeared in the child's language of the experimental class.