1 What are we trying to explain?
Let’s start by thinking about what we are trying to explain when we explore language development. Each of the videos below explain a different aspect of child language this course considers.
Transcript: Video 1 Development
NARRATOR
In this course, you are going to explore how children learn language. Children are constantly adapting, growing, changing. The social environment around them is also changing. This course explores the skills children need to develop language, how those skills change over time, and how the environment around them changes.
Transcript: Video 2 Diversity
NARRATOR
Whatever language learning skills children have, those skills must be powerful enough not just to learn one language, but to potentially learn any one of the 7,000 or so languages of the world. You will discover that different languages show huge diversity in their sounds, meaning, and grammar.
Yet children seem equally able to acquire any one of them. How are they capable of learning that diversity? Many children will grow up speaking more than one language. In fact, growing up multilingual is the global norm.
Transcript: Video 3 Relationships
NARRATOR
Children typically learn language from the people around them, such as parents, carers, and older siblings. Children play with others and observe them. They make meaning with them and they use language to cooperate and compete with others. Learning to use language is fundamentally a social activity, and you are going to explore the importance of those social relationships.
Clearly there is a lot to understand! But this course will take it step by step, introduce new ideas slowly, and break complex concepts down into simpler ones.
In the next section, you’ll try and imagine yourself as an infant learning language and think about some of the challenges they might face.