Second Language Acquisition/Learning Education Essay

Second Language Acquisition
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January 13, 2021
Understanding the relationship between play and a child’s development is crucial for any psychologist, educators, and parents alike. It allows them to have a better understanding of the crucial nature of ‘play’ in a child’s psychosocial development as well as how to leverage this to improve the child’s learning acquisition and retention. Accordingly, one of the ways where the concept of play could be used is during a child’s secondary language acquisition (SLA). Compared to learning his first language, a child would usually find SLA more difficult due to the need to associate new vocabulary and grammar rules with one’s existing language repertoire. Thus, the author believes that when it comes to SLA, a child’s play presents an advantage, which makes the process much easier compared to adults.
The Concept of Child’s Play
Children are more likely to improve their SLA skills during playtime because they devote a lot of time and effort during this process. As aptly noted by Hymes, a child’s play is his avenue for thinking, language learning, and problem-solving, among others. It is where the child focuses most of his efforts on the new stimuli to learn and retain the new information that he comes in contact with CITATION And03 \l 1033 (Anderson, 2003). Accordingly, it could be seen that this proactive and ‘effortful’ learning of new stimuli helps in the overall learning process. This is in line with the theories in memory learning wherein it shows that ‘effortful learning’ is one of the ways to encode memory, which is one of the essential processes when it comes to SLA CITATION Car202 \l 1033 (Carpenter, Endres, & Hui, 2020).
Another reason why a child&rsquo...