According to Chomsky, “Children are not born with knowledge of English or Japanese or any other human language. Instead, they are born with knowledge of those things that are common to all human languages.” This means that children are born with some implicit knowledge of language, but they need to learn how their language (or the language they are learning) functions. Chomsky believes that language is innate. So, is reading innate?
If children are born with the innate ability to gain oral language skills and it argued that there is a connection between oral language and reading, is reading innate too? I don’t believe so. While working in a kindergarten class last year I was amazed by the language skills of most of the kids. Their vocabularies alone were baffling to me at times. They had so much to say and were very pointed in their speech. However, this vast wealth of language they seemed to posses did not correlate to their reading ability. The fact that they had such strong oral language skills did help them learn to read. However it did not seem to have an innate quality.
I agree with your comment that reading isn't as innate as oral laguage skills. I wonder if this is because there's so much talking around them and maybe not enough reading.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if reading would be innate anyway. Children that are read to daily from birth may still have trouble learning how to read. Just a thought.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment Emily.
Suzanne,
ReplyDeleteWhat amazes me while working with my 1st graders is the huge difference in the language skills of my students. As you said, many have an extensive and surprising vocabulary, but I have found that others have little to no knowledge of things I often take for granted that they know. For example, today only one student could tell me the name of a horse's shelter. They all knew what shelter meant, but couldn't come up with "barn". I believe that some students are missing out on many language experiences as young children that provide them with this type of vocabulary.