I understand that most of us are pretty fed-up of the environment v/s heredity (or genetic or biological) or nature v/s nurture debate that has been going on in our sessions. But I want to add a few notes to it after today’s session on the process of language acquisition among children.
It must be noted that the debate cannot be pushed away as irrelevant because it is very much relevant if we are going to work in the field of education especially in the area of pedagogy and curriculum design. And we need to make a stand on the issues if we want to make curriculum for children. Our stand on this issue will decide what we expect of a child to learn, and what don’t expect of a child to learn.
Lam has written about this debate in his blog (click here to read) and nicely presented both sides of the argument and I’m not going to add anything to it. He had rightly pointed out the Practitioner’s point of view when he said that:
“as a practitioner who strives to bring changes in the educational environment of children, the rationality is more on the environmental aspect. After all, we cannot influence the heredity of a child, but we can influence the environment”.
To add one last point here after today’s session that there is no denying that both genetics and environment play important role especially if you happened to subscribe to today’s session that there is an innate ability in children to learn the complexities of languages without the involvement of the environment. The only question is –to what extend genetics or environment play a role in our learning?
To find the role of genes in learning
To find more information on Children’s innate ability to learn language, I recommend the following:
To find more information on Children’s innate ability to learn language, I recommend the following:
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