Personal Narrative: A Child's Brain

Decent Essays
After reviewing the topic about a child’s brain and how it is the most complex thing on earth. One thing immediately came to mind: Languages. I have been fascinated with how newborns and small children learn languages, and how they can master them just by listening and hearing.
I have taught English as a second language for many years, and worked with children who speak multiple languages without diligence. At one point, I was so impressed seeing these children speak them fluently, but then I realized; I went through exactly the same thing. I, myself grew up learning multiple dialects and languages. Some I learned at an earlier age, while some at an older age. The ones that I learned/heard since I was born were the ones that I don’t remember

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    I was ten years ago and I can still vividly remember sitting on an old, wooden rocking chair while the words of The Very Hungry Caterpillar trembled off my lips to a room full of second graders. I can recall the eagerness and excitement that filled their little faces as I flipped from page to page. There was an abundance of curiosity and desire to learn in that classroom that made me happy that I decided on skipping recess to read to the younger students. There was a fire that lit in my ten-year-old body that day. That was the day where I finally had an answer to all the “What do you want to be when you grow up?”…

    • 432 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    I am the oldest child. I have two younger siblings who I love unconditionally, but life as the oldest child is not the picnic most people think it is. I know this probably sounds cliché, becoming who I am because of my siblings, but it is the truth without them I would not be the person I am today. When I was four years old my mother became pregnant with my sister. My sister, Madison was born seven months before I turned five.…

    • 582 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    I kindly accepted that those people were my siblings. They were all part of my family, but I felt an immense distance. Whitney had her own mother standing by her. My eldest sister and brother shared the same mother, whom I never saw before.…

    • 249 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Great Essays

    Bilingual Myths

    • 1779 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Language development for infants happens in the first 2 years of life. It starts of slow, for the first 20 weeks the infant will typically make cooing sounds, and whilst cooing they will also make various vowel and consonant sounds. At 6-12 months the infant begins to babble, focuses on the phonemes, rhythm, has an intonation of language spoken in the home, and begins saying single words. 12-20 months they use word-gesture combinations combined with variations in intonation, and uses two-word sentences and they express a vocabulary of 100 to 200 words. Cultures all over the world show that an infant’s language development is the same, some babies speak before the normal language milestone, and some don’t speak till a little later.…

    • 1779 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    It was a Saturday morning March 17, 1996 I was eight months in my mother’s tummy and my due date was in mid April. Uncle Benito had the crazy idea of going to the snow all because my mother had never seen the snow. My mother told me of a hill she sled down from, a great slope that didn’t leave her feeling to good “No me siento muy bien.” My uncle rushed her to Granada Hills Hospital on the morning of March 19, 1996; I was born seven pounds at eight minutes until eight.…

    • 1420 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Monolingual Milestones

    • 1092 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Within the study “Semantic and Conceptual Knowledge Underlying Bilingual Babies’ First signs and Words”, Holowka, Brosseau-Lapré and Petitto attempt to gain understanding regarding bilingual babies reaching language milestones and their semantic capacities at the given milestones. The experiment addresses their hypotheses in four parts: Analysis I, which compares the bilingual milestones with monolingual milestones; Analysis II, which regards the use of TEs—or Translation Equivalents—and the bilingual babies’ recognition that they are learning two separate languages; Analysis III, focusing on the constraints of learning languages; and Analysis IV, considering the possibility that babies talk more about things they prefer to talk about. An…

    • 1092 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    I documented the children and assessed them after I demonstrated the project first. I stood back and watched the children not talking to them and listened. They were talking among themselves and saying what they thought would happen next. Children would even say the things I did as I presented the project. After sometime I asked the children what they were doing to hear their responses.…

    • 91 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    There are still some sectors of society that firmly, if mistakenly, believe that kids are too young to learn another language other than that spoken at home by their parents and siblings. The reasons usually given include the supposedly undue mental and physical stress that children must endure to learn a new language. Well, this could not be further from the truth where the why and how kids learn Spanish are concerned. Why Children Learn Faster Research has proven that children as young as three years old can learn a new language alongside their mother tongue. In fact, most children learn faster and easier than their adult counterparts when provided with similar language learning materials.…

    • 698 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    I have realized that there is a difference between children and adult in language learning. Children have the ability to learning a foreign language and achieve like native speakers more quickly than adults. I believe there are several key factors that play an important role in a child 's growth and learning new language. Children who know two languages and their mental performance are governed by the highest, and there are also long-term benefits, including that the acquisition of two languages. Unlike me, or adults who start learning the language in the later stages, they face many obstacles in learning and perhaps take a long time even mastered the language.…

    • 756 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Children’s ability to learn a language so rapidly and easily within the first few years of life is due to the way one was born and how one was…

    • 1292 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    It is believed that a child, who knows more than two languages, has a stronger variation in their linguistics, than a child who knows…

    • 719 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Many people grow up having a normal childhood, I being one of them. I grew up living in a warm, and welcoming household with my mother, father, and older brother. As a child, we all thought we had no worries in the world. Everything was peaceful and taken care of by our parents. We all eventually grow up, and have to become more responsible.…

    • 630 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Does age play a role in second language acquisition? In recent years, more and more parents have decided to introduce their children to one, or even several foreign languages in order to increase their opportunities in professional life. Parents are often uncertain whether or not their children could actually benefit from multilingualism and if an early acquisition of a foreign language could interfere with their child’s ability to fluently speak the mother tongue. To optimally prepare the little ones for their multilingual future, parents and educators increasingly hold the opinion that, when it comes to foreign language acquisition, it is beneficial to begin at a young age.…

    • 1312 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Empirical Study

    • 2261 Words
    • 10 Pages

    abilities. This position too has been criticized by various critics who point to the empirical studies which prove that the quality and amount of exposure to a language by a child affects his or her learning experience (Benson, 2010). Recent empirical studies by developmental psychologists point to the fact that language is exclusively human, biologically based in terms of capacity and the environment of a child influences the innate potential to learn. A number of empirical studies have found out that children have the ability to learn three or more language from their early years.…

    • 2261 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    I remember few things from when I was in elementary school however, one thing that has stayed in my memory is the sudden disappearance of my Spanish class. The class didn’t stop completely but it did become less frequent. Along with Spanish class, my art and gym classes were also becoming less frequent. Later I would find that these were the effects of budget cuts. I’m not sure if these cuts were made more apparent to me because of my mother’s position in my school or if I had noticed them by chance.…

    • 1363 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays