Bilingualism
I had to edit my first post and divide it into two separate post, so here is my conclusion of my Week 1 post for Week 2:
I believe that all the language developmental perspectives apply to the development of children and their language abilities. It seems to me that you need Behaviourist perspective because ‘imitation, practice, feedback on success, and habit format’ in a social environment is needed in a child’s development. However, the Innatist perspective argues that we are all born with the ability to learn and develop language skills as we do with walking. Then the Interactionist perspective derived from the Innatist perspective. The Interactionist perspective claims that the development of all humans is based on cognitive processes which are developed as any other skill a human can perform. As for the Connectionism/Usage-Based Perspective I believe also derives from all the above perspectives. I think this because they all involved environments and the initial ability to develop as a human being.
Bilingualism confuses me as a definition of L2 Learner. In my opinion if an L2 Learner is raised with two or more languages in their household and is fluent in all the languages (reading, writing, verbal) then this should not be considered for an L2 Learner definition. Yet, if the one or more of the languages are lost in the person's youth and they have difficulty as well as are not fluent in the languages then, yes, they should be categorized as an L2 Learner.
I did find it fascinating that in the first year of a child's life they cannot differentiate languages in the grammatical sense, but eventually learn (at different stages/ages) that there is a difference between the sentence and grammatical structure of each language spoken.
