Comprehensible Output:
Lesson from a Child Acquiring a First Language
Patuan Raja
The present article is intended to
examine what a child acquiring a first language did when he encountered a
communication block in his interaction with others. More specifically, it will
examine linguistic output modification attempted by the child when he was not
successful in getting his meaning across or in achieving his intended goal. The
corpus data, in the form of cards containing naturally occurring utterances
together with the context which were collected for one-year, starting at age
1;6 and ended at 2;6, were part of a participant-observation, parental-diary,
naturalistic case study into his early language development. In his attempts to
overcome a communication block, the child was found to make phonological,
lexical, morphological, and syntactical elaboration, thus producing
more-comprehensible output. Relevant implications are then forwarded for the
teaching of English in
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Raja, P. (2003, October). Comprehensible output: Lesson from a child acquiring a first language.
Paper presented at the 51st TEFLIN International Conference,
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