ong with ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are culturally embedded and socially determined that constitutes language in its most essential sense" (Walsh, 1987, p. 197). M.A.K. Halliday (1975) notes that the semantic system--the system of meanings--which a child constructs develops concurrently with his social system, thus forming a unitary system (p.55).
In this perspective, it is neither scientifically correct nor pedagogically sound to separate knowledge, learning, and socialization conceptually and operationally.
Language learning, in its first stages, clearly does not resort to formal syntactical and lexical conceptualization. Nor is it formally taught this way. Carole Urzuß (1980) says it thus: "Linguistic behavior has its origins in a general social communication system to which a formal lexicon and grammar are ultimately added" (p.40). This is where the young child differs markedly from the older child, and it is the main reason why teaching/learning methodologies likewise need differ. Twelfth grade young people come to second-language learning from the formal school system which, whether rightly or wrongly, has infused (embedded, imprinted, engrammed) into students a cognitive consciousness of the form of language, i.e. of the first (school) language. There is ample evidence to show that after fifteen or so, flexibility in the acquisition of new sound patterns is greatly stunted. Rare is the person who loses his or her first-language accent in speaking another language learned after the age of fifteen or so. It is evident that the complex neural processing of language is intimately tied to cerebral maturation. Until a plateau is reached in the teen-years, the role of hemispheric dominance appears to be quite minor if at all discernible. Could puberty's hormonal revolution bring about a drastic deceleration of cerebral maturation concurrently with a more rigid (mature?) specialization and compartimentaliza...