Towards a comprehensive model of child language acquisition

Abstract

The article briefly presents some theoretical approaches on language acquisition in children; analyzes, evaluates, and discusses the approaches in order to point out the advantages and limitations of the theories. In the later part of the article, with the hope of leading to a comprehensive model of language acquisition in children, we propose to present Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory to explain the process of language acquisition in children; discuss the different aspects of each subsystem in the picture of language acquisition under the bioecological system theory. We believe that ecological theory is the most multifaceted framework to reflect the diversity and complexity of language acquisition in children. Up to now, this theoretical approach has not been studied and applied much in Vietnam.