THE DUAL NATURE OF LANGUAGE: BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL

CHARLOTTE M. NAVARRO

To promote literacy, teachers must be equipped with the understanding of the very nature of language acquisition. They need to understand to the core that language may be viewed in diverse perspectives in order for them to know where to start. The use of language evidences the active and conscious mental activity among humans. In terms of biological nature of a language, linguist Noam Chomsky pointed out that children are born with a mechanism that enables a person to understand language features, making the human brain set to receive a language. Chomsky’s theory supporting the biological nature of language differs from the view about the social nature of a language. Citing language social nature, the influence of external factors such as the native environment in which the language exists play a vital role in language acquisition. The orientation of Halliday’s theory supports this side which expounds that the capacity to acquire a language is dependent on the person’s interaction with the language native environment. This external factor triggers and nourishes language learning and language acquisition. Yet both views show clear differing insights and stand about the nature of language, both orientations prove similarly that language by nature is dependent on several factors that relate to the language users and the context by which the language is used. Moreover, both views also postulate that a language is not a single stimulus that grows solely, that it requires the interference of the human’s internal capacity to receive, to encode and to process, and the external factors that nourishes the acquisition of a language. Whichever weighs more to our own understanding, as teachers, we need to consider both as development of learners must be holistic and must not cease because of the barriers and limitations stated in each view.