Language and Literacy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Language and Literacy - Essay Examplethither seems to be no agreement as to when terminology was first apply by homos. Some estimates discover as far back as deuce million years ago, during the time of Homo habilis, duration others date as recent as forty thousand (40,000) years ago, during the time of Cro-Magnon man. What is unarguably clear, however, is that language development is a continuous process affected by several mixer factors and that most modern-day human languages are a blend of several primitive ones. One of import feature of human language is arbitrariness of symbols and sounds. A symbol or sound only if needs to be affiliated to a particular concept or meaning, or even applied to the rules of grammar and becomes a part of the language. For instance, term the word nada is conceptualised to mean nothing in the Spanish language, for Croatian speakers, it means hope (Hudson, 2000).Through the program of this essay, I shall attempt a discourse of the various s ocial factors that come into play in language, within the context of literacy development. In this regard, three students currently undertaking a basic skills Brush Up Your English course at Halton College will be used as case studies. After a brief abstract of what has been said and researched on the impact of social factors on language development, I will give a brief account of the backgrounds of the three students in this group, before examining how the duo of region/geography and gender (two main social factors) have affected language development and literacy in these students.Language and Social FactorsSociolinguistics are social sciences that consider the interactions between languages and society as a whole. It is an established body of knowledge that studies language on a social basis. Thus, it involves an interest in interaction, variability and diversity in language (Deumert, 2005). Or as described by Trask (1999), it is the study of variation in language, or more preci sely, the variation within terminology communities. (Trask, 1999, p.283). This field of interest only dates back to the 1950s, this perhaps explain why most of the social influences on language development are still not fully comprehended. Within the Sociolinguistics school, there are two broad approaches to language variation prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivists tend to be found among the ranks of language educators and journalists, and not in the certain academic discipline of linguistics. They hold clear notions of what is right and wrong and tend to advocate what they consider as correct use of language according to set rules (Hudson, 2000). Describing this school of thought, Thorne (1997) states that it is associated with formal written and spoken language and is used in dictionaries, grammar books and language handbooks. (p.92). To further buttress this point, Thorne (1997) cited the example of the original version of the National Curriculum for schools idiom o n Standard English (SE) being taught as the language of wide social communication and was broadly required in formal contexts (p.138).Descriptivists, on the other hand, do not accept the prescriptivists notion of wild usage. They prefer to describe such variance as non-standard. Thus, they see Standard English as only one variety among manylinguistically speaking it can not legitimately be