The role of teacher’s input on young foreign language learners’ unit analysis

Teaching English to young learners should not be based on the assumption that units of language that children are exposed to are just memorized wholes.  Usage-based account on language acquisition holds that children are at first limited to identification of similar frame and slots in holistic units, but those units gradually develop into productive patterns. Based on this account, the study explores how young foreign language learners in a classroom setting analyze units of language, and how the teacher’s input facilitates the analysis.  Categorization of young learners’ utterances shows that units are analyzed (whole to parts) for further constructions (parts to whole). Utterance schemas emerge, showing possibility of rule generations. However, I hypothesize that this happens in a condition where they are properly exposed to linguistic representations. Distribution of the teacher’s linguistic input plays an important role on children’s pattern finding, and the variation of units is the key to linguistic analysis.