Mời các bạn thử sức bản thân thông qua việc giải những bài tập trong IELTS Academic Reading Sample 99 - Investigating Children’s Language sau đây. Tài liệu phục vụ cho các bạn đang chuẩn bị cho kỳ thi sắp tới. | Investigating Children s Language A For over 200 years there has been an interest in the way children learn to speak and understand their first language. Scholars carried out several small-scale studies especially towards the end of the 19th century using data they recorded in parental diaries. But detailed systematic investigation did not begin until the middle decades of the 20th century when the tape recorder came into routine use. This made it possible to keep a permanent record of samples of child speech so that analysts could listen repeatedly to obscure extracts and thus produce a detailed and accurate description. Since then the subject has attracted enormous multi-disciplinary interest notably from linguists and psychologists who have used a variety of observational and experimental techniques to study the process of language acquisition in depth. B Central to the success of this rapidly emerging field lies the ability of researchers to devise satisfactory methods for eliciting linguistic data from children. The problems that have to be faced are quite different from those encountered when working with adults. Many of the linguist s routine techniques of enquiry cannot be used with children. It is not possible to carry out certain kinds of experiments because aspects of children s cognitive development such as their ability to pay attention or to remember instructions may not be sufficiently advanced. Nor is it easy to get children to make systematic judgments about language a task that is virtually impossible below the age of three. And anyone who has tried to obtain even the most basic kind of data a tape recording of a representative sample of a child s speech knows how frustrating this can be. Some children it seems are innately programmed to switch off as soon as they notice a tape recorder being switched on. C Since the 1960s however several sophisticated recording techniques and experimental designs have been devised. Children can be observed and .
