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Monday, January 7, 2013

Schools Matter: Comments on C. Chomsky (1969): Stages in language development and reading exposure

Schools Matter: Comments on C. Chomsky (1969): Stages in language development and reading exposure:


Comments on C. Chomsky (1969): Stages in language development and reading exposure

“… perhaps wider reading should find a place in the curriculum”: Comments on Chomsky, C. 1969. Stages in language development and reading exposure. Harvard Educational Review 42 (1): 1-21.

S. Krashen

Carol Chomsky’s analysis of the order of acquisition of complex grammatical construction received a lot of attention when it was first published in 1969. Chomsky studied children’s ability to understand, for example, that the subject of “see” in: “The clown is eager to see” is the clown, but in “The clown is easy to see” the subject of see is not the clown but somebody else.

This study was noticed for several reasons: First, Chomsky found that acquisition of these complex constructions took place after age five, after the age when basic language acquisition is considered to