RESEARCH ABSTRACT ABOUT DEIXIS

ABSTRACT

The Use of Deixis in Children’s First Language Acquisition

(Hendra : hendrayusufok@gmail.com)

Children are unique and childhood is our past time. To observe children’s language is interesting and attractive to investigate. It is because they are not ‘a miniature of adult’ as they have their own world.  They are quite different from the adult. Their uniqueness invites us to the ongoing exploration and observation. 

Children’s language development, especially in first language (L1) acquisition, is beneficial to investigate and observe for it is useful to develop second language learning which children’s L1 also affects the other language level-vocabulary and grammar. Teachers can take benefit from children’s language acquisition.  

One of children’s language developments is how they use deixis. Deixis means 'pointing to' something. In verbal communication however, deixis in its narrow sense refers to the contextual meaning of pronouns, and in its broad sense, what the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given speech context. It is words or phrases that can only be understood from the context of the text or utterance where they are found.

 Children sometime use deictic expression in their conversations such as pronouns: first person (I), second person (you) and third person (he, she or it), and the like. They sometimes say things such as ‘Read you a story’ (instead of ‘me’) when handling over a favourite book. Children also are often hard to negotiate meaning, and then they try hard to find it through some deixis. When they notice a strange object, they will soon ask ‘what is that?’ It means that they use a deictic expression (that) to indicate something in the immediate context. 

This research, therefore, investigates and elaborates in details the use of deixis in children’s first language (L1) acquisition. In this study I will take a child aged two years as my respondents. There are two main questions in this study: (1) How do Children use deixis in children’s first language acquisition? (2) What kinds of deixis do children use more?

The data will be obtained from observation in daily life as he is my nephew. I record his conversation. So it will be easier to me in data collection.

The result of the study is that……..and it is rewarding especially for teachers as they can take benefits and make comparison between first language acquisition and second language learning then apply it in developing students’ second language learning.

Keywords

Deixis, Children’s First Language Acquisition