English Language Acquisition and Education Policies — LET Practice Questions

Noam Chomsky proposed the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) as an innate biological capacity — not a specific brain organ, but a mental mechanism — that lets children rapidly acquire language from limited input. Inside the LAD sits Universal Grammar (UG), the abstract set of principles and parameters that all human languages share. A useful image: the LAD is the toolbox; Universal Grammar is the tools inside it. The LAD is the device that does the work of acquiring language; UG is the content the LAD applies. Without this innate equipment, learning a language from sparse input would be impossibly slow — which is Chomsky's main argument against behaviorist accounts of language learning.

In Philippine Multilingual Education (MLE), young learners begin school in their mother tongue — often a regional language like Cebuano, Ilocano, or Hiligaynon — and use it as the medium of instruction from Kindergarten through Grade 3. Filipino and English are introduced as separate subjects and gradually become the medium in higher grades. The policy is anchored in RA 10533 (Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013), with DepEd Order No. 74 s. 2009 establishing the framework. The reasoning: students who first build literacy and reasoning skills in a language they already understand transfer those skills more effectively when they later move to Filipino and English.

Fossilization occurs when a second language learner stops improving and gets stuck with errors that should be correctable. Imagine a Filipino speaker who says 'I am going to the market yesterday' for years—the tense error is fossilized; despite repeated input and correction, it never changes. This happens when the interlanguage (the learner's developing language system) stabilizes prematurely, often due to limited input, reduced motivation, or learned tolerance of errors. Fossilization is the opposite of the continuous refinement most learners experience.