Edexcel A-level English Language · Paper 2 · C1/C2 · Skinner, Chomsky, Bruner, Halliday and Tomasello — and how to make them earn marks in an essay
Every child on Earth — every language, every culture — learns to speak in roughly the same sequence, mostly without teaching. The deepest question in this subject is simply: how?
By the end you'll hold five answers at once — because the exam's highest levels go to candidates who show the data supports different theories at different moments, not to candidates with a favourite.
A child says "milk", receives milk and delight, and says it again. Adults model; children imitate; reinforcement carves the habit deeper.
Chomsky's argument: the speech children hear is limited and full of fragments, yet every child builds a full grammar from it — so the essential machinery must be inborn. Virtuous errors are the LAD's fingerprints: rules applied by a system nobody taught.
Scaffolding is the key term: adults support the child exactly where needed, then remove support as skill grows — like scaffolding coming off a finished building. In transcripts, scaffolding is visible and quotable:
| Adult move | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Modelling / recast | Child: "the /wɪŋ/" → Adult: "the swing!" — correct form returned, no criticism |
| Expansion | Child: "it big" → Adult: "it IS a very big one" — the grammar installed |
| Questions & reformulation | "What did you have? What did you eat?" — repeated invitations to talk |
Halliday catalogued the jobs early language performs. The four most useful in exam data:
| Function | The job | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| Instrumental | getting needs met | "more juice" |
| Interactional | bonding with people | "night-night mummy" |
| Imaginative | creating pretend worlds | "I going to be a crocodile" |
| Informative | giving information | "bees sad now" |
(The full set also includes regulatory — controlling others; personal — expressing self; heuristic — exploring the world with "why?".) Naming the function a child's utterance performs links language directly to the question's focus — what the language allows the child to do.
Children first learn whole chunks around things they care about ("eat him up" from stories), then gradually abstract the patterns inside them. Frequency and passion decide what's mastered first.
Each exhibit is a real-style transcript moment. Decide which theory it most strongly supports — argue aloud first, then click your verdict.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
Exhibit D:
Theory bolted on ("this supports Chomsky") earns little. Theory woven in — support AND challenge — earns the top levels. Compare:
| Bolted on | Woven in |
|---|---|
| "The child says 'eated'. This supports Chomsky." | "'Eated' cannot be imitated — no adult models it — so it evidences the productive rule-building nativists describe; yet the same child's 'it is broken', produced seconds after her father's expansion, shows interaction shaping her output exactly as Bruner's scaffolding predicts. The data rewards both accounts at different moments." |
Data: Noah, aged 3;2, helping his grandfather water the garden:
Write one theory-woven paragraph. Challenge: use at least TWO theories, with the data deciding when each applies.
From Lesson 3: the four developmental stages, in order.
From Lesson 2: "spaghetti" → /ˈgeti/. Name the pattern.
From Lesson 1: what one framing must never appear in your essay?
Close everything. Say all five — name, one-line idea, one piece of supporting data, one piece of challenging data. Then check the full table.