Conversational Interaction to Develop the Two-Word Stage of A Child ’ s Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

Indonesian children are mostly taught to speak Bahasa Indonesia as their first language (L1) since they were born. However, there is a common tendency nowadays where most of Indonesian parents start to teach their newborn with the thought that the best time to teach their children a second language (L2) is the same time they are learning their first language (L1). Therefore, English becomes a second language (L2) for those children. The purpose of this research is to examine how conversational interaction in a form of daily conversation used by an Indonesian parent support a child’s L2 acquisition at age 18 to 20 months. In addition, the study aims to get insights into how Bahasa Indonesia as the child’s L1 influences the acquisition of English as his L2 through conversational interactions. Designed as a case study, the data for this study were collected by videotaping daily conversation events and were analyzed qualitatively. Results indicate that conversational interaction are instrumental in triggering the child’s language acquisition specifically in the process of twoword pairing stage. The pattern of utterances also appeared during the period of the research. Keywords—conversational interaction; two-word stage; second language acquisition