What is second language acquisition (SLA)?

SLA is the way in which people learn a language other than their mother tongue inside or outside the classroom.

What is the reason for the emergence of the systematic study of how people acquire a second language?

Is the emergence of the systematic study of how people acquire L2 haphazard/accidental ? Elucidate /illuminate /illustrate.

No, this has been a time of the global village and the world wide web when learning a language became as a means of obtaining an education or securing employment .At such a time there is an obvious need to discover about how second languages are learned.

What are the goals of studying SLA?

1-The description of L2 acquisition i.e.to describe how L2 acquisition proceeds and explain this process and why some learners seem to be better at it than others.

2-The description and identification of the external and the internal factors that account for why learners acquire an L2in the way they do.

What are the external and internal factors that account for why learners acquire an L2 in the way they do?

Factors

External factors Internal factors

1-social milieu in which the leaning takes place 1- cognitive mechanisms 2-The input (simplified or natural) which enable the learner to extract information about L2 from the input. L2 learner bring enormous amount of knowledge to the task of learning an L2 because A-They have learnt a language L1 and we expect them to draw on them when learning L2. B-They possess general knowledge about the world which they can draw on to help them understand L2 input C-Possess communication strategies that can help them to make effective use of their L2 knowledge. D-Learners are equipped with knowledge of how language in general work. This help them to learn a particular lang.,for example, There are inbuilt constraints on what is grammatically possible). E-There are a set of inherent factors that explain the individual differences in the rate of learning(aptitude ,natural disposition).

Second-language acquisition (W)

Second-language acquisition,second-language learning, orL2 (language 2)acquisition, is the scientific discipline devoted to studying the process by which people learn asecond language. It is often abbreviated toSLA..

Itrefers to any language learned in addition to a person'sfirst language; although the concept is namedsecond-language acquisition, it can also incorporate the learning of third, fourth, or subsequent languages. The field of second-language acquisition is a sub-discipline ofapplied linguistics, but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education.

A central theme in SLA research is that ofinterlanguage, the idea that the language that learners use is not simply the result of differences between the languages that they already know and the language that they are learning, but that it is a complete language system in its own right, with its own systematic rules. This interlanguage gradually develops as learners are exposed to the targeted language. The order in which learners acquire features of their new language stays remarkably constant (persistent/ perpetual/ endless), even for learners with different native languages, and regardless of whether they have had language instruction. However, languages that learners already know can have a significant influence on the process of learning a new one. This influence is known aslanguage transfer.

The primary factor driving (motivating /energizing:give vitality and enthusiasm to) SLA appears to be the language input that learners receive. Learners become more advanced the longer they are immersed ( engrossed/ absorbed ) in the language they are learning, and the more time they spend doing free voluntary reading. Interestingly, theMonitor Model, developed by Stephen Krashen, a linguist, makes a distinction between language acquisition and language learning (acquisition-learning distinction), claiming that acquisition is a subconscious process, where learning is a conscious one. According to this hypothesis, the acquisition process in L2 is the same as L1 (Language 1) acquisition. The learning process is consciously learning and inputting the language being learned. [1]However, this goes as far as to state that input is all that is required for acquisition. Subsequent work, such as theinteraction hypothesisand thecomprehensible output hypothesis, has suggested that opportunities for output and for interaction may also be necessary for learners to reach more advanced levels.

Research on how exactly learners acquire a new language spans (extents , exceeds, overruns, transcends, surpasses) a number of different areas. Cognitive approaches to SLA research deal with the processes in the brain that underpin ( reinforce, support,strengthen) language acquisition, for example how paying attention to language affects the ability to learn it, or how language acquisition is related to short-term and long-term memory. Sociocultural approaches reject the notion that SLA is a purely psychological phenomenon, and attempt to explain it in a social context. Some key social factors that influence SLA are the level of immersion, connection to the L2 community, and gender. Linguistic approaches consider language separately from other kinds of knowledge, and attempt to use findings from the wider study of linguistics to explain SLA. There is also a considerable body of research about how SLA can be affected by individual factors such as age, learning strategies, and affective factors. A commonly discussed topic regarding age in SLA is thecritical period hypothesis, which suggests that individuals lose the ability to fully learn a language after a particular age in childhood. Another topic of interest in SLA is the differences between adult and child learners. Learning strategies are commonly categorized as learning or communicative strategies, and are developed to improve their respective acquisition skills. Affective factors are emotional factors that influence an individual's ability to learn a new language. Common affective factors that influence acquisition are anxiety, personality, social attitudes, and motivation.

Individuals may also lose a language through a process calledsecond-language attrition. This is often caused by lack of use or exposure to a language over time. The severity of attrition depends on a variety of factors including level ofproficiency, age, social factors, and motivation at the time of acquisition. Finally, classroom research deals with the effect that language instruction has on acquisition.

Contents

  • 1Definitions
  • 2Research background
  • 3Stages
  • 4Comparisons with first-language acquisition
  • 5Learner language
  • 5.1Interlanguage
  • 5.2Sequences of acquisition
  • 5.3Variability
  • 6Language transfer
  • 7Input and interaction
  • 8Cognitive factors
  • 9Sociocultural factors
  • 9.1Sociocultural approaches
  • 10Linguistic factors
  • 11Individual variation
  • 11.1Age
  • 11.2Strategies
  • 11.3Affective factors
  • 12Attrition
  • 13Classroom second-language acquisition
  • 14See also
  • 15Notes
  • 16References
  • 17Bibliography

1- Definitions: X

Second languagerefers to any language learned in addition to a person'sfirst language; although the concept is namedsecond-language acquisition, it can also incorporate the learning of third, fourth, or subsequent languages.[2]Second-language acquisition refers to what learners do; it does not refer to practices inlanguage teaching, although teaching can affect acquisition. The termacquisitionwas originally used to emphasize the non-conscious nature of the learning process,[note 1]but in recent yearslearningandacquisitionhave become largely synonymous.

SLA can incorporateheritage language learning,but it does not usually incorporatebilingualism. Most SLA researchers see bilingualism as being the end result of learning a language, not the process itself, and see the term as referring to native-like fluency. Writers in fields such as education and psychology, however, often use bilingualism loosely to refer to all forms of multilingualism.[4]SLA is also not to be contrasted with the acquisition of aforeign language; rather, the learning of second languages and the learning of foreign languages involve the same fundamental processes in different situations.[5]

2-Research background:

The academic discipline of second-language acquisition is a subdiscipline ofapplied linguistics. It is broad-based and relatively new. As well as the various branches oflinguistics, second-language acquisition is also closely related to psychology,cognitive psychology, and education. To separate the academic discipline from the learning process itself, the termssecond-language acquisition research,second-language studies, andsecond-language acquisition studiesare also used.

SLA research began as an interdisciplinary field, and because of this it is difficult to identify a precise starting date.[6]However, two papers in particular are seen as instrumental (contributive) to the development of the modern study of SLA: Pit Corder's 1967 essay"The Significance of Learners' Errors", and Larry Selinker's 1972 article"Interlanguage".[7]The field saw a great deal of development in the following decades.[6]Since the 1980s, SLA has been studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and theoretical perspectives. In the early 2000s, some research suggested an equivalence between the acquisition of human languages and that of computer languages (e.g. Java) by children in the 5 to 11 year age window, though this has not been widely accepted among educators.[8]Significant approaches in the field today are: systemic functional linguistics, sociocultural theory, cognitive linguistics,Noam Chomsky'suniversalgrammar,skillacquisition theoryandconnectionism.[

There has been much debate about exactly how language is learned, and many issues are still unresolved. There are many theories of second-language acquisition, but none are accepted as a complete explanation by all SLA researchers. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the field of SLA, this is not expected to happen in the foreseeable (predictable/probable/likely anticipated)future.

3-Stages:

Haynes divided the process of second-language acquisition into five stages:

1-preproduction, 2-early production, 3-speech emergence,4- intermediate fluency, and 5-advanced fluency.[9]The first stage, preproduction, is also known as thesilent period. Learners at this stage have a receptive vocabulary of up to 500 words, but they do not yet speak their second language.[9]Not all learners go through a silent period. Some learners start speaking straight away, although their output may consist of imitation rather than creative language use. Others may be required to speak from the start as part of a language course. For learners that do go through a silent period, it may last around three to six months.[10]

The second of Hayne's stages of acquisition is early production, during which learners are able to speak in short phrases of one or two words. They can also memorize chunks of language, although they may make mistakes when using them. Learners typically have both an active and receptive vocabulary of around 1000 words. This stage normally lasts for around six months.[9]

The third stage is speech emergence. Learners' vocabularies increase to around 3000 words during this stage, and they can communicate using simple questions and phrases. They may often make grammatical errors.

The fourth stage is intermediate fluency. At this stage, learners have a vocabulary of around 6000 words, and can use more complicated sentence structures. They are also able to share their thoughts and opinions. Learners may make frequent errors with more complicated sentence structures.

The final stage is advanced fluency, which is typically reached somewhere between five and ten years of learning the language. Learners at this stage can function at a level close to native speakers.[9]

The time taken to reach a high level of proficiency can vary depending on the language learned. In the case of native English speakers, some estimates were provided by the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of theU.S. Department of State, which compiled approximate learning expectations for a number of languages for their professional staff (native English speakers who generally already know other languages). Of the 63 languages analyzed, the five most difficult languages to reach proficiency in speaking and reading, requiring 88 weeks (2200 class hours), areArabic,Cantonese,Mandarin,Japanese, andKorean. The Foreign Service Institute and theNational Virtual Translation Centerboth note that Japanese is typically more difficult to learn than other languages in this group.[11]

4-Comparisons with first-language acquisition:

Adults who learn a second language differ from childrenlearning their first languagein at least three ways: children are still developing their brains whereas adults have conscious minds, and adults have at least a first language that orients their thinking and speaking. Although some adult second-language learners reach very high levels of proficiency, pronunciation tends to be non-native. This lack of native pronunciation in adult learners is explained by thecritical period hypothesis. When a learner's speech plateaus, it is known asfossilization.

Some errors that second-language learners make in their speech originate in their first language. For example,Spanishspeakers learningEnglishmay say "Is raining" rather than "It is raining", leaving out thesubjectof the sentence. This kind of influence of the first language on the second is known asnegativelanguage transfer.Frenchspeakers learning English, however, do not usually make the same mistake of leaving out "it" in "It is raining." This is becausepronominaland impersonal sentence subjectscan be omitted(or as in this case, are not used in the first place) in Spanish but not in French.[12]The French speaker knowing to use a pronominal sentence subject when speaking English is an example ofpositivelanguage transfer.

Also, when people learn a second language, the way they speak their first language changes in subtle ways. These changes can be with any aspect of language, from pronunciation and syntax to gestures the learner makes and the language features they tend to notice.[13]For example, French speakers who spoke English as a second language pronounced the /t/ sound in French differently from monolingual French speakers.[14]This kind of change in pronunciation has been found even at the onset(commencement) of second-language acquisition; for example, English speakers pronounced the English /p t k/ sounds, as well as English vowels, differently after they began to learn Korean.[15]These effects of the second language on the first ledVivian Cook to propose the idea ofmulti-competence, which sees the different languages a person speaks not as separate systems, but as related systems in their mind.[16]

5-Learner language:

Learner languageis the written or spoken language produced by a learner. It is also the main type of data used in second-language acquisition research.[17]Much research in second-language acquisition is concerned with the internal representations of a language in the mind of the learner, and in how those representations change over time. It is not yet possible to inspect(examine/scrutinize/check) these representations directly with brain scans or similar techniques, so SLA researchers are forced to make inferences about these rules from learners' speech or writing.[18]

5-1 InterlanguageFinal

Originally, attempts to describe learner language were based oncomparing different languagesand onanalyzing learners' errors. However, these approaches weren't able to predict all the errors that learners made when in the process of learning a second language. For example, Serbo-Croat speakers learning English may say "What does Pat doing now?", although this is not a valid sentence in either language.[19]

To explain this kind of systematic error, the idea of theinterlanguagewas developed.[20]An interlanguage is an emerging language system in the mind of a second-language learner. A learner's interlanguage is not a deficient version of the language being learned filled with random errors, nor is it a language purely based on errors introduced from the learner's first language. Rather, it is a language in its own right, with its own systematic rules.[21]It is possible to view most aspects of language from an interlanguage perspective, includinggrammar,phonology,lexicon, andpragmatics.

There are three different processes that influence the creation of interlanguage:[19]

  • Language transfer. Learners fall back on their mother tongue to help create their language system. Transfer can be positive, i.e. promote learning, or negative, i.e. lead to mistakes. In the latter case, linguists also use the term interference error.
  • Overgeneralization. Learners use rules from the second language in roughly the same way that children overgeneralise in their first language. For example, a learner may say "I goed home", overgeneralizing the English rule of adding-edto create past tense verb for
  • ms. English children also produce forms like goed, sticked, bringed. German children equally overextend regular past tense forms to irregular forms.
  • Simplification. Learners use a highly simplified form of language, similar to speech by children or inpidgins. This may be related tolinguistic universals.

The concept of interlanguage has become very widespread in SLA research, and is often a basic assumption made by researchers.[21]

5-2 Sequences of acquisition:

1. / Plural-s / Girls go.
2. / Progressive-ing / Girls going.
3. / Copula forms ofbe / Girls are here.
4. / Auxiliary forms ofbe / Girls are going.
5. / Definite and indefinite
articlestheanda / The girls go.
6. / Irregular past tense / The girls went.
7. / Third person-s / The girl goes.
8. / Possessive 's / The girl's book.
A typical order of acquisition for English, according to Vivian Cook's 2008 bookSecond Language Learning and Language Teaching.[22]

Order of acquisition

In the 1970s, several studies investigated the order in which learners acquired different grammatical structures.[note 2]These studies showed that there was little change in this order among learners with different first languages. Furthermore, it showed that the order was the same for adults and children, and that it did not even change if the learner had language lessons. This supported the idea that there were factors other than language transfer involved in learning second languages, and was a strong confirmation of the concept of interlanguage.

However, the studies did not find that the orders were exactly the same. Although there were remarkable similarities in the order in which all learners learned second-language grammar, there were still some differences among individuals and among learners with different first languages. It is also difficult to tell when exactly a grammatical structure has been learned, as learners may use structures correctly in some situations but not in others. Thus it is more accurate to speak ofsequencesof acquisition, in which specific grammatical features in a language are acquired before or after certain others but the overall order of acquisition is less rigid. For example, if neither feature B nor feature D can be acquired until feature A has been acquired and if feature C cannot be acquired until feature B has been acquired but if the acquisition of feature D does not require the possession of feature B (or, therefore, of feature C), then both acquisition order (A, B, C, D) and acquisition order (A, D, B, C) are possible.