SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

1. SLA: learning a language subsequent to learning their first language. It may be an official or societally dominant language needed for basic purposes.

2. Target Language: any language that is the aim or goal of learning.

3. Bilingualism: the ability to use two languages

4. Multilingualism: learning more than 2 languages

5. Multilingual Competence: “the compound state of a mind with two [or more] grammars”

6. There are another L2 distictions to mention:

   • Foreign Language: acquired for future social context such as travel, cross-cultural communication
   • Library Language: used for study purposes, because books or material are in another language
   • Auxiliary Language: for immediate political setting or for wider communication
   • Language for Specific Purposes: jargon for hotel, technology, aviation, etc. For example, English for Academic Purposes

7. L1 vs L2 Acquisition

   • It has 3 states
     • Initial State: includes the underlying knowledge about language structures andprinciples that is in learners’ heads at the very start of L1 or L2 acquisi-tion
     • Intermediate State: overs all stages of basiclanguage development
     • Final State: is the out-come of L1 and L2 learning

8. Before we acquire any L2, we first learn our L1, that is the language we learn in our first 3 years.

   • Simultaneous Mutilingualism: multiple L1s acquired by about three years of age
   • Innate Capacity: part of language structure is genetically “given” to every human child

9. Different emphasis

   • Linguists emphasize the characteristics of the differences and similarities in the languages that are being learned, and the linguistic competence (underlying knowledge) and linguistic performance (actual production) of learners at various stages of acquisition
     • Framewors: Structuralism, Transformational - Generative Grammar, Functionalism, Principles and Parameters Model, Minimal Program
   • Psychologists and psycholinguists emphasize the mental or cognitive processes involved in acquisition, and the representation of language(s) in the brain
     • Frameworks: Behaviorism, Neurolinguistics, Information Processing, Humanistic Models, Connectionism, Processability
   • Sociolinguists emphasize variability in learner linguistic performance, and extend the scope of study to communicative competence (underlying knowledge that additionally accounts for language use, or pragmatic competence
     • Frameworks: Sociocultural Theory, Ethnography of Communication, Variation Theory, Acculturation Theory, Accommodation Theory, Social Psychology
   • Social psychologists emphasize group-related phenomena, such as identity and social motivation, and the interactional and larger social contexts of learning