Second Language Acquisition

Second Language Acquisition

1. Theories

   • Corder (1967) and Selinker
     • Argued researchers must turn for evidence to the actual language produced by learners as they try to communicate in the target second language (L2). This meant examining the ‘errors’ learners produce not as something to be pre-empted or remedied but as objects of study that hold great value for understanding L2 acquisition.
     • These developments made interlanguage investigations during the 1970s and 1980s increasingly more focused on cognitive and psycholinguistic aspects of acquisition. Nevertheless, a few SLA researchers also working within the interlanguage tradition turned their attention to exploring the potential of quantitative sociolinguistic theories of variation for the study of L2 development
   • Stephen Krashen (1985).
     • Krashen proposed that:
       • (A) the core ingredient of additional language learning is meaningful, comprehensible input
         • (B) the processes of additional language acquisition are implicit and subconscious and any explicit and conscious processes that may be summoned in the classroom can only help careful monitored performance but will have little effects on true language knowledge or on spontaneous performance
           • (c) the main obstacles to additional language learning for adults stem from .affective inhibitions
   • (McLaughlin 1987)
     • Held that learning an additional language is a complex, cognitive process similar to any other human learni)ng (cooking, playing chess, riding a bike, thinking mathematically, knowing history
       • It involves great amounts of experience aided by attention and memory and it must include the development of sufficient declarative knowledge about the language and sufficient deliberate practice to eventually support fully automatic use of language.
   • A cognitiveinteractionist prism (Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991)
     • was strongly influenced by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and easily accommodated within it the interlanguage research tradition as well as the skills acquisition theory. It called for the examination of L2 acquisition as the sum contributions of learner-internal factors, such as attention and memory, and learnerexternal factors, such as the interactions offered to learners in the target language and the quality of any formal instruction they might seek.
   • (Hawkins 2001; White 1989)
     • was strongly influenced by US linguist Noam Chomsky and flourished out of the strides made by this linguistic theory during the late 1980s.programme sought to tease out the degree to which Universal Grammar knowledge, knowledge stemming from the first language, or a combination of the two, guided the construction of mental L2 grammars.

2. Theoretical expansions: socioculturalism and emergentism

   • new SLA traditions that soon would grow enormously in vitality
     • One is the study of L2 acquisition through the sociocultural theory of mind developed by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, a contemporary of Piaget, and led in SLA by James Lantolf (Lantolf 1994). The other is the application of the usage-based, emergentist family of theories developed in cognitive science and initiated in SLA by Nick Ellis (1996) and Diane Larsen-Freeman (1997).
       • The coexistence of the two better established approaches with the two young but bold newcomers created epistemological tension and led to the gradual articulation of differences.
       • The two psychologically oriented approaches, cognitive-interactionist and sociocultural, consider the learner’s mind and the surrounding environment as essential

3. The formal linguistic approach and the emerging SLA approach also have key differences amidst critically crossed interests.

   • Both are dedicated to explaining language development as part of cognitive science, but they clash in their incompatible assumptions about what human language is and about the relative contributions that nature and nurture make to its development.
     • The formal linguistic researchers of the SLA
       • SLA (Wakabayashi, this volume) adhere to radical nativism, modularity and rule-based representation. In other words, they believe that language is a biological faculty unique to the human species (nativism):
         • operating independently from other cognitive faculties used to learn and process other kinds of knowledge (modularity), and encoded as a system of abstract rules of the sort that have been described in formal linguistic grammars (rule-based representationism)
     • SLA researchers (Ellis, this volume)
       • Are empiricist, generalist, and associationist. In other words, they hold that language in each individual emerges out of massive amounts of experience with the linking of form and meaning through language use that is driven by the species:
         • social need to communicate (empiricism), enabled by simple memory and attention processing mechanisms that are the same as employed for all other cognitive functions (generalism), and self-organized out of the human brain’s unique capacity to implicitly and mandatorily tally the statistical properties and contextual contingencies of the linguistic input they experience over a lifetime (associationism).

4. AGE

   • competencies we observe at increasingly older starting ages are reflective of the varied social, educational, and emotional complications as well as the varied demands on time and pursuits that come with adult life, compared to the more uniform and restricted lives that infants and toddlers lead before they enter school.

5. Crosslinguistic influences stemming from already known languages

   • A number of theoretical positions are considered empirically plausible, which are contained within two extremes. At the one extreme, full access to Universal Grammar is proposed and the influence of the L1 is believed to be minimal.
     • This position assumes that first and second language acquisition are fundamentally similar in nature. At the other extreme, no access to Universal Grammar is posited during L2 acquisition and the L1 is afforded a central position in the construction of the L2 grammar. That is, after learning the first language from birth by recourse to Universal Grammar, any subsequent language learning is thought to be accomplished through the more detailed knowledge structures instantiated by the particular first-language grammar that is known already, and by resorting to processingmechanisms that are fundamentally different

6. Environment and cognition: what are their contributions to additional language learning?

   • From socioculturally oriented studies of the environment for SLA, we also know that many additional language learners are actively involved in their own learning processes, both regulating challenges and maximizing learning opportunities as they seek environmental encounters

7. Three approaches to explaining variability of L2 learning across individuals

   • There're 3 perspectives
     • The perspective with the longest tradition is known as individual differences research and draws on social psychological constructs and methods. This research is quantitative and correlational, and it assumes multiple causal variables interacting and contributing together to explaining variation systematically.
       • Motivation is another source of individual difference that has been investigated particularly energetically by SLA researchers over the years, and several theories have shed light on different qualities of motivation that are important in sustaining and nourishing learning efforts, including integrative motivation, self-determined motivation, and motivation
     • A second perspective that can help explain individual variability is socio-dynamic and draws from complexity theory and dynamic systems theory, which are recent approaches within the emergentist family of SLA theories.
       • Motivation is another source of individual difference that has been investigated particularly energetically by SLA researchers over the years, and several theories have shed light on different qualities of motivation that are important in sustaining and nourishing learning efforts, including integrative motivation, self-determined motivation, and motivation
     • A third approach to variability across individuals contrasts sharply with the previous two in taking a qualitative, sociocultural, and critical perspective towards the problem at hand
       • Norton and Toohey (2001) explain, in this perspective constructs such as motivation, aptitude, and other individual differences are reconceptualized as stemming from the interplay between people’s understanding of themselves in the world and the constraints, material and symbolic, that their worlds afford them

8. The role of instruction in SLA

   • instruction that is designed to present language or to directly summon learners to pay attention to language leads to more tangible results, at least in terms of post-test gains (Norris and Ortega 2000). However, we need much more nuanced answers as to what really constitutes degrees of ‘explicitness’ or ‘implicitness’ in L2 instruction

9. Looking into the future

   • We can expect that may see a burgeoning of SLA studies that probe knowledge of how the brain works as it processes and acquires language by employing methods such as millisecond-sensitive behavioural measures involving reaction times and eye tracking, brain imaging techniques