SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

1. FIELDS

   • Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA), which examines language development among infants and children when they grow up surrounded by two or more languages from birth
   • Child Language Acquisition, which investigates how infants and children learn their first language when they grow up surrounded by one language

2. THEORIES

   • The awakenings of SLA: interlanguage
     • Corder (1967) and Selinker argued that researchers must turn for evidence to the actual language produced by learners as they try to communicate in the target second language
   • From first theories to the cognitive and linguistic emphases of the 1990s
     • Krashen proposed that: the core ingredient of additional language learning is meaningful, comprehensible input; - the processes of additional language acquisition are implicit and subconscious and any explicit and the main obstacles to additional language learning for adults stem from affective inhibitions.
   • Theoretical expansions: socioculturalism and emergentism
     • The study of L2 acquisition through the sociocultural theory of mind
     • The application of the usage-based, emergentist family of theories developed in cognitive science
   • SLA after the social turn
     • Investigated L2 acquisition in a-social and decontextualized ways

3. KEY THEMES IN SLA RESEARCH

   • Age
   • Crosslinguistic influences stemming from already known languages (mother tongue)
   • Environment and cognition
   • Three approaches to explaining variability of L2 learning across individuals
     • Individual differences research
     • Socio-dynamic
     • Qualitative, sociocultural, and critical
   • The role of instruction in SLA(Learning by instructional experiences)

4. Epistemological approaches.

   • Four theoretical approaches
     • Cognitive-interactionist
     • Formal linguistic
     • Vygotskian sociocultural
     • Usage-based emergentist SLA