SECOND LANGUAGE PROCESS

SECOND LANGUAGE PROCESS

1. BY: DIANA BENÍTEZ MARTÍNEZ

2. All second language learners, have already acquired at least one language.

3. Very young language learners begin the task of first language acquisition without the cognitive maturity or metalinguistic awareness that older second language learners have.

4. Studying the language of second language learners

   • We have seen that children's knowledge of the grammatical system of their first language is built up in predictable sequences.
     • Like first language learners, second language learners do not learn language simply through imitation and practice.
   • Contrastive analysis, error analysis, and interlanguage
     • Until the late 1960s, people tended to see second language learners' speech simply as an incorrect version of the target language.
     • Error analysis was based on the hypothesis that, like child language, second language learner language is a system in its own right-one that is rule-governed and predictable
     • Larry Selinker ( 1972) gave the name interlanguage to learners' developing second language knowledge.

5. Developmental sequences

   • Second language learners, like first language learners, pass through sequences of development: what is learned early by one islearned early by others.
   • The cognitive develop ment of adult or adolescent second language learners is much more stable, and their experiences with the language are likely to be quite different.
   • Possessive determiners
     • Possessive determiners can change depending on the language.
     • Joanna White (1998, 2008) studied the acquisition of possessive determiners by French-speaking students
       • White found a total of eight stages in the sequence, but they can be grouped into three main stages.
         • Stage 1:Pre-emergence
         • Stage2:Emergence
         • Stage3:Post-emergenc
   • Grammatical morphemes Negation Questions
     • Learning a language goes from the simplest to the most complex, but even so, they can continue to have errors over time.

6. Relative clauses

   • Second language learners first acquire relative clauses that refer to nouns in the subject and direct object positions, and only later learn to use them to modify nouns in other sentence roles.
   • The study of relative clauses it carne from patterns that Edward Keenan and Bernard Comrie (1977) observed in a large number oflanguages.
   • First, It has been observed that for learners whose first language does not have a particular clause type, it is more dif ficult to learn to use that type in English.
   • Second, where learners have a first language with a substantially different way of forming relative clauses, they may avoid using relative clauses even when their interlan guage is fairly advanced.
   • Third, first language influence is seen in the errors learners make.

7. Reference to past

   • A number of researchers, including Jürgen Meisel (1987), have observed the developing ability to use language to locate events in time.
     • The research has shown that learners from different first language backgrounds and acquiring a variety of second languages, acquire the language for referring to past events ina similar pattern.
   • Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig (2000) and others have found that students are more likely to mark the past tense in simpler and more straightforward sentences than in complex sentences.

8. Movement through developmental sequences

   • As in first language acquisition, there are systematic and predictable developmental sequences in second language acquisition.
   • In examining a language sample from an individual learner, one should not expect to find behaviours from only one stage. On the contrary, at a given point in time, learners may use sentences typical of several different stages.
   • Progress to a higher stage does not always mean fewer errors.

9. More about.first language inftuence

   • One reason that sorne researchers rejected the hypothesis that 'transfer' or 'interference' would best explain a learner's difficulties with the target language was the fact that contrastive analysis was dosely associated with behaviourist views oflanguage acquisition
   • As Nick Ellis (2009: 153) put it, 'The language calculator has no "dear" button.' In learning something new, we build on what we already know.
   • Some ways in which the first language interacts with developmental sequences.

10. Vocabulary

    • Researchers in the 1970s and early 1980s were drawn to syntax and morphology because of the way error patterns and develop mental sequences of these features might reveal something about universals in languages and language acquisition.
    • Every language has an astonishingly large number of words.
    • Acquiring a basic vocabulary is a significant accomplishment for a second language learner.
    • Among the factors that make new vocabulary more easily learnable by second language learners is the frequency with which the word is seen, heard, and understood.

11. Pragmatics

    • Is the study of how language is used in context to express such things as directness, politeness, and deference.
    • The study of how second language learners acquire this aspect of language is referred to as 'interlanguage pragmatics' (Bardovi-Harlig 1999).

12. Phonology

    • Grammar has been the focus for second language teachers and researchers for a long time.
    • Pronunciation was a central component in language teaching when the audiolingual approach was dominant.
    • Several techniques for teaching pronunciation were developed at that time, and most of them focused on the pronunciation of segmentals, getting learners to perceive and to produce distinctions between single sounds in minimal pair drills.
    • Research related to teaching pronunciation is gaining more attention. lt is already clear that decontextualized pronunciation instruction is not enough and that a cornbination of instruction, exposure, experience, and rnotiva tion is required iflearners are to change their way of speaking