Describing and Explaining L2 Acquisition

1. Describing and Explaining L2 Acquisition AnizaFebrikuvi 2201410048

2. What is Second Language Acquisition?

3. second language can refer to any languages that is learned subsequent to the mother tongue • Second language acquisition can be defined as the way in which people learn a language other than their mother tongue, inside or outside of a classroom.

4. What are the Goals of SLA? • to describe how L2 acquisition proceeds • to explain this process and why some learners seem to be better at it than others

5. To reach the goals, there are two factors; • internal factors; • External factors.

6. The external factors are: 1. the social milieu in which learning takes place (social conditions influence the opportunities the learners have to hear and speak the language and the attitudes that they develop towards it); 2. the input that learners receive( the samples of language to which a learner is exposed).

7. The internal factors are : • learners possess cognitive  mechanism which enable them to extract information about the L2 from the input to  notice; • L2 learners bring an enormous amount of knowledge to the task of learning an L2 (they have already learned a language [their mother tongue]) • they possess general knowledge about the world they can draw on to help them to underrstand L2 input • learners are equipped with knowledge of how language in general works (grammatical)

8. Illustration in Case Studies • A Japanese Adult • naturalistic learner : learns the language at the same time as learning English in it. • had learned grammatical features with the same level of accuracy as native speaker English. • cannot use the appropriate grammatical features (-s, -ing, -ed)

9. Cannot be considered as a failed learner • considered as a successful communicator • highly skilled at repairing communication breakdowns

10. Two-child Learners (Portuguese and Pakistani) • Their request verbless ( big circle) • Their development of request was marked by a general extension of the linguistic devices ( Miss, I want…) => grown considerably

11. The conclusion we get from the cases are : 1. They raise of number of important methodological issues to how L2 acquisition should be studied 2. They raise issues relating to the description of learner language 3. They point to some of the problems researchers experience in trying to explain L2 acquisition

12. Methodological Issues • What it is that needs to be described ability to communicate in an L2 : • grammatical development • using English in appropriate situation • holding successful conversation

13. What it means to say that a learner has acquired a feature of the target language what learners know and what they can do • Determining whether learners have acquired a particular feature • Overuse of linguistic forms

14. Issues in the Description of Learner Language • Making errors in different kinds • Acquiring a large number of formulaic chunks • Acquiring the language systematically (order of accuracy of the different grammatical features)

15. Issues in the Explanation of L2 Acquisition • Internalizing chunks of language structure • Acquiring rules (using given linguistic features in a particular context with particular functions) • Being motivated to learn and to extent that learners are able to satisfy their communicative needs.

16. Thank you..