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Explore the goals, internal and external factors, case studies, and methodological issues in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) to understand how learners acquire a new language. Discover the complexities and challenges faced during the acquisition process.
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Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Rega Giyang girana zetira2201410088403-404
What Is Second Language Acquisition? • L2 acquisition can be defined as the way in which people learn a language other than their mother tongue, inside or outside of a classroom.
What are the goal of SLA? • SLA focus on on the formal features of language that linguists have traditionally concretated on. • The goal is the description of L2 acquisition and to explanation; identifying the external and internal factors that account why learners acquire an L2 in the way they do.
The goals of SLA are to describe how L2 acquisition proceed and to explain this process and why some learners seem to be better at it that others.
External faktors • The social milieu in which learning takes place. • The input that learners receive, that is, the samples of language to which a learners is exposed.
Internal faktors • L2 learners bring an enormous amount of knowledge to the task of learning an L2. For start, they have already learned a language and we can expect them to draw on this when they learn an L2. They also possess general knowledge abot the world which they can draw on to help them understand L2 input. Finally, learners possess communication strategies that can help them make effective use of their L2 knowledge.
It is possible that learners are equipped with knowledge of how language in general works and that this helps them to learn a particular language. A final set of internal factors explain why learners vary in the rate they learn an L2 and how successful they ultimately are.
Two Case Studies • A case study is detailed study of a learner’s acquisition of an L2. It is typically longitudional, involving the collection of samples of the learner’s speech or writing over a period of time, sometimes years.
A case study of an adult learner • Wes (native speaker of Japanese) had little or no knowledge of the study of most of the grammatical structures Schmidt (resercher) investigated. • After three years, Schmidt noted that Wes was adept at identifying these fixed phrases and that he practised them consciously.
2. A case study of two child learners • When they study, the requests can be performed in a variety of ways in English. • Wes found clear evidence of development taking place. • Wes found clear evidence of development taking place. • Many of their requestsseemed formulaic in nature.
Their requests tended to be very direct throughout, whereas native speakers would need to use more indirect requests.
Methodological Issues • Language is such a complex phenomenon that researchers have generally preferred to focus on some specific rather than on the whole of it. • Another issue concerns what it means to say that a learner has ‘acquisition’ a feature of the target language.
The learners made considerable use of fixed expressions or formulas. • The next problem is trying to measure whether ‘acquisition’ has taken place concerns learners’ overuse of linguistic forms.
Issues in the Description of Learner Language • One finding is that learners make errors of different kinds. • Another finding is that L2 learners acquire a large number of formulaic chunks, which they use to perform communicative functions that are important to them and which contribute to the fluency of their unplanned speech. • Whether learners acquire the language systematically.
Issues in the Explanation of L2 Acquisition • Learners must engage in both item learning and system learning. • Learners follow a particular developmental pattern because their mental faculties are structured in such a way that this is the way have to learn.
