Second Language Acquisition Yodha Mahatva 2201410058

Introduction What is ‘second language acquisition’? ‘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.

SLA goals The SLA goal is mainly to make the learners acquire an L2. Another is explanation; identifying the external and internal factors that account for why learners acquire an L2 in the way they do. One of the external factors is the social milieu in which learning takes places. A final set of internal factor explains why learners vary in the rate they learn an L2 and how successful they ultimately are. Then the SLA goals are to describe how L2 acquisition proceeds and to explain this process and why some learners seem to be better at it than others.

A Case Study A case study is a detailed study of learner’s acquisition of an L2. It is tipically longitudinal, invlving the collection of samples of the learner’s speech or writing over a period of time, sometimes years.

Methodological Issues One Issue has to do with what it is that needs to be described. Another issue concerns what it means to say that a learner has acquired a feature of the target language. Language is such a complex phenomenon that researchers have generally preferred to focus on some specific aspect rather than on the whole of it.

Issue in the description of learner language Both of these studies set out how to describe how learners’ use an L2 changes over time and what this shows about the nature their knowledge of the L2. One finding is that learners make errors of different kinds. That is the failure to use request in a socially appropriate manner. Another finding is that L2 learners acquire a large number offormulatic chunks, which they use to perform communicative functions that are important to them and which contribute to the fluency of their unplanned speech.

Issues in the explanation of L2 acqusition The systematic nature of L2 acquisition also requires explanation. There are a number of possible explanations. One is that learners follow a particular developmental pattern because their mental faculties are structured in such a way that this is the way they have to learn. Other explanation emphasize the importance of external as opposed to internal factors.

2 The nature of learner language Errors and error analysis

Identifying errors The first step in anakysing learner errors is to identify them. This is in act easier said than one. To identify errors we have to compare the sentences learners produce with what seem to be the normal or correct sentences in the target language which correspond with them.

Describing errors An analysis of some errors reveals that the most common grammatical category of error is past tense. The most common general error type is misinformation. All the past tense errors are also misinformation errors.

Explaining errors The identification and description of errors are prelminaries to the much more interensting task of trying to explain why they occur. Errors are, to a large extent, systematic and, to a certain extent, predictable.

Error evaluation Some errors can be considered more serious than others because they are more likely to interfere with the intelligibility of what someone says. Teachers will want to focus their attention on these. Some errors knows as global errors violate the overall structure of a sentence and for this reason may make it difficult to process.

Developmental patterns The early stages of L2 acquisition we can find out how a language is learned as a natural, untutored process by investigating what learners do when exposed to the L2 in communicative settings. The order of acquisition to investigate the order of acquisition, researchers choose a number of grammatical structures to study. They then collect samples of learner language and identify how accurately each feature is used by different leraners.

Sequence of acquisition When learners acquire a grammatical structure they do so gradually. Moving through a series of stages to acquiring the native-speaker rule. Learners are likely to pass through the different stages. Some implications The discovery of common patterns in the way in which learner language changes over time is one of the most important findings of SLA. It provides further support for the conclusions reached from the study of learner errors, namely that L2 acquisition is systematic and, to a large extent.

Variability in learner language We have seen that learner language is systematic. That is, at a particular stage of developmental, learners consistently use the same grammatical form, although this is often different from that employed by native speaker. At any given stage of development, learners sometimes employ one form and sometimes another. Thus, one type of error may alternate with another type: Yesterday the thief steal the suitcase. Yesterday the thief stealing the suitcase. Or an error may alternate with the correct target-language form: Yesterday the thief stole the suitcase.