Saidna Zulfiqar bin Tahir STATE UNIVERSITY OF MAKASSAR INPUT AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: THE ROLES OF FREQUENCY, FORM, AND FUNCTION INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE By: Nick Ellis and Laura Collins Saidna Zulfiqar bin Tahir STATE UNIVERSITY OF MAKASSAR 2013

Nativism Behaviorism Interactionist INTRODUCTION Environment is basic element in language-producing machine Input is formulated in form of stimulus and feedback habitual Behaviorism Language Acquisition Devices Input is merely an ‘instigator’ to activate internal mechanism of human mental Nativism Input is result of interaction between mental cognitive (internal) and linguistic environment (external) Correspondent of speech production and context Interactionist

SUMMARY These articles provide perspectives on the input–acquisition relationship in a range of learning contexts, across a spectrum of learning populations: children in Quebec (Collins et al.), adolescents in Korea (Year and Gordon), migrant workers in Europe (Ellis and Ferriera-Junior), and university students in Thailand (McDonough and Kim) and the United States (Wulff et al.) The articles in this special issue explore how the acquisition of linguistic constructions as form–function mappings is affected by the distribution and saliency of forms in oral input, by their functional interpretations, and by the reliabilities of their form–function mappings. They analyze how learning is driven by the frequency within construction, the salience of their form, the significance of their functional interpretation, the match of their meaning to the construction prototype. These investigations address a range of morphological and syntactic constructions in instructed, uninstructed, and laboratory settings. They include both experimental and corpus-based approaches (some conducted longitudinally) and consider the relationship between input and acquisition. The purpose is that this special issue will encourage researchers to broaden the linguistic base of the research approaches highlighted, focusing on the input–acquisition relationship across different Languages. Of particular interest is the instructional input (both oral and written) provided in the foreign language contexts in which many modern languages are learned.

SUMMARY Four determinants of learning explored in this issue are (a) input frequency (type–token frequency), (b) form (perception), (c) function (prototypicality of meaning, importance of form for message comprehension), and (d) interactions between these (contingency of form–function). Input frequency affects the processing of phonology and phonotactics, reading, spelling, lexis, morphosyntax, language comprehension, grammaticality, sentence production (Ellis, 2002). Sensitivity to input frequency entails that language user must have registered patterns of occurrence in processing. of input. Type frequency refers to the number of distinct lexical items. syntactic construction specifying the relation among words. For example, the “regular” English past tense –ed has a very high type frequency because it applies to thousands of different types of verbs, whereas the vowel change found in some irregular past forms (e.g.,“swim/swam”; “ring/rang”) has much lower type frequency. Many grammatical meaning–form relationships, particularly are difficult for L2 learners, like grammatical particles and inflections in many languages. For e.g., adverbials such as “yesterday” and “tomorrow” are stronger psychophysical forms in the input than the grammatical morphemes attached to verbs. Redundant cues tend not to be acquired. Not only are many grammatical meaning–form relationships low in salience, but they can also be redundant in the understanding of the meaning of an utterance. Raw frequency of occurrence is less important than the contingency between cue and interpretation.

CRITIQUES In this article, the authors explored some of the factors that have a close relationship with learning a second language that drive input and useful for language proficiency.  Turner (1978) investigated three second language learners and found that teaching the message of a set of grammatical morpheme is not correlated to the message they get. In other words, the message was different teaching and learning. In addition, the input material is too oriented toward strict grammatical structure will reduce the quality of the input that can be understood and lead to less focus on the real and natural communication ( Krashen (1982).

CONCLUSION Second language acquisition is not only related to the study explored the determinants of this problem is (a) the input frequency, (b) shape, (c) function, and (d) the interaction between, but also should take into account other factors, namely intelligence, attitude, and motivation.  The input material is too oriented toward strict grammatical structure will reduce the quality of the input that can be understood and lead to less focus on the real and natural communication.