INTRODUCTION : DESCRIBING AND EXPLAINING L2 ACQUISITION Ellis 2003, Chapter 1 PP By. Annisa Rizqi Handayani

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 classroom.

THE GOALS OF SLA The description of L2 acquisition. To describe how L2 acquisition proceeds. Explanation : identifying the external and internal factors that account for why learners acquire an L2 in the way they do. To explain this process and why some learners seem to be better at it than others.

E XTERNAL FACTORS : The social milieu in which learning takes place. Social conditions influence the opportunities that learners have to hear and speak the language and the attitudes that they develop towards it. The input that learners receive, the sample of language to which a learner is exposed.

TWO CASE STUDIES A case study is a detail study of a learners acquisition of an L2. It is tipically longitudinal, involving the collection of samples of the learner’s speech or writing over a period of time, sometimes years. The two case studies which we will now examine were both longitudinal. One is of an adult learner learning English in surroundings where it serves as a means of daily communication and the other of two children learning English in a classroom.

1. A C ASE S TUDY OF A N A DULT L EARNER Wes is a native speaker of Japanese who had had little formal instruction in English. He visit Hawaii to work and he had opportunities to use English Wes is an example of a “naturalistic” learner: someone who learns the language at the same time as learning to communicate in it. Richard Schimdt is a researcher who studied about Wes’ language development.

In fact, Wes had little or no knowledge at the beginning of the study of most of the grammatical structures Schimdt investigated. Schimdt noted that Wes was adept at identifying fixed phrases and that he practised them consciously.

2. A C ASE S TUDY OF T WO C HILD L EARNERS Investigated two child learners in a classroom context. Both were almost complete beginners in English at the beginning of the study. They are J and R.

J J was a ten-year-old Portuguese boy, literate in his native language. He was a confident learner, willing to struggle to communicate in English, even when he had very limited sources. R R was an eleven-year-old boy from Pakistan, speaking (but unable to write) Punjabi as his native language. He lacked confidence, relying on his elder sister to help him communicate in English

T HE CASE STUDIES SHOW THAT : They raise a number of important methodological issues relating to how L2 acquisition should be studied. They raise issues relating to the description of learner language. They point to some of the problems researchers experience in trying to explain L2 acquisition.

METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES Schimdt was concerned broadly with how Wes developed the ability to communicate in an L2, examining his grammatical development, his ability to use English in situationally appropriate ways, and how he learned to hold successful conversations. The author goal was concerned with how J and R acquired the ability to perform a single language function (request). His study is more typical of SLA. Language is such a complex phenomenon that researchers have generally preferred to focus on some specific aspect rather than on the whole of it.

Another issue concerns what it means to say that a learner has ‘acquired’ a feature of the target language. Schimdt defines ‘acquisition’ in terms of whether the learners manifests patterns of language use that are more or less same as native speakers of the target language. There is another problem in determining whether learners have ‘acquired’ a particular feature. A third problem in trying to measure whether ‘acquisition’ has taken place concerns learners’ overuse of linguistic forms.

ISSUES IN THE DESCRIPTION OF LEARNER LANGUAGE Both of the studies set out how to describe how learners’ use of L2 changes over time and what this shows the nature of their knowledge of L2. One finding is that learners make errors of different kinds. - Wes made errors of omission and overuse - J and R made sociolinguistics errors

Another finding is that L2 learners acquire a large number of formulaic chunks, Which which contribute to the fluency of their unplanned speech. An important issue in SLA is the roles that this formulas play. One of most interesting issues raised by these case studies is whether learners acquired the language systematically.

ISSUES IN THE EXPLANATION OF L2 ACQUISITION To account these descriptive findings, we can begin with the hypothesis that L2 acquisition involves different kinds of learning. On the one hand, learners internalize chunks of language structure (i.e formulas). On the other hand, they acquire rules (i.e the knowledge that a given linguistic feature is used in a particular context with a particular function)

The systematic nature of L2 acquisition also requires explanation. None of the three learners in the two case studies reached a native-speaker level of performance. It is not necessary to learn the full grammar of a language in order to get one’s meaning across.

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