My view of language (1st Draft)

Glogovac Tatjana

In her book, Saville-Troike distinguishes between main terminology and views on Second Language Acquisition (SLA). I will give a brief summary of it as seen from my perspective. The first question that imposes is: What is a second language? Having read several definitions, I would define it as a language that a person, an immigrant or a minority group that is starting to live in a new country, needs for official reasons, for example, educational or employment purposes. We differentiate it from a foreign language, which a person needs for travels or when coming into contact with different cultures in their free time. A library language can be seen as the one we learn in order to use educational resources of one nation. On the other hand, an auxiliary language is the one a person needs because their employment position requires it from them. This is the case, for example, with doctors who need Latin in order to prescribe medications. If we proceed to define a first language, we come across difficulties; existence of several seemingly similar terms, such as first language, native language, primary language and mother tongue. All of these terms sometimes have different definitions which might cause confusion. But, what they all have in common is the view that they all refer to a language (languages) acquired during an early age and that it is the language spoken in the environment of the child as he grows up. To complicate things further, there is the question of multilingual competence and how to define it. Multilingual competence, whether simultaneous or sequential, is defined as the ability to use two or more languages. It is simultaneous when a learner learns two languages at the same time. This is typical of children whose parents speak different languages. Normally these children start to talk later than their monolingual peers because they need more time to pick up all the sounds from two languages. It is believed that children, in their first year, and even sooner, (6 months), produce all sounds from all languages. But as they listen to their environment speaking they learn to discriminate between those they need and to ignore those that their environment does not use (for example, different variety of nasals that are present in Portuguese but not in Spanish). Sequential multilingualism is when one language is learned after the other. The other language(s) can be learned during the critical period, or after it, in and adult age. In this case the very structure and system of learning a language is significantly different but that will be discussed later. When it comes to the issue of whether a person is multilingual, we must ask ourselves in what degree one should know languages in order to be classified as multilingual. Does it count if you are only able to lead a basic grocery-buying conversation? Or if one is apt only in a specific area of a language? Many SLA researches take on the view that any stage of learning a L2 can be taken into consideration. However, I am of the opinion that a learner should be on a decent level of knowing a language in order to declare himself as a multilingual. That means that knowing a few phrases or just being able to understand movies without a title is not

enough. He must possess a working knowledge of the language. A person must be able to convey his thoughts, communicate his needs, because after all, that is the primary goal of language: to communicate. So taking into consideration the classification of the European Language Framework I would decide for a level of A2 or B1 to be an approximate criteria. Regardless of the level, it is indisputable that a multilingual person has numerous advantages over two multilingual persons: a better insight into the first and second language, more developed metalinguistic abilities, and a different use of cognitive processes. When juxtaposing L1 and L2 learning processes we can deduce that they have similar states: initial, intermediate and final state. In the case of L1, the initial state is the childs innate capacity to learn a language, but it is disputable whether such a capacity exists for older learners. On the other hand, L2 learner already possesses the knowledge of concepts which children lack. Thanks to his schemata, L2 learner already has a preexisting knowledge of the concepts, but just needs to learn new words to label those concepts. Also, L2 leaner already knows how to perform different communicative functions such as apologizing, requesting etc, while L1 needs to learn of all that as well. However, the issue of interference might rise as a problem for L2 learners, when their L1 serves as an impediment for learning a new language. In my personal experience, positive transfer was more prevalent. For example, due to my knowledge of English I was able to learn French vocabulary, since about 50 per cent of its words has its roots in French, or more precisely, Latin. The knowledge of French helped me acquire Spanish, not only for its lexical similarity but also syntactical. Of course, the problem of confusing similar words or tenses did arise but through systematic and conscious practice I think managed to overcome some of them. So, I guess in this sense I do support the now out-dated audio-lingual view that language is a matter of habit formation. Through appropriate amount of exercises I believe that we can extract mistakes one makes in a language. Now, I am learning Latvian and the knowledge of declination in my native language (Serbian language has seven cases too) helps me understand the rules of the Latvian language much better than my Korean colleagues who have just begun to understand the notion of declination. So, in my view the more languages you learn, the more your brain becomes trained and picks up the languages rules and structures quicker. The effect of transfer is most present in the intermediate states. In the final state this is hopefully eradicated when a learner achieves proficiency, which is of course never as the one a child of 6 years effortlessly reaches in its L1. When looking into the very theories of second language acquisition, we can notice that there are 3 frameworks for SLA, all of which emphasize a certain aspect of the second language acquisition issue. Linguists emphasize the difference between linguistic competence and linguistic performance while psychologists focus on mental processes involved in learning a language. Sociolinguists, on the other hand, turn their attention to pragmatic competence, which is a union of linguistic and communicative competence. Further, social linguist emphasize motivation and the effect of social interaction. For neither of them can we say that are

completely right, but rather that all of them together give us a fuller overview of the language learning process.