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 What is Second
Language Acquisition?

In second language learning, language plays an

institutional and social role in the community. It functions as
a recognized means of communication
among members who speak some other language as their
native tongue.

In foreign language learning, language plays no major

role in the community and is primarily learned in the
classroom.

The distinction between second and foreign language

learning is what is learned and how it is learned.
 What is the Study of Second Language Acquisition?
It is the study of:

how second languages are learned;

how learners create a new language system with limited exposure to

a second language;

why most second language learners do not achieve the same degree
of proficiency in a second language as they do in their native
language; and

why some learners appear to achieve native-like proficiency in more

than one language.
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mifferent theories have been proposed:
1. The behaviorist perspective
2. The innatist perspective
3. The cognitive/developmental perspective
4. The sociocultural perspective
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‡ Learning is explained in terms of imitation, practice,
reinforcement, and habit formation
‡ It had a powerful influence on second and foreign
language teaching between the 1940s and the 1970s.

Example
The Audiolingual method.
‡ Students memorized dialogues and sentence patterns
by heart.
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‡ It·s mainly concerned with first language acquisition.
‡ It asserts that humans have access to the knowledge that is
processed innately.
‡ One of its main pioneers is aom Chomsky.
‡ [e argued that if children learn language by imitation, why do
they say things have never heard before?
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¢homsky·s conclusion: ¢hildren·s minds are not blank states to be

filled by imitating language they hear in the environment.

[ypothesis: ¢hildren are born with a specific innate ability to

discover by themselves the rules of language system on the
basis of the samples of a natural language they are exposed to.
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=xample:
¢hildren hear falso starts, incomplete sentences and slips of tongue.
Nonetheless, they learn to distinguish between grammatical and
ungrammatical sentences.
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hniversal Grammar
¢homsky even affirmed that babies did not have to learn rules
specific to each language because according to him all languages
follow the same set of rules.

Noam ¢homsky made the argument that the human brain contains
a limited set of rules for organizing language. In turn, there is an
assumption that all languages have a common structural basis.
This set of rules is known as universal grammar.
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‡ It is one of the models that adopt the innatist
perspective
‡ It was quite influential in the 1970s.
‡ It emphasizes the role of exposure to comprehensible
input in second language acquisition.
‡ It is based on 5 hypotheses:
1. Acquisition/learning hypothesis
2. Monitor hypothesis
3. The natural order hypothesis
4. The input hypothesis
5. The affective filter hypothesis
The Sociocultural Perspective
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 The Sociocultural Perspective
‡ Vygotsky·s theory proposes:
‡ ¢ognitive development, including language development, arises as a result
of social interaction.
‡ Learning occurs how?
When an individual interacts with an interlocutor
- within his ZPm a situation where the learner is capable of performing
at a higher level because there is support from the interlocutor).
- Focus on input and output in the interaction.
- ¢ognitive development starts from the social context then become
internalized.