Second-language acquisition

Acquisition vs. learning

Acquisition is the subconscious assimilation of the language

without any awareness of knowing rules.
Learning is a conscious process, achieved particularly
through formal study, and resulting in an explicit knowledge
of rules.
 Central themes and project ideas

 Is there a fundamental
 Developmental difference between the
sequences and the processes of L1 and L2
process of acquisition acquisition?
 It is well documented that
children acquire certain
morphological features of L1
in fairly consistent order.
  Research into the
 Comparison of L1 & similarities and differences
L2 acquisition between L1 & L2
acquisition goes further
than just the developmental
sequences.
  Many people leave school
saying that they ‘know’
 Language-learning
another language meaning
targets that they can just about buy
a postcard or a glass of beer
using it. For many others,
knowing another language
would mean they could
speak and write fluently a
wide rang of subjects.
  For example:
 German has two words that
 Different concepts both translate into English
expressed in different as but. In translating the
languages sentences:
 Jane went to the pictures but I
stayed at home, the German
word aber would be used
for but.
 Jane didn’t go to the pictures
but stayed at home, the word
sondern would be used.
 Interlanguage, error analysis and
contrastive analysis
 Interlanguage is used fairly
loosely by many to mean,
variously, what the learner can
do at any given point after
beginning L2 but before
perfecting it, the underlying
knowledge which produces the
imperfect performance, and a
system essentially the same for
all learners, featuring rules and
patterns consistently found at
any given stage, irrespective of
the L1 and the learning
method.
 Error analysis was for many years
the standard approach to
identifying the features of the
interlanguage.
 Contrastive analysis takes direct
account of how the L1 & L2 differ
in their expression of an idea or
their construction of a grammatical
relationship, and predicts certain
errors directly emanating from
using the L1 patterns in L2.
  There are almost as many
forms of language test as
 Language assessment there are approaches to
and testing language learning, because
it would not be fair for
students drilled in grammar
and translation to be tested
only in their communicative
skills, and vice versa.
  Bilingualism is the
 Bilinguals, ability to use two different
multilingual and languages.
polyglots  Multilingualism is the
ability to use more than
two languages.
 Polyglots (the speakers
of several languages).