Name : Agus Rahman

NIM : I2J019001

Summary
Chapter I: Introduction

This chapter, as its name states, mainly talks about introductory discussion related to what
Second Language Acquisition (SLA) constitutes. It contains four sub topics that provide sufficient
overview of the nature of SLA. Those sub-topics are; the study of language acquisition, definitions,
the nature of language and the nature of nonnative speaker knowledge.
In the first sub topic the initial emergence of SLA study and its definition are clearly
explained. The study of SLA is, if not a brand new, a young field as its development is still in progress.
It was immensely expanded and developed 40-45 years ago. SLA is the study of how second
language or non primary language are learned or acquired and other properties that related to
second language acquisition. This study is interdisciplinary field as it is derived from and also
influences other areas of study such as linguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics, sociology,
sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, conversational analysis, education and many others. The study of
second language acquisition is part of the broad study of language where its primary goal is to
discover language constraints that language learner may encounter on the formation of second
language grammars. Moreover, SLA study plays a major role in recent context. Every language
teaching training program offers SLA as the required course since it seems inappropriate that
language teaching experts design methodologies that are not in line with how language learning is
processed which is the domain of second language acquisition. Language teachers expect from the
students to be able to use the language properly in terms of structure, phonology, culture, etc.
Issues regarding language teaching policies are also dependent on knowledge of how language is
learned. Thus, SLA study is inevitably important and its tight relation to other fields makes it a
complex study. Its focus is mainly on unveiling the process of learning second language. It is part of
Humanities discipline because of its complexity and also Social Science as it deals with the
interaction among individuals using language in a society.
The second sub topic introduces some basic terms that are commonly used in SLA such as
Native Language (NL) which refers to mother tongue or first language, Target Language (TL) is the
language being learned, Second Language Acquisition (SLA) which is the process of acquiring a
language after first language, Foreign Language Learning is learning a language locally where the
target language is not spoken or used as opposed to SLA where learning language in a place where
the target language is used.
The third sub topic discusses what it is need to be learned in a language in order to
completely understand SLA. The aspects of language that are important to SLA are sound system or
phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics and pragmatics. In terms of sound system it is crucial to
know what sounds that exist in a given language as its unique characteristic, what are possible and
not possible sound. Sound combination also matters as what sound to come with other sound in a
word. Syntax talks about the structure of sentence which is grammatically accepted or not in a
language, knowing the rules of how to produce meaningful sentences. Morphological aspect deals
with word formation and its properties such as affixes, markers, etc., how they are combined to
form meaningful words. Semantics, on the other hand, mainly refers to the meaning of utterances
and reference of words. Pragmatics is how to use and understand language in context.
The last sub topic talks about interlanguage (IL) which is a language system created by
language learner that does have origin neither from native language nor target language. As
explained above that there are various complex aspects of language that have to be mastered make
language learner may produces errors that gradually become a system with its own structure.