SLA – Session 1

What is second language acquisition?

 The study of how people acquire a second language (L2)

What does “second” mean?

 Any language that is learned subsequent to the mother tongue (3 rd, 4th language)
 Second language acquisition vs first language acquisition
 Second language acquisition vs foreign language acquisition
 Acquisition vs learning

Second language acquisition covers both second language and foreign language.

L2 acquisition = the learning of another language after a first language (L1) has been acquired.

Why study SLA?

o There are lots of questions in this area so people try to study this area.
o Is SLA like first language acquisition?
o Does the first language help or get in the way of SL learning? => Depend on the first language
o What are some circumstances in which people learn a SL?
o Do innate capacities play an important role in SLA?
o Why do we make mistakes in a SL?
o Do learners need their errors to be explicitly corrected?
o Is there a teaching method that has proved to be more successful than others?
o What about individual differences? Are there factors that enable some people to learn aspects
of a SL better or faster than others?
o Are there certain learning strategies that seem particularly useful?
o What happens when children learn 2 languages at the same time? Do they end up confused
and does one or both of their languages suffer?
o Can bilinguals “turn off” or ignore one of their languages?

What are the goals of SLA?

How would you find out how learners acquire an L2?

 Asking successful learners how they did it

 Finding out what learners actually do => Collecting samples of learner language
SLA – Session 1

What has SLA focused on?

 The formal features of language (ex: how learners’ accents change over time, how learners build
up their vocabulary, how learners’ ability to produce grammatical structure develops over time )
=> focus on syntax and morphology

The goals of SLA

 Description of L2 acquisition
 Explanation of L2 acquisition

What are the external and internal factors???

Language learning contexts (Chapter 3)

Naturalistic – Classroom – related

Theories of SLA (W4)

Instruction and SLA (W5)

The importance of SLA applications to language teaching

SL development (W6): process, problems that L have