“What possible explanations are there for the failure of efl students to achieve native-like competence in a second language (l2)?”

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

“What possible explanations are there for the
failure of EFL students to achieve native-like
competence in a second language (L2)?”


Cladera, Sonia Vanesa




Date: 26/06/2010










INDEX

PageINTRODUCTION............................................................................................. 3

WHAT IS COMPETENCE?.............................................................................. 3

THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO EXPLAINING SLL.............................. 3

THE INFLUENCE OF L1 OVER L2................................................................ 5

FACTORS AFFECTINGSLA.......................................................................... 6

CONCLUSION.................................................................................................. 8

BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................................................................. 9

























INTRODUCTION
Language acquisition is one of the mostfascinating aspects of human development. Considering FLA, it can be said that normal children, given a normal upbringing, acquire the language successfully. In contrast, the success in a second language varies from learner to learner. A topic that has been the core of a long debate is whether it is possible to achieve native-like competence and why students fail to achieve it. As we will be dealingwith this topic, it would be important to analyse the term competence. Some of the theories which have been offered as explanations for how a second language is learned will be considered. Moreover, the way in which the mother tongue influences a second language will be examined as well as the factors affecting SLA.

WHAT IS COMPETENCE?
Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between langue, languageas a system, and parole, the individual utterances which are used by each member of a speech community.
A similar distinction was made by Noam Chomsky. He used the terms competence and performance. Competence is the intuitive knowledge that every speaker possesses of the language, and performance means the act of interpreting or producing a speech act. The term langue differs from competence byhaving a social nature; Chomsky's term is purely psycholinguistic. He argued that Linguistics should study competence and concentrate on introspective evidence and the native speaker's intuition.
Dell Hymes prefered to use the notion of communicative competence as opposed to Chomsky’s linguistic competece. Hymes believed that speakers of a language must have more than grammatical competence inorder to be able communicate effectively in a language; they also need to know how language is used by members of a speech community to accomplish their purposes. He criticized Chomsky’ view and claimed that his “linguistic competence” does not include a social aspect of language. To Hymes, linguistic theory must also account for performance since it is the only sector which can be related to thesocial nature of language. He opposed Chomsky’s concern over the grammar of an ideal speaker of the language and claimed that this idea disregarded the actual context and the functions of language. He focused on the relationships existing between the language and the communicative contexts where this is used, which is the area of study of Pragmatics.

THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO EXPLAINING SLL
Thesecond language learning process is complex, and many theories and models have tried to account for this phenomenon, nevertheless, none of them has been able to provide a complete analysis of it. Some theories will be briefly mentioned that are related to failure in second language learning.
Acculturation (Schumann 1978) means “the social and psychological integration of the individual with the...