Second Language Acquisition

Acquisition







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SUBJECT ASSIGNMENT:
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION





Assignment:


What possible explanations are there for the failure of EFL students to achieve native-like competence in a second language (L2)?
NOTE:
In answering this question you will need to consider the following areas:
• Psycholinguistic issues such asinterlanguage, the differing theories of competence held by Chomsky and Dell Hymes’, Universal Grammar (UG), L1 transfer, the Monitor Model...etc.
• Discourse issues such as input and interaction, the role of instruction...etc.
• Some sociolinguistic issues such as Accommodation and Acculturation Theories, social identity - if you consider them relevant to EFL situations.
• Is it possible to achievenative-like competence? Is it desirable?




















SUBJECT ASSIGNMENT:
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION



Learning a second language demands from the students not only knowledge of its grammatical and semantic rules, but also an assimilation of the cultural, transactional and interactional aspects of the target language. As a consequence, students may find itreally complicated to accomplish native-like proficiency. The purpose of the following essay is to account for the possible failure of EFL students to achieve native-like competence in a second language. In order to reach that target, first of all I am going to define three fields of study: Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics and Discourse. After all this, I will provide a detailed account of a numberof issues related to those fields of study which help to explain the purpose of this paper.
The first field of study that we are going to deal with is Psycholinguistics, which studies the mental processes a person uses in producing and understanding language. Under this field, it is possible to place the theories of first language acquisition. Behaviourist, Nativist and Developmental theorieshave provided an explanation of how a language is acquired and how it affects the acquisition of a second one.
I am going to develop these three theories deeper. Behaviourists, like Skinner, state that language acquisition is the result of the response to a stimulus, which leads to the formation of a habit. Nativists, like Chomsky, argue that humans´ ability to acquire a language depends on aninnate linguistic capacity. And finally, Developmentalists, like Bloom and Selinker, claim that language development is linked to internal personal processes and the interaction between the linguistic and world experience each child gathers.
The second field we are going to analyse is Sociolinguistics, which studies the language in relation to social factors, for instance, social class,educational level and type of education, sex, ethnic origin, age... And the third field is Discourse, where issues center upon the study of language which results from an act of communication, whether in spoken or written way.
After we have finished presenting these three main fields of study, we will be focusing on those issues within the fields previously mentioned, which account for EFL students´ lackof success in achieving native-like competence. One of them is the process of fossilization. It can be said: “...when incorrect linguistic features, such as aspects of pronunciation, vocabulary usage and grammar become fixed or a permanent part of the way a person speaks or writes a language...” (Richards and Schmidt 1985: 202/472).
This process has a direct impact on students´ interlanguage andaffects the so-called “interlanguage continuum”. According to Selinker we can say the following: “An ´interlanguage’ may be linguistically described using as data the observable output resulting from a speaker´s attempt to produce a foreign norm.” (Selinker 1969: 71 in Spolsky: 1989:32)
Some of the observable data collected from students´ production of a second language reveals that their...