Second Language Acquisition: Linguistic Perspective, Resúmenes de Adquisición de Datos

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UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN ENRIQUE GUZMÁN Y VALLE “Alma Mater del Magisterio Nacional” FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS SOCIALES Y HUMANIDADES Departamento Académico de Lenguas Extranjeras

Second Language Acquisition

Week 04: Linguistic Perspective

Professor:

Mg. Roger Isidro Fabián

At the end of this lesson,

students will have learnt more

about the linguistic

perspective regarding Second

Language Acquisition.

Learning Outcome

Be on time

Welcome to English class!

Participate in class

Linguists traditionally divide a language into different levels for description and analysis, even though in actual use all levels must interact and function simultaneously. The human accomplishment of learning language(s) seems all the more remarkable when we consider even a simplified list of the areas of knowledge which every L1 or L2 learner must acquire at these different levels:

Phonology (sound system)

• speech sounds that make a difference in meaning (phonemes)
• possible sequences of consonants and vowels (syllable structure)
• intonation patterns (stress, pitch, and duration), and perhaps tone in words
• rhythmic patterns (pauses and stops)

Morphology (word structure)

• parts of words that have meaning (morphemes)
• inflections that carry grammatical information (like number or tense)
• prefixes and suffixes that may be added to change the meaning of words or their grammatical category

Discourse

• ways to connect sentences, and to organize information across sentence boundaries
• structures for telling stories, engaging in conversations, etc.
• scripts for interacting and for events

All of this knowledge about language is automatically available to children for their L1 and is somehow usually acquired with no conscious effort. Completely comparable knowledge of L2 is seldom achieved, even though much time and effort may be expended on learning. Still, the widespread occurrence in the world of high levels of multilingual competence attests to the potential power and effectiveness of mechanisms for SLA.

Contrastive Analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of SLA which involves predicting and explaining learner problems based on a comparison of L1 and L2 to determine similarities and differences. It was heavily influenced by theories which were dominant in linguistics and psychology within the USA through the 1940s and 1950s, Structuralism and Behaviorism.

The goal of CA (as that of still earlier theories of L learning) was primarily pedagogical in nature: to increase efficiency in L2 teaching and testing.

Our view must be the preparation of up-to-date pedagogical and experimental materials must be based on this kind of comparison.

ERROR ANALYSIS (EA)

The most influential publication launching Error Analysis as an approach in SLA was S. Pit Corder’s (1967) article on “The significance of learners’ errors,” which calls on applied linguists to focus on L2 learners’ errors not as “bad habits” to be eradicated, but as sources of insight into the learning processes.

Corder claimed that errors provide evidence of the system of language which a learner is using at any particular point in the course of L2 development, and of the strategies or procedures the learner is using in his “discovery of the language.”