Chapter 9 Second Language Acquisition

9.1 What is second language acquisition?

　 The term language acquisition refers to the natural process of children's language development. In recent decades, linguists and psycholinguists have studied how children are able to master the complexities of human language. Through observations and experiments they have found that children the world over all undergo certain stages of language development, namely the babbling stage (articulating certain speech sounds), holophrastic stage (using single words to represent various meanings), the two-word stage, and the telegraphic speech stage (using phrases and sentences composed of only content words. For examople, ‘cat table’ means ‘The cat is sitting on the table’.) Regulations have been found in the phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic development. For example, bilabial consonants are uttered first by children at the babbling stage. Certain grammatical morphemes are acquired earlier than others (e.g. -ing and plural -s in English are acquired earlier than the third person singular -s). Children tend to overextend the reference of a word (e.g. The word ball is used to refer to any round object).

　 The word acquisition used in the study of how children pick up their mother tongue suggests that children's language development is a natural subconscious process. The term is also used in the study of how people acquire or learn another language. In the early 1980s, it was an issue whether different terms should be used to talk about the process of L1 development and that of L2. Scholars like Krashen (1982) make a clear distinction between acquisition and learning, the former referring to picking up L2 naturally and subconsciously, the latter mastering L2 through instruction in classroom. Many linguists took an issue with Krashen in the decade. At the turn of the century acquisition and learning are used interchangeably in the literature of L2 research.

　 The expression second language is not just in contrast with first language or mother tongue in the literature. Some linguists make a distinction between a second language and a foreign language. The contrast is based on the social context. In a bilingual or multilingual community, the language other than one's mother tongue is called a second language. In a monolingual country, the language one learns is a foreign language. In this chapter we will use second language as a general term that refers a language additional to one's mother tongue. To summarize, second language acquisition (SLA) may be defined as the process by which a language other than the mother tongue is learnt in a natural setting or in a classroom.