社会语言学第十一章 作业上课讲义

社会语言学第十一章

作业

Second Language Acquisition

刘颖 13073080

Second language acquisition is a general term which refers to the acquisition of a second language, in contrast with first language acquisition. SLA is also used as a general term to refer to the acquisition of a foreign or subsequent language. Thus, SLA is primarily the study of how learners acquire or learn an additional language after they have acquired their first language. According to Krashen, acquisition refers to the gradual and subconscious development of ability in the first language by using it naturally in daily communicative situations. Learning, however, is defined by Krashen as a conscious process of accumulating knowledge of a second language usually obtained in school settings.

But there are some differences between acquisition and learning. According to Krashen, acquisition refers to the gradual and subconscious development of ability in the first language by using it naturally in daily communicative situations. Learning, however, is defined as a conscious process of accumulating knowledge of a second language usually obtained in school settings. A second language, Krashen argues, is more commonly learned but to some degree may also be acquired, depending on the environmental setting and the input received by the second language learner. A rule can be learned before it is internalized, but having learned a rule does not necessarily prevent having to acquire it later. For example, an English language learner

may have learned a rule like the third person singular "-s", but is unable to articulate the correct form in casual and spontaneous conversation because the rule has not yet been acquired. This shows that conscious knowledge of rules does not ensure an immediate guidance for actual performance. Contrastive Analysis was developed in order to identify and predict the areas of learning difficulty. Given this approach, it was hypothesized that second language errors were predominantly the result of negative transfer, or mother tongue interference and second language learning was believed to be a matter of overcoming the differences between first language and second language systems. According to this view, the major task of second language teaching should predominantly be: first, contrast the native and the target language systems and make predictions about the language items that would cause difficulty and the errors that learners were likely to make; then use these predictions in deciding on the type of language items that needed special treatment in teaching and in material development and the type of intensive techniques that would be employed to overcome learning difficulties created by the interference. In practice, the Contrastive Analysis is not effective because a large proportion of grammatical errors could not be explained by mother tongue interference. Errors predicted by contrastive analysis have often not occurred, whereas many actual errors come from overgeneralization instead of negative transfer. Errors, according to the contrastive analysis approach, are negative and had to be overcome or given