Thursday 23 October 2008

Describing and explaining L2 acquisition

Second Language Acquisition by Rod Ellis (1997)

New Words
Language aptitude: the special ability that people have, in varying degrees, for leaning an L2
Formulas: chunks of language that are stored either as complete units (e.g. ‘I don’t know’) or as partially analysed units (e.g. ‘Can I have a _____?’)
Mentalist: a mentalist theory of language learning emphasizes the learner’s innate capacity for acquiring a language

Main points
-SLA is the study of a language other than a mother tongue.
-The goals of SLA are the description of L2 acquisition process and the explanation of the learners’ external factors (social condition, type of input) and internal factors (cognitive mechanisms, language aptitude).
-There are two methodological arguments. One is the range of learners’ description, from a specific aspect to the whole of it. The other is the relationship between language form and linguistic function as a feature of the target language.
-Can learners acquire the language systematically?

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