Second Language Acquisition
Second Language Acquisition Research
It has been noted that one of the most outstanding features of human beings is their capacity for learning their mother tongue, and often one or more other languages as well. We can find documented in the literature cases of superpolyglots such as the British explorer Sir Richard Burton who was attributed to have known a total of forty different languages and dialects. For the majority of people, however, the acquisition of a second language is a much less spectacular affair, proving to be a slow and sometimes arduous task, in which the learner will rarely attain native -like competence.
Since ancient times, scholars and philosophers such as Aristoteles, Saint Augustine, or Rousseau, among others, have been interested in second language acquisition. During the last one hundred years, research has centred on the teaching of languages and the methods and materials used. With changing theories in the field of applied linguistics, the focus switched to the learner and the processes involved in the acquisition of a foreign language. While Larsen-Freeman & Long (1991) have noted that there are no less than forty different theories, models, perspectives and hypotheses related to SLA, as regards their relation to language learning/teaching, these theories should not lead exclusively to one method or other, for as Spolsky (1989)comments:
If you look at the complexity of circumstances under which second languages are learned, or fail to be learned, you immediately see that a theory must not only be equally complex, but must also be able to account for the success and the failures of the many different methods that have been, and are used throughout the language teaching world. (1989:2)
The main aim of SLA research involves the description and explanation of the linguistic or communicative competence of the learner (Ellis, 1994:15). As Towell & Hawkins (1994) note, most of the studies that have been carried out to fulfil these...
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