(This article is submitted by Mohammad Hashamdar, PhD Student, Islamic Azad University-Science and Research Branch- Tehran- IRAN, E-mail: m_hashamdar@yahoo.com)
Second Language Acquisition has two different senses to be distinguished. Ellis (2005) classified these two senses. He referred to the first one as the learning of another language after the acquisition of one’s mother tongue is completed. He labeled it the object of inquiry. The second sense refers to the study of how people learn a second language; that is, it can be labeled as the field of enquiry.
There might be different views in scientific realms of various disciplines. Theses different views do not always lead to confrontation and debate. They may lead to separate development in that field. That field has to undergo a degree of fragmentation in which different areas of enquiry, while still under the title of the main discipline, can go for their own interest and add new discoveries. One highly dynamic area of enquiry of this kind is the field of Second Language Acquisition.
In 1960s onward, the study of First Language Acquisition was accelerated in the language domain. This acceleration in that field caused the initiation of the study in the SLA in 1970s. Cook (2003) states that SLA research concerned itself with both explaining and describing the process of acquiring a second language. At first, particular areas of interest have included the degree of transfer from the first language to the second language. Later, this transfer from first language to second changed direction and in some topic such as individual differences, the itinerary was from second language to first one.
Gass and Selinker (2008), while recognizing that the field is both an old and a new one, suggest that “as it is now represented” it “only goes back about 40 years”. The starting point is generally held to be Corder’s (1967) seminal article “The significance of learner errors” together with Selinker’s (1969, 1972) work on language transfer and inter-language as a linguistic system in its own right—both of which, in very similar ways, challenged the view prevailing at that time that second language (L2) acquisition was like any other learning, namely, just a matter of habit formation. These early papers provided the impetus for a series of empirical studies. These consisted of analyses of learner errors, case studies of individual language learners, and studies investigating the order of acquisition of a group of English morphemes by Dulay & Burt in 1973 (cited in Ellis, 2007). The tradition that SLA has followed ever since was a continuum from a theoretical questioning of basic assumptions followed by empirical inquiry to establish whether the new claims have any foundation.
SLA is inherently an applied linguistic discipline. That is, it is a problem-oriented field and it is eclectic in the bodies of knowledge it brings to bear in seeking solutions of the problems that it identifies. The early work in SLA was oriented towards solving the problem of “language pedagogy”—namely, identifying a method to teaching L2 which works effectively and that classroom learners were as successful at learning a second/foreign language as they were in their mother tongue or first language. Throughout years, however, SLA has increasingly addressed other problems. The nature of problem changed dramatically from a empirical nature to a more theoretical one. Nevertheless, SLA has never lost its applied orientation totally. Today the scope of SLA has broadened and extended to the programs for linguists and for students studying the cognitive and social sciences.
It is noteworthy to mention that the field of SLA has an interdisciplinary entity (Gass and Selinker, 2008). Scholars approach the field from a wide range of disciplines: sociology, psychology, computer sciences, anthropology, education, and linguistics. Being concern of different disciplines has both positive and negative effects on the field. The merit is that through the diversity of perspectives and scopes, we can find a richer and more fruitful picture of acquisition. The picture can best represent the issue of SLA from different angles due to the fact that many variables involved in SLA are factors relating to psychology, sociology, education, and linguistics. The demerit is that these multiple involvement from different disciplines in the field provokes complexity. Gass and Selinker (2008) believe that multiple perspectives on what purports to be a single discipline bring confusion, because it frequently occurs that scholars from various disciplines who had worked on SLA cannot understand each other.
Second Language Acquisition has different scope. That is, various disciplines and sciences might have interest or benefits in this realm:
Linguistics
The essence of SLA is language and in order to study and understand its principles one
should be familiar to linguistics. Gass and Selinker (2008) argued that a major goal of the second language acquisition research is the determination of linguistic constraints on the formation of second language grammars.
Sociology
SLA research sometimes deals with social identity and gender as these play important roles in the complex multilingual societies. Socio-cultural theories that address how culture and language are interwoven as learners progress from other- to self-regulation in the L2 has been a continuing interest in individual learner differences in language learning.
Neurolinguistics
The availability of increasingly sophisticated means for examining the functioning of the human brain (e.g. magnetic resonance imaging) has allowed researchers to examine neurolinguistic aspects of L2 use and acquisition. Traditional neurolinguistic, and cognitive approaches to second language acquisition (SLA) operate by observing linguistic behavior in experimental, clinical, or naturalistic settings, and based on patterns in those data, mechanisms are inferred.
Psycholinguistics
The focus of inquiry and research in psycholinguistic SLA has been the acquisition of linguistic competence. The study of learner errors, of orders and sequences of acquisition, of variability in learner language, and even of inter-language pragmatics has been mainly concerned with documenting how learners develop specific L2 linguistic resources. Early SLA research was predominantly psycholinguistic in nature.
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguists prefer to treat individuals as representative members of the speech communities in which they function. It should be noted, however, that sociolinguistics is a broad field of study, itself encompassing a number of different perspectives. Fasold et al.(2006) defines sociolinguistics as the study of language in its social context. He classified sociolinguistics into two branches: (a) the sociolinguistics of society, and (b) the sociolinguistics of language. The former, according to Fasold, deals with the societal end of the language and society spectrum.
The latter is primarily concerned with language and linguistic theory but sees a need to examine social factors in order to account for these. Later SLA research has increasingly adopted a sociolinguistics of society outlook, often stridently so by insisting on the narrowness and illegitimacy of the input, interaction, and output model.
Mono-lingualism, bilingualism and multilingualism
Many SLA researchers are interested in knowing the nature of learning in monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual cases. When do we label a person as bilingual or multilingual?
De Bot et al. (2005) argued that there were two extreme positions regarding the answer to this question, both of which are now seen as untenable. One is that only people who grow up in two languages are ‘real’ bilinguals because they have a full command of those languages. The other extreme is that any knowledge of another language will make you a bilingual. So if you can read Hebrew characters, you are a bilingual in Hebrew and your first language. Clearly, the definition should be somewhere between those two extremes.
A form of language acquisition which is relatively recently originated in the education literature is heritage language acquisition. It is a form of SLA and a form of bilingualism.
Heritage language learners have knowledge of two languages (the home language and the language of the environment/school), and they are usually dominant in the second language.
Psycholinguistic or Sociolinguistic SLA?
Tarone and Swain (1995) provide a neat characterization of the differences between a psycholinguistic and a sociolinguistic approach to investigating L2 acquisition.
The controversy over whether SLA should proceed as primarily a psycholinguistic or sociolinguistic field of study came to the fore in a special issue of the Modern Language Journal, where Firth and Wagner (1997) presented their prolegomena for a sociolinguistics of society approach to investigating L2 acquisition and a number of psycholinguistic SLA researchers responded (cited in Ellis, 2007).
Ellis (2007) believes that with the partial exception of variability studies, which draws on the sociolinguistics of language tradition, early SLA research was predominantly psycholinguistic in nature.
Diversity in theories of SLA
The multiplicity which exists in SLA caused many theories, models, and hypotheses in the field. Each discipline tried to propose its own theories and models. Few of these theories and models consider the principles of other theories. This is partly because SLA is an interdisciplinary entity and partly due to the lack of attention given to other theories by other theoreticians.
This theoretical pluralism has inevitably given rise to sharp divisions in opinion regarding the relative merits of the different theories. It has also given rise to controversy and debate as to whether such multiplicity should be accepted as inevitable and even desirable in a complex field of inquiry such as SLA or whether there is a need to sift out the weaker theories (Ellis, 2007).
On the one hand, there are the “relativists” who view SLA research as an “art” rather than a “science” and argue that “in art perspectives are neither right or wrong; they are simply more or less appealing to various audiences” (Schumann cited in Ellis, 2007). On the other hand, there are those like Long (1993) and Beretta (1991), who see multiple theories as problematic for SLA research and consider the elimination of some theories in favor of others, a necessary goal if the field is to advance. He argued that where opposition exists, culling needs to take place, pointing out that the history of science shows that successful sciences are those that are guided by a dominant theory (Long cited in Ellis, 2007).
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