Second language acquisition by David Nunan

This blog is a part of our ELT-1 class activity,

The references have been taken from the research paper of David Nunan: Second Language acquisition

        The second language acquisition is all about how native learners accept the second and foreign language. David Nunan has done a research in this field and he found that researchers are interested in both process as well as product. Product is the language which is used by learners and process is the leaning process.

       SLA (Second language acquisition) immerged from comparative studies of similarities and differences between languages. These comparative studies conducted in the belief that L₁ has a very influence upon the acquisition of L₂, which is ‘Contrastive analysis’ hypotheses.

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             Contractive analysis includes two terms:

1 Negative Transfer: when the rules of L_­1 and L₂ are not similar, it is negative transfer between speaker and listener.

2 Positive Transfer: when the rules of L_­1 and L₂ are similar, it is positive transfer between speaker and listener.

     §  Corder’s investigation of learners SLA (1967)

        In the approach of Corder, errors are considered as a normal and healthy part of the learning process which has suggested by behaviourism.

      

      §  Brown’s longitudinal case (1973)

       Brown has done a research work upon three children who were having English as a L₁. He found fourteen (14) grammatical structures, and their way of learning and using English was similar to their parents. As per Brown the way of learning English language is natural.

        

       §  Dulay and Burt (1973-1974)

       Dulay and Burt have established a new term “Morpheme order” which means minimum meaningful language unit. Dulay and Burt found that listening is the first way of learning language. they have done their research upon the children from different L₁ backgrounds(Spanish and Chinese), and as a result they found that the morpheme they have used were similar.

       §  Stephen Krashen (1980s) :

      Krashen formulated a ‘controversial hypothesis’, as per him there are two mental process operating SLA: conscious learning and subconscious learning.

Conscious learning: it focuses upon grammatical rules. It helps learners to identify the violation of rules.

Subconscious learning: it facilitating the acquisition of grammatical rules at a subconscious level.

      Krashen has also argued that the basic mechanism underlying language acquisition was comprehension, and he has given “comprehensible input hypotheses”. In this hypothesis learner understands a message in different structure. The instructions which have given for language are input and acquisition of language is output.

      Long has also done research upon tasks of SLA, he has given three stages which are connected with each other.

1. Conversational adjustment

    2.    Comprehensible input 

    3.    Acquisition

      Current SLA research orientations can be captured by a single word: complexity. Researchers have been found that there are different dimensions of language acquisition, and input and output both are important in this process. SLA can be defined as a discipline from early work in CA, error analysis and inter-language development.