Talk:Second-language acquisition

Define "learner language"

"Learner language" is not a common term lay people know. After reading the article introduction and learner language section introduction, I am left wondering wtf it means. Define it, create a "learner language" article, or use a clearer term (interlanguage?)

Breaking up into new articles

The section "Summary of Research" and "New Directions" need to be moved to decrease the length of the page. Simply moving the information to the critical period page would only bloat that page to gargantuan size, and I would also have to move the links and references at the bottom there too, and I wouldn't want to remove references relevant to the rest of the article. The major long contributions were made by 81.101.79.212. A whois search came up with a result from Amsterdam. They have a large linguistics group there. Perhaps it was written by an American or British Grad Student. Rpchase 03:13, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I am going to move the "Summary" of language acquisition to another page. Rpchase 02:53, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about 4900 words long, so any substantial new content should be farmed out to a sub-article. I see this as a survey article in the future, with sub-articles on each of the different fields of SLA. Lots of work to do here! :-) -- Visviva 03:52, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I have created a new page for the Critical Period Hypothesis - this topic is currently spread over several articles, including critical period and language acquisition as well as this one. As this SLA article is becoming too long, and since the CPH - I would argue - is fundamental enough to merit a page of its own, I have copied all the content from these pages, and added a short introduction. Arguably, much of the detail on this page can now be cut. Jsteph 11:23, 8 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Effective strategies etc

Someone should really put in a paragraph on what the consensus is wrt. current state-of-the-art in stategies and techniques for L2a.

Missing reference

The article says:

Nation (2000) reviews various studies which indicate that about 98% of the words in running text should be previously known in order for extensive reading to be effective.

But Nation (2000) is not on the list of references. Taw 08:33, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Is there anyone working on this article at the moment?

I think there is scope for shortening this article while keeping the same content. Is there any plans to add other SLA topics like phonology acquisition (e.g. phonological templates), memory strategy, comparison between SLA and FLA? --RichardCLeen 21:36, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"The objective of this study is to investigate whether capacity for vocabulary acquisition decreases with age."

This quote makes me think that the Summary of Critical Period Research to date section is copied from some article. Is there a citation?

Sources?

I see the article mentions Dörnyei (2001) put there is no information in the references section. Does anyone have the actual reference?DDD DDD 01:33, 13 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

External Links

I fixed one broken link and removed some others that did not provide sufficient content for warrant their inclusion. The appliedlinguistics.org links have been problematic elsewhere and have nothing to do with the content on this page. They also also contain objectionable amounts of advertising and it is clear that they were being used only to promote the websites - even having multiple links to the same url on this page. I left the one link to lingforum.org because it is potentially related - but the wiki guidelines do state that discussion forums should not be linked. In the past, the website owner has repeatedly reposted the links (promising to improve the content of the site) and that may happen again here. If anyone believes that it is vital to have a list of TESOL programs linked to the article, an up-to-date, ad-free list is available at the tesol.org website. Guidelines for external links can be found at Wikipedia:External_links.

Thank you, anon editor above, for this patrolling and housekeeping work. The price of freedom (from spam links) is eternal vigilance! BrainyBabe 14:21, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Competence performance distinction

The article says, "This distinguishes competence, a person's idealized knowledge of language rules, from performance, the imperfect realization of these rules. Thus, a person may be interrupted and not finish a sentence, but still know how to make a complete sentence." The logic of the second sentence in the pair does not follow from the first in a way that makes this a useful description of Chomsky's competence versus performance distinction; furthermore, the explanation of the notion of performance is misleading. Chomsky(1965)makes this distinction as a way of outlining which particular aspect of linguistic phenomena he was interested in pursuing (i.e. using as the basis for his discussion). Rather than refer to people's actual (real-world) utterances as a source for data, his opinion was that theoretical linguistics should refer only to the "abstract and hidden representation of language knowledge held inside our minds" (Mitchell & Myles, 2004, p. 10). I suggest removing these sentences from the article. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects on the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mitchell, R. and F. Myles. (2004). Second Language Learning Theories. New York: Oxford UP. Darrellpenta 22:55, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There were a number of SLA researchers who worked under the generative grammar (P&P) framework (e.g., White, 1992, 1996, 2003; Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996; Martohardjono, 1995; Flynn, 1996 etc.) and the distinction between competence and performance has been the foundation of their studies. I agree that the notion of performance is not same as that Chomsky originally proposed (basically, refutation against data-oriented corpus studies until the early 1950s'), but I think it's worth mentioning in this article. For example, one of the SLA handbooks (Richie & Bhatia, 1996) is based on this kind of assumption. Maybe, this article should refer to one of those UG-based studies. --Tomonori 00:47, 18 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Second Language Acquisition and Language Education

I just wanted to comment that the distinction between these two terms is quite large and so I don't believe that this Second Language Acquisition (SLA) article should be merged with Language Education. Gass and Selinker (Second Language Acquisition, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004, p.2) have suggested that Second Language Acquisition is not only concerned with Language Education. In addition to Language Pedogogy, SLA is also concerned with Linguistics, Cross-Cultural Communication, Language Policy and Language Planning. I would like to suggest that Wikipedia keep these topics separate. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Quimbys (talk • contribs) 09:01, 5 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the first half. SLA is very obviously not the same as (second) language education: (i) some people acquire a second language despite having no education in it, and as many of us can confirm from embarrassing personal experience, (ii) a huge number of people undergo second language education with little acquisition to show for it.

SLA is also related to first language acquisition, and of course to linguistics. Second-language education (for English, usually called ELT, TESOL, etc.) is related to pedagogy etc etc as well as to SLA.

Moreover, universities and academic publishers acknowledge that SLA and second-language education are very different. -- Hoary 09:11, 5 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Second Language Acquisition and Language Education should not be merged

Although the previous comment is substatially more supportive of this claim.

Language Education could imply language learning in schools and only within schools