Second language Acquisition

  We have looked at the ways in which children learn language, and we have seen that they do indeed appear to learn a great deal from very little evidence, and that they do appear to build upon grammars that they could not have simply plucked from the language that they hear around them. We have looked at one or two examples of language learning in extreme situations, and we have seen that there are indications that language must be learnt at a certain period in a child's life, and that a reasonably intelligent adolescent or adult, capable of learning many things, finds learning a language simply too difficult.

We now need to turn to look more closely at the acquisition of a second language. In doing so, we will bear in mind a number of questions

• - are there similarities between first language learning and second language learning, and if so - what are they?
• - are there differences between first language learning and second language learning - and if so, what are they?
• - do young children learn a second language in the same way that a teenager or an adult learns it?

We will begin by looking at one theory of L2 learning that holds that it is very similar to L1 acquisition. This is the theory of Stephen Krashen, an American linguist who holds a Chomskian position, and who at one time worked on the team that investigated Genie's language acquisition. Krashen's theory is called the 'Input Hypothesis', because he claims that it is through input - what we hear, and what we read - that we make progress in a foreign language - and not through output - speaking and writing.