Second%20language%20acquisition%20and%20materials%20development

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Second language acquisition and materials
development

• Chapter 2

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Introduction
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SLA

• Second language acquisition (SLA)
• SLA is the process by which people acquire and/or
  learn any language in addition to their first
  language.
• It is also the name of the academic discipline
  which studies that process.

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• Acquisition

• Learning

• It is informal, subconscious process of gaining a
  language from exposure and use.

• It is deliberate, conscious study of a language
  in order to be able to use it.

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• Acquisition

• Development

• It is the initial stage of gaining basic
  communicative competence in a language.

• It is the subsequent stage of gaining the ability
  to use the language successfully in a wide range
  of media and genres for a variety of purposes.
• Tomlinson (2007)

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What do we know about the process of SLA

• Research and theory

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It is generally agreed that SLA is facilitated by
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A rich and meaningful exposure to language in use

• Powerful evidence ?Extensive reading

Exposure to comprehensive input is both necessary
and sufficient for SLA
Input
meaningful
rich

• It contains a lot of implicit information about
  how the language is actually used to achieve
  communicative effect
• It provides natural recycling of language features

It is relevant to the learner and the learner is
able to understand enough of it to gain meaning
from it.
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Affective engagement
Self-esteem
Self-confidence
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Cognitive engagement
Inferencing
evaluating
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Making use of those mental resources typically
used in the communication in the L1

• Reading listening
• Inner voice
• Visual imaging
• Motor imaging
• Prior to speaking writing
• Visual imaging
• Inner speech

• To silently eco the utterances we hear or see and
  to comment to ourselves about them
• To present the meaning of what is said or written
• Mm
• To recreate movements which are described
• To develop a mental representation of our
  intended message
• To prepare what we are going to say or write

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Noticing how the L2 is used
Nothing in the input can become intake without
noticing it.
Schmidt
Psychological readiness is an important
facilitator of acquisition and this can be
influenced by materials and teachers.
Pienneman
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Being given opportunities for contextualized and
purposeful communication in the L2

• Output (producing language for communication)
• It can provide learners with contextual feedback
• It helps to automatize language
• It constitutes auto-input and it can elicit
  further comprehensible input too
• Pushed output (communicating something which is
  not easy to express)
• It stretches the learners capabilities by
• making them make full use of their acquired
  language and of their strategic competence
• providing opportunities for new but
  comprehensible input from their interlocutors who
  are helping them to negotiate meaning.
• This would suggest that setting learners
  achievable communicative challenges is likely to
  be more useful than providing easy practice.

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Being encouraged to interact
Interaction hypotheses

• Oral interaction in the L2 creates positive
  conditions for its acquisition as
• it helps to make input more comprehensible
• It provides meaningful feedback
• it pushes learners to modify their output

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Being allowed to focus on meaning

• Helping learners to acquire language from a focus
  on meaning
• Use an experiential approach in which the
  learners first experience an engaging text
  holistically, respond to it personally and then
  return to the text to focus discretely on a
  salient feature of language use.
• This procedure was advocated by Long as a
  form-focused approach to replace the typical
  form-focused approach in which the teacher or
  textbook focuses the learners conscious
  attention on a pre determined, discrete form
  (e.g. the present perfect).
• This procedure is also made use of in language
  awareness approaches in which the learners first
  experience a form in use and are then helped to
  make their own discoveries about it and in
  consciousness rising approaches in which the
  learners are guided towards finding out how a
  form is used.

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