Second Language Acquisition

The academic discipline of second-language acquisition is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics. It is broad-based and relatively new. As well as the various branches of linguistics, second-language acquisition is also closely related to psychology, cognitive psychology, and education. To separate the academic discipline from the learning process itself, the terms second-language acquisition research, second-language studies, and second-language acquisition studies are also used.

SLA research began as an interdisciplinary field, and because of this it is difficult to identify a precise starting date.[7] However, two papers in particular are seen as instrumental to the development of the modern study of SLA: Pit Corder`s 1967 essay The Significance of Learners` Errors, and Larry Selinker`s 1972 article Interlanguage.[8] The field saw a great deal of development in the following decades.[7] Since the 1980s, SLA has been studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and theoretical perspectives. In the early 2000s, some research suggested an equivalence between the acquisition of human languages and that of computer languages (e.g. Java) by children in the 5 to 11 year age window, though this has not been widely accepted among educators.[9] Significant approaches in the field today are: systemic functional linguistics, sociocultural theory, cognitive linguistics, Noam Chomsky`s universal grammar, skill acquisition theory and connectionism.[8]

There has been much debate about exactly how language is learned, and many issues are still unresolved. There are many theories of second-language acquisition, but none are accepted as a complete explanation by all SLA researchers. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the field of SLA, this is not expected to happen in the foreseeable future. Although attempts have been made to provide a more unified account that tries to bridge first language acquisition and second language learning research.