Comparing and Contrasting First and
Second Language Acquisition
Implications for Language Teachers
Similarities between First and Second Language Acquisition
Developmental Sequences
Rod Ellis (1984)
covers the idea of developmental sequences in detail and outlines three
developmental stages
The silent period
Children acquiring their first language go through a period of listening to the language they are
exposed to.
Formulaic speech
Expressions which are learnt as unanalysable wholes and employed on particular occasions (Lyons,
1968, cited in Ellis, 1994)
These expressions can have the form of routines ,Krashen (1982)
Structural and semantic
simplification.
Structural simplifications take the form of omitting grammatical functors
(e.g. articles, auxiliary verbs) and semantic simplifications take the form of
omitting content words (e. g. nouns, verbs).
Acquisition Order
Acquiring grammatical morphemes
Linguistic Universals and Markedness
Generative school
Chomsky
Approaches to linguistic universals
Typological universals
Greenberg (1966, in Ellis 1994)
Input
"Language which a learner hears or receives and from which he or she can learn” (Richards et al., 1989, p.
143)
Crucial Language Acquisition
Behavioristic Views of Language Acquisition
Operant conditioning.(Pavlov,B.F.Skinner)
Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), Vygotsky (1982)
Differences in First and Second Language Acquisition
The Acquisition/Learning Hypothesis Krashen,
(1982)
The Critical Period Hypothesis
Neurological Considerations
Lateralization makes it difficult for people to be able ever again to easily acquire fluent control of
the second language or native-like pronunciation. (Thomas Scovel 1969 )
Psychomotor Consideration
The decline of the flexibility in the speech muscles, prevents adult second language
learners to reach native-like pronunciation in the second language
(Brown, 1994).
Affective Considerations
Inhibition, attitudes, anxiety,
and motivation
Fossilization
The possible causes for fossilization are suggested to be age ,lack of desire to articulate and lack of
learning opportunity