19 Facts About Second-language acquisition

Second-language acquisition, sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language.

Second-language acquisition is the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process.

The field of second-language acquisition is regarded by some but not everybody as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics but receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education.

Krashen makes a distinction between language Second-language acquisition and language learning, claiming that Second-language acquisition is a subconscious process, whereas learning is a conscious one.

Common affective factors that influence Second-language acquisition are anxiety, personality, social attitudes, and motivation.

Second-language acquisition refers to what learners do; it does not refer to practices in language teaching, although teaching can affect acquisition.

The term Second-language acquisition was originally used to emphasize the non-conscious nature of the learning process, but in recent years learning and Second-language acquisition have become largely synonymous.

Academic discipline of second-language acquisition is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics.

Second of Krashen's stages of Second-language acquisition is early production, during which learners can speak in short phrases of one or two words.

Article Second-language acquisition is difficult for L1 speakers of languages without articles, such as Korean and Russian.

Much research in second-language acquisition is concerned with the internal representation of a language in the mind of the learner, and how those representations change over time.

Mental processes that underlie second-language acquisition can be broken down into micro-processes and macro-processes.

Some notable cognitive theories of second-language acquisition include the nativization model, the multidimensional model and processability theory, emergentist models, the competition model, and skill-acquisition theories.

Specific social factors that can affect second-language acquisition include age, gender, social class, and ethnic identity, with ethnic identity being the one that has received most research attention.

Social Identity Theory argues that an important factor for second language Second-language acquisition is the learner's perceived identity to the community of the language being learned, as well as how the community of the target language perceives the learner.

The linguistic research tradition in second-language acquisition has developed in relative isolation from the cognitive and sociocultural research traditions, and as of 2010 the influence from the wider field of linguistics was still strong.

Second-language acquisition believed that children not only acquire language by learning descriptive rules of grammar; he claimed that children creatively play and form words as they learn language, creating meaning of these words, as opposed to the mechanism of memorizing language.

Some learners learn quickly and reach a near-native level of competence, but others learn slowly and get stuck at relatively early stages of Second-language acquisition, despite living in the country where the language is spoken for several years.

Since older learners would already have an established native language, the language Second-language acquisition process is very different for them, than for young learners.