The course provides an introduction to second
language acquisition research. The initial lectures define the scope of
second language studies and demonstrate their relevance to linguistics,
language pedagogy and intercultural communication, their relationship to
other disciplines, such as linguistics and applied linguistics,
psychology, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, social psychology
and sociolinguistics, and discuss major issues in related fields of
study, such as multiple and heritage language acquisition. Then the
historical predecessors of second language acquisition studies are
presented: behaviourism in psychology as well as structuralism in
linguistics and the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. The cognitive
revolution in the social sciences initiated by Chomsky is discussed and
the influence Chomsky’s early ideas had on the emergence of second
language acquisition as a separate field of study. The influence of
Chomsky’s ideas is also shown in early second language acquisition
research: Error Analysis and interlanguage studies, morpheme order
studies and Krashen’s Monitor Model. As the field matures, the scope of
interest broadens to include crosslinguistic influence at the cognitive,
not only linguistic, level. Then, Chomsky’s Universal Grammar is
discussed along with the controversies it raised in second language
acquisition research and Cook’s multicompetence proposal. After that,
major developments in psychology are presented. This discussion begins
with early research in first language acquisition contradicting some of
Chomsky’s early claims. Then information processing approaches are
discussed along with the role of memory in second language acquisition,
as well as emergentism and usage-based approaches. The students are also
introduced to neurological foundations of first and second language
processing. The discussion ends with an overview of findings on the role
of age in second language acquisition.
- Teacher: Anna Ewert