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The Recent History of Second Language Learning Research

The document summarizes the major developments in second language learning research from the 1950s to the present. It discusses: 1) Behaviourism being the dominant theory in the 1950s-1960s, focusing on repetition and practice forming language habits. 2) The "Chomskyan revolution" in the 1970s challenging behaviourism and arguing language acquisition involves internalizing rules rather than copying strings. 3) Developments in the 1970s examining errors in learner language and finding they are not solely due to first language interference but also come from the learner's "interlanguage system".

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Umutcan Gülener
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216 views28 pages

The Recent History of Second Language Learning Research

The document summarizes the major developments in second language learning research from the 1950s to the present. It discusses: 1) Behaviourism being the dominant theory in the 1950s-1960s, focusing on repetition and practice forming language habits. 2) The "Chomskyan revolution" in the 1970s challenging behaviourism and arguing language acquisition involves internalizing rules rather than copying strings. 3) Developments in the 1970s examining errors in learner language and finding they are not solely due to first language interference but also come from the learner's "interlanguage system".

Uploaded by

Umutcan Gülener
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The recent history of

second language
learning research
Why do we have to look back?
• The aim for looking back in the Second Language Learning
traces is to explore the theoretical foundations of today’s
thinking.
Main topics:
• -1950s and 60s,
• -The Chomskyan revolution,
• -70s,
• -80s and onwards.
1950s and 60s
• The conviction that language systems
consisted of a finite set of 'patterns' or
'structures' which acted as models . . . for
the production of an infinite number of
similarly constructed sentences;
• The belief that repetition and practice
resulted in the formation of accurate and
fluent foreign language habits.
❀ ❀❀Behaviourism ❀❀❀
❀ ❀❀Behaviourism ❀❀❀
• The formula of behavourism:

stimuli from the environment


• (stimulus + response) . reinforcement = habit (desired outcome)
• We know from the observation of many
cases that the grammatical structure of the
native language tends to be transferred to
the foreign language ... we have here the
major source of difficulty or ease in learning
the foreign language . . . Those structures
that are different will be difficult.
• (Lado, 1957, pp. 58-9, cited in Dulay et at.,
1982, p. 99)
Chomskyan revolution
Chomsky’s ideas
• A) …children do not learn and reproduce a large set of
sentences, but they routinely create new sentences that
they have never learnt before. This is only possible
because they internalize rules rather than strings of
words; extremely common examples of utterances such
as it breaked or Mummy goed show clearly that children
are not copying the language around them but applying
rules.
• B) …some of the structural properties of language, given
their complexity, could not possibly be expected to be
learnt on the basis of the samples of language to which
children are exposed.
70s
Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi
We shouldn’t focus on target
language or the mother tongue
but rather the language
produced by the learner.
All errors are not caused by the
interference of the first
language.
All errors are not caused by the
interference of the first
language.

Where do such errors come


from?
Where do such errors come
from?
•-Selinker - Interlanguage,
•-Roger Brown - Morphemes,
•-Negative structures…
Conclusion
• Second language learning is,

• Systematic,
• Largely independent,
• Even though it has differences, it
presents many similarities with
first language acquisition.
Conclusion
Schumann’s pidginization
• -The social and psychological
integration of the learner with the
target language group.
80s and onwards
• -SLL have become a complete
autonomous field of inquiry,
• New links with cognitive science,
neuro-psychology, socio-cultural
frameworks,
• Other fundamental issues such as,
Questions
Thank you

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