Second Language Acquisition

A Brief History of the Study of SLA

The scientific study of SLA as an independent field of inquiry took shape in the 1960s, its formal inception marked by the publication of a seminal paper by S. Pit Corder: “The Significance of Learners' Errors.” The discipline has since undergone four mainstream conceptual shifts; chronologically, these are the following:

• 1.
  Behaviorist era (pre-1970s), when second language learning was largely viewed as a process of “relexification” from the first language to the second language, but essentially as a process of habit formation, reinforced by feedback and repeated practice
• 2.
  Cognitive era (1970s–1980s), when the new linguistic system itself as created in the second language learner—known as interlanguage—became the focus of study
• 3.
  Mentalist era (1990s), in which an innate mechanism known as universal grammar was considered the driver of second language development
• 4.
  Interactionist era (2000s), when cognitive systems interacting with environmental influences were actively pursued as both a descriptive and explanatory framework

Throughout its 4 decades of existence, the field of SLA has, consistently and heavily, been influenced by such disciplines as psychology and linguistics, while progressively opening itself up to other disciplines as well—sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics, to name only a few. In consequence, the study of SLA is disciplinary and interdisciplinary to an increasing extent.

Seminal Issues

The field of SLA was spurred into existence largely by a widespread concern about the quality of learning: Lack of success is pervasive, learners typically winding up with variable attainment short of the target. At the epicenter of this concern is “fossilization,” a phenomenon whereby learning stalls despite favorable conditions such as adequate exposure to input, high motivation to learn, and plentiful opportunity for communicative practice, something not found in first language acquisition, which, by contrast, features ease, efficiency, and near-uniform success. The interlanguage hypothesis, the first SLA theory, uses fossilization as its argumentative basis to posit that first and SLA are epistemologically different. Hence, how SLA differs from first language acquisition has been a fundamental issue in SLA research. This issue breaks down into three questions: What is acquisition? How is acquisition possible? And how does acquisition develop? These questions combine to define the scope of SLA research, leading to understandings of the distinct as well as overlapping mechanisms, processes, and outcomes relative to second versus first language acquisition.

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