First and second language acquisition

SLA Topics  SLA Bibliography  Vivian Cook   SLL and LT

    Differences between L1 and L2 acquisition

               Ellis 94 (based on Bley-Vroman 1988)
Feature  L1 acquisition L2 (foreign language) VC's objections
acquisition
1. Overall  children normally adult L2 learners are  
    success achieve perfect L1 unlikely to achieve perfect
 
mastery L2 mastery
success guaranteed complete success rare All implicitly see
2. General  'success' in the
    failure sense of what a
little variation in L2 learners vary in overall mono-lingual native
3. Variation
degree of success success and route speaker does, not an
or route L2 user

4. Goals target language  L2 learners may be content

competence with less than target
language competence or
more concerned with
fluency than accuracy
5. unknown common, plus backsliding And L2 users too
Fossilisation (i.e. return to earlier stages have L1 attrition
of development
6.Intuitions children develop L2 learners are often unable But bilingual children
clear intuitions about to form clear grammaticality are better at this
correctness judgments than monolinguals

7. Instruction not needed helpful or necessary All depends!

8. Negative  correction not found correction generally helpful Recasts are in fact
    evidence and not necessary or necessary based on L1
acquisition ideas

9. Affective  not involved play a major role Again measured

    factors determining proficiency against
monolinguals

Cook, V.J., Long, J., & McDonough, S. (1979), ‘First and second language
learning’, in G.E. Perren (ed.) The Mother Tongue and Other Languages
in Education, CILTR, 7-22 online here
1. The child’s language is a system in its own right rather than being a small
fragment of the adult system
2. The learning of a first language has many sides and is not simply a matter of
 learning syntax and vocabulary
3. The use of the first language goes hand in hand with the child’s needs and
interests
4. Wherever there is a relationship between cognition and language development,
language depends on cognition
5. The child’s use and learning of language is partly determined by mental
capacity
6. There are particular stages of development through which all children progress,
even if the rate of progression varies
7. The child learns to adapt its language use to particular situations
8. Adults adapt their speech in systematic ways when talking to children

Extract from V.Cook (2000) 'Linguistics and Second Language

Acquisition: One Person with Two Languages' Aronoff & Rees-Miller,
Blackwell Handbook of Linguistics

What are the similarities between L2 learning and L1 acquisition?

A continuing theme has been whether people acquire a second language in the same way as a first. If
the L2 stages outlined above are also followed by L1 children, both groups are probably using the same
learning process. The L2 sequence for English grammatical morphemes was similar, though not
identical, to that found in L1 acquisition by Brown (1972), the greatest differences being the irregular
past tense (broke), articles (the), copula and auxiliaries (Dulay, Burt & Krashen, 1982). Other similar
sequences of syntactic acquisition have been found in L1 and L2 learning. L2 learners, like L1 learners,
start by believing that John is the subject of please in both John is easy to please and John is eager to
please and only go on to discover it is the object in John is easy to please after some time (Cook 1973;
d’Anglejan & Tucker 1975). L2 learners, like L1 children, at first put negative elements at the
beginning of the sentence No the sun shining and then progress to negation within the sentence That’s
no ready (Wode 1981).

A sub-theme underlying several of the questions discussed here is that L1 acquisition is completely
successful, L2 learning is not. Take two representative quotations: ‘Very few L2 learners appear to be
fully successful in the way that native speakers are’ (Towell & Hawkins 1994: p.14); ‘Unfortunately,
language mastery is not often the outcome of SLA’ (Larsen-Freeman & Long 1991: 153). The evidence
for this deficiency is held to be the lack of completeness of L2 grammars (Schachter 1988) or the
fossilisation in L2 learning where the learner cannot progress beyond some particular stage (Selinker
1992), both familiar ‘facts’ in some sense. Part of the interest in SLA research is explaining why L2
learners are usually unsuccessful. However, this alleged failure depends upon how success is measured,
as we shall see.

The answer to the question is far from settled. While there are many similarities between L1 and L2
learning, the variation in situation and other factors also produces many differences. One difficulty is
filtering out differences that are accidental rather than inevitable. L1 children mostly acquire language
in different settings with different exposure to language than L2 learners and they are at different stages
of mental and social maturity (Cook 1969). It may be inherently impossible to compare equivalent L1
and L2 learners. A more precise version of this question asks whether adults still have access to
Universal Grammar in the mind.

References
Cook, V.J. 1969. The analogy between first and second language learning. IRAL VII/3, 207-216,
Cook, V.J. 1973. The comparison of language development in native children and foreign adults. IRAL
XI/1, 13-28
d’Anglejan, A. & Tucker, G.R. 1975. The acquisition of complex English structures by adult learners.
Language Learning, XV/2
Larsen-Freeman, D. & Long, M. 1991. An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Research.
Longman, London & New York.
Schachter, J. 1988. Second Language Acquisition and its relationship to Universal Grammar. Applied
Linguistics 9, 3, 219-235
Wode, H. 1981. Learning a Second Language. Tübingen: Narr