Second Language Acquisition Theories

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CONTRASTIVE ESSAY SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES There are several theories about how people learn or acquire a second language, but before I talk about my personal point of view regarding all these theories, I want to take a closer look to the word “acquire” as it is very important to understand all the theories. Acquire is different from learning. When we talk about acquisition it means that the process of using language is internalized and somehow students know what is correct and what is incorrect, they don’t know why exactly, they just know. Learning is just to realize about grammar rules in the language. So, the theories that are about to be discussed have to do with acquiring a language not learning it. When we acquire our mother tongue or first language, we also learn its cultural implications, and if we as teachers expect our students to acquire a second language, then they need to get acquaintance with the cultural aspects of that language. This theory is called Acculturation Model. I think that this theory is basically the same thing as the Nativization Model although Rod Ellis stated in his book that Andersen’s model, the second one, is more focused on the processes, cognitive operating principles, and communicative strategies. I guess that every time a new theory appeared it had a new aspect that hadn’t been explored before, for example, in these two theories, nobody mentioned that people tend to use a different way of speaking for every situation; this was a new aspect explored in the Accommodation Theory. So far, we have talked about three theories and I strongly believe that all of them have to be interconnected for people to acquire a second language. But, let’s not jump into conclusions and let’s continue talking about the five theories left. Linguists continued studying more and more because the wanted to know how people acquire a
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