A Comparison Essay on Second Language Acquisition

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A comparison essay on second language acquisition Learning a second language nowadays is considered being part of life. Acquiring a second language means to learn a foreign language in a country where that language is the first language. For example an Icelander whose first language is Icelandic and he or she goes to Spain and learns Spanish there, thus her or his second language becomes Spanish. This cannot be the case if he or she learns Spanish at school in Iceland. Due to exchange programs, like Nord plus or Erasmus which is celebrating the 25th anniversary in 2012, second language acquisition became not only easier the last quarter of a century, but it also gives an extraordinary experience. This essay will present and compare three journal articles regarding the topic which is second language acquisition; however these articles differ from each other in several bases. Introduction of the three articles The paper of James L. Citron (1995) on second language acquisition called Can Cross-Cultural Understanding Aid Second Language Acquisition? Toward a Theory of Ethno-Lingual Relativity. Citron’s paper will be referred as paper one from now on in this comparison essay. Paper one collects and combines the different hypothesis on second language learning. These hypothesizes helps us understand the difficulties and positive effects of second language learning. Citron talks about ethno-lingual relativity, a perspective which is not only limited to one’s own cultural and linguistic view, but also opened to other people’s cultural and linguistic patterns. One hypothesis in Paper one (Whorf 1967) suggests that a language reflects a cultural pattern of their speaker and the one who is able to recognize this pattern has an advantage to learn a new language. Another hypothesis describes (Schumann in Brown 1980) that the greater the social difference between two cultures

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