Describe the most important events of Chomsky’s life.

Chomsky has published over seventy books and over a thousand articles in a range of fields
including linguistics, philosophy, politics, cognitive sciences, and psychology.

Chomsky began his formal education at a remarkably young age. Just prior to this second
birthday, he was sent to a Deweyite experimental institution in Philadelphia called the Oak Lane
Country Day School, where he remained until the age of twelve.

Despite the merits of Oak Lane Country School, no single educational institution could ever be
considered the principal source of Chomsky’s education. From a tender age, he was an avid
reader, delving into many fields.

At the age of twelve, Chomsky read a draft of his father’s book on David Kimhi, a Hebrew
grammarian working in the golden age of Jewish cultural creativity. Robert Sklar remembers a
conversation he had with Chomsky concerning the impact his father’s book had upon him.
Chomsky said that he had come to the field of linguistics informed by the classical philosophy
that he had learned from this father, and from his own readings, rather than by the prevailing
structuralist position.

In a sense, he became interested in the study of language without benefit of a theoretical

background; but he was equipped with a feeling for, and an interest in, historical processes,
which led him to seek explanations rather than formulate descriptions.

“In fact, giving explanations was regarded as some kind of infantile mysticism. Really the only
innovation I think I introduced into the field basically was to try to give descriptive explanations-
to try to give a theory of the synchronic structure of the language which would actually explain
the distribution of phenomena. In my early work, at least, this was very self-consciously modeled
on the kinds of explanations that people gave in historical linguistics that I knew about ever since
I was a kid” (qtd. in Sklar 32).

How does Chomsky theory apply to SLA?

While Chomsky did not make specific claims about the implications of his theory of second
language learning, Lydia White (2003) and other linguists have argued that Universal Grammar
offers the best perspective from which to understand second language acquisition.

Vivian Cook (2003) and others point out that there is still ́the logical problem ́of second language
acquisition. That is, we need an explanation for the fact that learners eventually know more
about the language than they could reasonably have learned if they had to depend entirely on the
input they are exposed to. The implications is that knowledge of UG must be available to second
language learners as well as to first language learners. Some of the theorists who hold this view
claim that the nature and availability of UG are the same in first and second language
acquisition. Others argue that UG may be present and available to second language learners, but
its exact nature has been altered by the acquisition of other languages.
What aspects of his theory do not apply to SLA?

Robert Bley- Vroman (1990) and Jacquelyn Schachter (1990) have suggested that, although UG
may be an appropriate framework for understanding first language acquisition, it does not offer a
good explanation for the acquisition of a second language, especially by learners who have
passed the critical period. In their view, this means that second language acquisition has to be
explained by some other theory, perhaps one of the more general psychological theories.

Lydia White (1991) and others agree that acquisition of many grammatical features of the new
language takes place naturally when learners are engaged in meaningful use of the language.
However, they also suggest that, because the nature of UG is altered by the acquisition of the
first language, second language learners may sometimes need explicit information about what is
not grammatical in the second language. Otherwise, they may assume that some structures of the
first language have equivalents in the second language when, in fact, they do not.