a. What are you learning when you are learning Second Language?

Thousands of words and rules on how you put them together to an entirely new sound system, idioms
for when it’s appropriate to say what cultural competence. People in the world learn languages in many
different contexts for many different motivations or reasons and with a very wide range of success.

b. What is Second Language Acquisition?

Linguistic is a scientific study of a language. Second Language Acquisition or SLA is a subfield of linguistics
that focuses on the learning and teaching second languages.

Serious efforts to study second language learning emerged in the mid-1900s when researches started to
look at how insights from psychology theoretical linguistics and first language acquisition could inform
our understanding of how adults learned additional languages and how this could apply to language
teaching. By the 1980s, SLA was really being established as a field in its own right. This is when early and
influential theories about second language learning started to take hold. These theories considered how
second language development was affected by things like innate grammatical knowledge, interaction
with other speakers, and social factors. They paved the way for explosion research that has flourished to
this day intersection with a wide range of scientific fields including anthropology, sociology, cognitive
science, neuroscience and education. SLA has its own subfields, generally these are divided into two
main strands. An applied strand that focuses on how to make language learning and teaching more
effective and a pure research strand that focuses on understanding the human ability to learn languages.

Why does it matter?

Second Language Acquisition is vital for education. Teaching programs, textbooks, curriculum designs
and even the activities in your language classrooms are often informed by SLA research. Beyond the
classroom, people learn languages at all ages in a variety of context for a variety of different reasons and
they all come at it with different strengths and weaknesses. SLA research seeks to understand how all
these different factors and more influence language learning.

Second Language Acquisition is important for public policy. In many countries, immigrants make up a
large number of second language learners. SLA research can inform policies about how and when to
educate these newcomers in the local language while maintaining their home languages.

Second Language Acquisition is important for national security and diplomacy. The Department of
Defense is actually one of the biggest funders of SLA research. They need to identify talented language
learners who can quickly learn to communicate with the diplomats and locals all over the world and
they’re probably training spies.

Second Language Acquisition is important for economy. More and more jobs are requiring
proficiency in another language, and in many fields, learning a second language can make you
a more competitive candidate.
The most important application of SLA is its role in cross-cultural understanding. SLA
research shows that learning new languages makes us more open to other cultures and
broadens our worldview.
In Summary,

1. Second Language Acquisition (aka SLA) is a subfield of linguistics that focuses

on the learning and teaching of second languages.

2. Within SLA, a “second” language refers to any language learned after your first

language, beyond the first few years of life.

3. SLA is relevant to many areas of our everyday lives, including, but not limited to

education, public policy, national security and diplomacy, the economy, and

cross-cultural understanding.