Second Language Acquisition and Materials Development

Introduction

Second language acquisition (SLA) is the process by which people acquire and/or learn any language in
addition to their first language. It is also the name of the academic discipline which studies that process.
Some SLA researchers use the term 'acquisition' to refer to the informal, subconscious process of gaining
a language from exposure and use while reserving the term 'learning' to refer to the deliberate,
conscious study of a language in order to be able to use it.

There is considerable controversy in the field as to which of these processes is the most likely to help a
learner to develop the ability to use a language effectively but most researchers seem to agree that
learning is insufficient and needs to be at least supplemented by acquisition.

5 Some researchers also differentiate between ‘acquisition’ and ‘development’. For example, Tomlinson
(2007a, p. 2) says that acquisition' is the initial stage of gaining basic communicative competence in a
language' and 'development' is the subsequent stage of gaining the ability to use the language
successfully in a wide range of media and genres for a wide variety of purposes’.

Research and Theory It is generally agreed that SLA is facilitated by:

A rich and meaningful exposure to language in use

Krashen ( ) claimed that exposure to comprehensible input was both necessary and sufficient for SLA.
Ideally the input which the learners are exposed to should be rich in the sense that it contains a lot of
implicit informal about how the language is actually used to achieve communicative effect and that it
provides natural recycling of language features (Nation, 2011).

It should also be meaningful in the sense that it is relevant to the learner and the learner is able to
understand enough of it to gain meaning from it.

Affective and cognitive engagement

It has been found that affective engagement is vital for SLA Learners who are stimulated to laugh, smile,
feel joy, feel excited and feel empathetic are much more likely to acquire communicative competence
than learners who are restricted to bland, safe, neutral materials which do not stimulate any emotional
response. Positive emotions seem most likely to stimulate deep processing (Craik - & Lockhart, 1972)
and therefore to facilitate language acquisition.

Self-confidence and self-esteem are also important aspects of affective engagement as is feeling positive
about the learning environment. It is also very important that learners are cognitively engaged by the
texts and tasks they are given to use. They need to use such high level mental skills as inferencing,
connecting, predicting and evaluating while processing language.

10 If they do, they are much more likely to achieve deep processing and to eventually acquire language
and develop language skills than if they are restricts to using such low level decoding and encoding skills
as learning dictionary definitions, recognizing and repeating sounds, listening to and repeating
utterances, learning spellings and reading aloud short phrases.

Making use of those mental resources typically used in communication in the L1

We make full use of the resources of our brain when we use language For example, when listening or
reading we make use of our inner voice to silently echo the utterances we hear or see and to comment
to ourselves about them.

We make use of visual imaging to represent the meaning of what is said or written.

Prior to speaking or writing we use visual imaging and inner speech to develop a mental representation
of our intended message and inner speech to prepare whet we are going to say or write.

Yet when learning an L2 learners rarely make use of these mental resources at all.

This is mainly because:

 They are not encouraged to do so by their teachers and materials.

 Their reluctance to tolerate ambiguity
 Their 'need' to know the meaning of everything

Noticing how the L2 is used

It is essential for the learner to pay attention to the salient features of the language they encounter in
order to eventually acquire them. The more the learner pays willing attention(either deliberately and
consciously or incidentally and subconsciously) to a feature of the language the more the learner's brain
is likely to notice that feature as salient in subsequent input and the readier the learner will be for
acquisition.

Pienneman (1985) claims that psychological readiness is an important facilitator of acquisition and that
this can be influenced by materials and teachers. One way of doing this is to draw the learner's attention
to language features in use for task completion.

A very effective way of helping learners to achieve psychological readiness is to use experiential
discovery approaches in which the learners first of all respond personally to the content of an engaging
written or spoken text and then go back to make discoveries about the form and function of a particular
feature of that text (Tomlinson, 1994, 2003b, 2007b; Bolitho et al., 2003; Bolitho and Tomlinson, 2Q05)

Another way is to make use of a form-focused approach (Long, 1991; Ellis, 2002; Williams, 2005; Fotos &
Nassaji, 2007.) in which learners first focus on the meaning of a text and later focus on the form and
function of a specific linguistic feature.

Being given opportunities for contextualized and purposeful communication in the L2

It has been found that output (i.e. producing language for communication) is also an important
facilitator of acquisition. It can provide learners with contextual feedback, it helps to automatize
language, it constitutes auto-input and it can elicit further comprehensible input too (Swam, ; Ellis, 2008;
Ortega, 2010).

1It seems that pushed output (communicating something which is not easy to express) can be
particularly beneficial as it stretches the learner's capabilities by making them make full use of their
acquired language and of their strategic competence, as well as providing opportunities for new but
comprehensible input from their interlocutors who are helping them to negotiate meaning.