SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION RELATED DISCIPLINES BY: Saidna Zulfikar bin Tahir

1. SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION RELATED DISCIPLINES BY: SaidnaZulfikar bin Tahir STATE UNIVERSITY OF MAKASSAR 2011

2. RELATED DISCIPLINES Third language acquisition/multilingualism Heritage language acquisition Bilingual acquisition Bhatia (2006) states that bilingualism is a study of the nature of the individual bilingual’s knowledge and use of two (or more) languages” Valdés (2001a) “the term bilingual implies not only the ability to use two languages to some degree in everyday life, but also the skilled superior use of both languages at the level of the educated native speaker” Kroll and Sunderman (2003) distinguish between second language and bilinguals, “Cognitive processes in second language learners and bilinguals: the development of lexical and conceptual representations.” Multilingualism is the ability of societies, institutions, groups and individuals to engage on a regular basis with more than two languages in their day-to-day lives. (EC 2007:6) There a number of variables that can impact the extent to which one of the languages involved (the L2 or the L1) will influence the acquisition of the L3. Among these are the age at which L3 learning begins, the context of acquisition, individual characteristics, and language distances among the three (or more) languages. Polinsky (in press) defines heritage language as the language “which was first for an individual with respect to the order of acquisition but has not been completely acquired because of the switch to another dominant language. Valdés (2001b) notes that “it is the historical and personal connection to the language that is salient and not the actual proficiency of individual speakers.

3. First Language Acquisition At approximately six months of age, infants turn to more language-like sounds in what is called babbling. Babbling most commonly consists of consonant–vowel sequences (e.g., bababa, dadada, and later bada). Babbling Hoek, Ingram, and Gibson (1986) noted one child’s (19–20 months) use of the word bunny to refer to doll, hen, shoe,car, picture of people, giraffe, cow, bear, chair, lamp, puzzle, train, and soforth. Words Sounds and pronunciation Some sounds are distinguished quite early (e.g., the difference between the consonants in [ta] and [da]); others are of course learned later (wabbit for rabbit). After several months in the one-word stage, children start to combine words (usually at around two years of age). Syntax Brown (1973) and his astute observation that there was a predictable order of acquisition of certain inflectional morphemes in English. (e.g., the morpheme -ing, as in walking, can receive stress and is salient, whereas the morpheme -ed, as in walked, cannot) Morphology

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