Language Acquisition

This test aims to evaluate the specific objective.

Support

Karim is an Algerian university student. He benefited from a scholarship to Great Britain. He went there to get a degree of Master in Law. However, Karim’s English proficiency was not that much. It was only when he stayed in London that he had opportunities to use English, whether in class or outside. Professor Ellis, a scholar at the university of Plymouth, studied Karim’s language development over a three year period – the period he spent in London to pursue his studies. Ellis asked Karim to make recordings in English about nearly all his daily activities. Particularly, Ellis was interested in how Karim’s knowledge of grammar developed over the three years. Thus, the researcher focused on a small set of grammatical features: the use of auxiliary to be, plural s, third person s, and regular past tense. He looked to see how accurately Karim used these features in his speech at a time near the beginning of his study and at a time near the end. However, Ellis suspected that Karim had not really acquired these. For example, although Karim succeeded in using progressive –ing when it required, as in: All day I’m studying. He also supplie dit in sentences when it was not required: Yesterday, I did not playing football. Furthermore, there were very few verbs which Karim used in both the simple past and the progressive form ( as with the verb to study). He generally used each verb with just one of these forms. Clearly, Karim did not have the same knowledge of progressive –ing as a native speaker. In fact, Karim had little or no knowledge at the beginning of the study of most of the grammatical structures Ellis investigated. Moreover, he was still far short of native-speaker accuracy three years later. For example, he continued to omit –s from plural nouns, rarely put –s on the third person singular of verbs, and never used the regular past tense. It would be wrong, however, to think of Karim as a complete failure as a language learner. Although he did not learn much grammar, he did develop in other ways. For example, a general feature of Karim’s use of English was his use of gambits, as “What I’m really getting at is…”, “to be quite honest”, “actually”, “in fact”, “really” – to mention just few. Karim practised these expressions consciously as Ellis said. They helped him develop fluency in using English. In fact, Karim achieved considerable success as a communicator. He became quite a skilled conversationist, very effective at negotiating complex cases in English. More importantly, Karim was also skilled at repairing communication breakdowns.

Rubric

Based on the case study you have just read, answer briefly the subsequent tasks:

Task 1. How can you identify the study of SLA?

Task 2. How can the goals of SLA be determined?

Task 3. How can you define the main frameworks for exploring SLA?