Glossary
Competence
Linguist Noam Chomsky used this term to refer to knowledge of language. This is contrasted with performance, which is the way a person actually uses language—whether for speaking, listening, reading, or writing. Because we cannot observe competence directly, we have to infer its nature from performance.
First Language (L1, mother tongue, native language)
The language first learned. Many children learn more than one language from birth and may be said to have more than one ‘first’ language.
Second Language
The term refers to any language other than the first language learned. Thus, it may actually refer to the third or fourth language.
Transfer
The influence of a learner’s first language knowledge in the second language. Also called ‘interference’. The term ‘cross-linguistic influence’ is now preferred by many researchers. It better reflects the complex ways in which knowledge of the first language may affect learners’ knowledge and use of another.
language acquisition/language learning
These two terms are most often used interchangeably. However, for some researchers, most notably Stephen Krashen acquisition represents ‘unconscious’ internalization of language knowledge, which takes place when attention is focused on meaning rather than language form, and learning is described as a ‘conscious’ process that occurs when the learner’s objective is to learn about the language itself, rather than to understand messages conveyed through the language.
Universal Grammar (UG)
Innate linguistic knowledge which, it is hypothesized, consists of a set of principles common to all languages. This term is associated with Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition.
Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
The metaphorical ‘place’ in which a learner is capable of a higher level of performance because there is support from interaction with an interlocutor. In Vygotsky’s theory, learning takes place through and during interaction in the learner’s ZPD.
Native Speaker
A person who has learned a language from an early age and who is deemed to be fully proficient in that language. Native speakers differ in terms of vocabulary and stylistic aspects of language use, but they tend to agree on the basic grammar of the language. The notion ‘native speaker’ must always be understood within a specific geographic region or socioeconomic group because there is wide variation among ‘native speakers’ of most languages.
The systematic study of how people acquire a second language (often referred to as an L2) is a fairly recent phenomenon, belonging to the second half of the twentieth century
Input
The language that the learner is exposed to (either written or spoken) in the environment.
Comprehensible Input
Krashen (1985) stated that, ‘ … humans acquire language in only one way – by understanding messages, or by receiving comprehensible input’. Comprehensible input is the linguistic input containing structures that are a little bit beyond a learner’s current level of competence. Allwright and Bailey (1990; 1994), ‘ He called this type of input ‘i+1’, where the ‘i’ can represent the learner’s current stage of interlanguage development and the ‘+1’ designates that the input is challenging but not overwhelming the learners’.
Teacher Talk
It is a potentially valuable source of comprehensible input to learners. It’s essential for language acquisition (Krashen, 1981). The amount of it will depend on what one believes about the role of language input in acquisition. It is the simplified language teachers use in order to talk to L2 learners ; it is found to have or to contain the characteristics of ‘foreigner talk’. The latter has been found to be very similar to ‘caretaker-talk (Ferguson, 1975). Specially, it is characterized by a slow rate of delivery, clear articulation, pauses, emphatic stress, exaggerated pronunciation, paraphrasing, substitution of lexical items by synonyms, omission, addition and replacement of syntactic features. Teacher talk puts more emphasis on simplified input rather than on any extended verbal interaction between teachers and learners. At least at the initial stages, such a talk was considered sufficient for classroom L2 development.
Feedback
Thornbury (2006), it is the information, either immediate or delayed that learners get on their performance. At least some of this feedback may have a long-term effect on their knowledge of the language. Traditionally, feedback takes the form of ‘correction’. Correction of the sort ‘no/ not right’ is called ‘negative feedback’ (learner produced an error). Positive feedback (right, yes, good, etc).
Interlanguage
A learner’s developing second language knowledge. It may have characteristics of the learner’s first language, characteristics of the second language, and some characteristics that seem to be very general and tend to occur in all or most interlanguage systems. Interlanguages are systematic, but they are also dynamic. They change as learners receive more input and revise their hypotheses about the second language.
Errors
Errors are deviations in usage, result from gaps in learner’s knowledge of the target language. The learner doen not know what is correct and are unable to correct their own deviant utterances. Mistakes are deviations in usage, reflect the learner’s unability to use what they actually know of L2 (called also ‘occational lapses).
Noticing Hypothesis
The hypothesis, proposed by Richard Schmidt, that language learners learn only that which they have first ‘noticed’ or become aware of in the input.
Error Analysis (EA)
A branch of applied linguistics emerged in the sixties to reveal that learner errors were not only because of the learner’s L1 but also they reflected some universal strategies.
Contrastive Analysis (CA)
A set of procedures for comparing and contrasting the linguistic systems of two languages in order to identufy their similarities and differences.