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COGNITIVE APPROACH TO SECOND-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: ESL ASPECT

Svitlana Shandruk

(Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine)

The academic discipline of second-language acquisition (SLA) is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics. It is broad-based and relatively new. As well as the various branches of linguistics, second-language acquisition is also closely related to psychology, cognitive psychology, and education. To separate the academic discipline from the learning process itself, the terms second-language acquisition research, second-language studies, and second-language acquisition studies are also used. SLA research began as an interdisciplinary field, and because of this it is difficult to identify a precise starting date [3]. However, it does appear to have developed a great deal since the mid-1960s. The term acquisition was originally used to emphasize the subconscious nature of the learning process, but in recent years learning and acquisition have become largely synonymous.

Second-language acquisition can incorporate heritage language learning, but it does not usually incorporate bilingualism. A complete theory of SLA must include both a property theory, of what the domain of knowledge is and how it is represented, and a transition theory, of how learners get from one knowledge state to another. Thus SLA is a subject of cognitive science par excellence (E. Bialystok, B. McLaughlin, M. Harrington, R. Schmidt and others) [2]. Writers in fields such as education and psychology, however, often use bilingualism loosely to refer to all forms of multilingualism. Second-language acquisition is also not to be contrasted with the acquisition of a foreign language; learning of second languages and learning of foreign languages involve the same fundamental processes in different situations.

Internal factors affecting second-language acquisition are those which stem from the learner's own mind. Attempts to account for the internal mechanisms of second-language acquisition can be divided into three general strands: cognitive, sociocultural, and linguistic. These explanations are not all compatible, and often differ significantly.

Much modern research in second-language acquisition (R. Rueda, D. August, C. Goldenberg, J. Plass, D. Chun, R. Mayer, D. Leutner and others) has taken a cognitive approach [1]. Cognitive research is concerned with the mental processes involved in language acquisition, and how they can explain the nature of learners' language knowledge. This area of research is based in the more general area of cognitive science, and uses many concepts and models used in more general cognitive theories of learning. As such, cognitive theories view second-language acquisition as a special case of more general learning mechanisms in the brain. This puts them in direct contrast with linguistic theories, which posit that language acquisition uses a unique process different from other types of learning.

Cognitive approaches, including Functional linguistics (T. Bates, B. MacWhinney and others), Emergentism (J. Elman, B. MacWhinney and others), Cognitive linguistics (R. Langacker, D. Ungerer, R. Schmid and others), and Constructivist child language researchers (P. Brooks, C. Slobin, M. Tomasello and others), view the linguistic sign as a set of mappings between phonological forms and conceptual meanings or communicative intentions [2]. They hold that simple associative learning mechanisms operating in and across the human systems for perception, motor-action and cognition as they are exposed to language data as part of a communicatively-rich human social environment by an organism eager to exploit the functionality of language are what drives the emergence of complex language representations.

In the early days of second-language acquisition research interlanguage was seen as the basic representation of second-language knowledge; however, more recent research has taken a number of different approaches in characterizing the mental representation of language knowledge [1; 97-98]. There are theories that hypothesize that learner language is inherently variable, and there is the functionalist perspective that sees acquisition of language as intimately tied to the function it provides. Some researchers make the distinction between implicit and explicit language knowledge, and some between declarative and procedural language knowledge. There have also been approaches that argue for a dual-mode system in which some language knowledge is stored as rules and other language knowledge as items.

The mental processes that underlie second-language acquisition can be broken down into micro-processes and macro-processes. Micro-processes include attention; working memory; integration and restructuring, the process by which learners change their interlanguage systems; and monitoring, the conscious attending of learners to their own language output. Macro-processes include the distinction between intentional learning and incidental learning; and also the distinction between explicit and implicit learning. Some of the notable cognitive theories of second-language acquisition include the nativization model, the multidimensional model and processability theory, emergentist models, the competition model, and skill-acquisition theories [3].

There is a difference between language acquisition and language learning. Just as everyone needs to develop skills in a variety of curricular areas, everyone can benefit from learning a foreign language, whether it is because of the cognitive advantages or the exposure to and understanding of other cultures.

To sum it up, according to the Cognitivists, even a very limited amount of language data may be sufficient to reveal the underlying rules, and once the rule is known, it can be used or applied to produce an infinite number of sentences. The Cognitivists, tend to look at only that part of the language, where general rules apply, because for them language learning is the process whereby the rules of language are discovered and internalized.

References:

  1. Chamot A. The CALLA Handbook / Anna Uhl Chamot, J. Michael O’Mally. – NY: Brookline Books, 1994. – 340 p.

  2. Ellis N. Cogniteve Approaches to SLA / N. Ellis // ARAL, 2012. – Vol.XIX. – pp. 4-28.

  3. Second-language acquisition [Електронний ресурс] / Wikipedia. – Режим доступу: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-language_acquisition#cite_note-FOOTNOTEVanPattenBenati20105-50.