Читать книгу The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition - Zoltan Dornyei - Страница 13

The term ‘language acquisition’ often occurs in the language-related psychological literature without any specification as to whether the authors are talking about the acquisition of an L1 or an L2, let alone specifying the exact type of these broad categories. Looking more closely at these texts we will usually find that ‘language acquisition’ refers to mother-tongue attainment only, with relatively few language psychologists addressing the unique issues of L2 acquisition and processing. Although in their influential text on psycholinguistics, Berko Gleason and Bernstein Ratner (1998: p. v) state that a ‘psycholinguistic discussion of language processing would not be complete without consideration of bilingualism and second language learning’, this is not (as yet) the standard position in psychology.

It has been pointed out by many that the majority of the people living in the world speak more than one language and therefore the norm is not monolingualism but bilingualism. So why is there such an obvious reluctance in psychologists to consider second language issues? And how much can we generalize findings from L1 acquisition studies to SLA? What are the similarities and differences between the two processes? Are there situations (e.g. early learning) when SLA can be seen as virtually identical to L1 acquisition? Can we distinguish two types of SLA depending on whether the L2 is primarily acquired in the host environment or in a formal school setting? And more generally, what are the main types of bilingualism and how do they differ in psychological terms? These are some of the central questions that will be addressed in our exploration of the psychological basis of SLA in the following chapters. Let us have a preliminary overview of the main issues here.