Adding a Second Language

Abstract

A very significant difference between the acquisition of one's mother tongue (L1) and adding a second language (L2) is that the former is merely learned whereas the latter must usually be taught. Though the difference is not absolute, it still has enormous consequences. There is a great deal of interest today in finding out exactly how a child does lear his L1, and a large amount of research is being carried out in an attempt to discover just how and when the various components of language mastery are developed. Though few incontrovertible facts are as yet available for the guidance of the language teacher, the various stages in which the learning process takes place are coming to be understood with increasing clarity. The first phase is often labeled the exploratory stage. Just as the newborn child instinctively exercises his limbs in order to develop them, he also exercises his lungs, mouth, tongue, and lips to produce sounds. His early cries of anger, pain, fear, or hunger are soon supplemented by increasing amounts of babbling activity, apparently aimed at exploring the range of his own vocal possibilities. He often makes a wide variety of sounds which he can never have heard before and which he would find it very difficult to emit later as an adult: velar spirants, voiceless nasals, retroflex sibilants, or simultaneous labio-velar stops plus vowels. The second phase of language learning has been called the imitative stage. There are signs that the infant is beginning to pay more attention to the speech sounds made by other people, and he may even become temporarily less vocal himself as he concentrates on listening to others. The sounds he produces become progressively more similar to those made by his elders, and he abandons many of his earlier sounds altogether. His parents find that, by giving him the benefit of every doubt, they can identify some of his sounds as the vowels and consonants of the mother tongue.