The Background to Current Second Language Acquisition Research

Abstract

Relating second language acquisition to linguistics means looking at the nature of both linguistics and second language research. Chomsky (1986a, p. 3) defined three basic questions for linguistics: (i) What Constitutes Knowledge of Language? The prime goal of linguistics is to describe the language contents of the human mind; its task is to represent what native speakers know about language — their linguistic competence. Achieving this goal means producing a fully explicit representation of the speaker’s competence, that is to say, a generative grammar of a ‘particular language’. From the outset, this question defines linguistics as based on the internal reality of language in the individual mind rather than on the external reality of language in society. (ii) How is Knowledge of Language Acquired? A second goal for linguistics is discovering how knowledge of language comes into being — how linguistic competence is acquired by the human mind. Chomsky proposes to achieve this goal by describing how innate principles of the child’s mind create linguistic competence, that is to say how the child’s mind turns the language input it encounters into a grammar by using its built-in capabilities. Phrased in another way, knowledge of language is not only created by the human mind but also constrained by its structure.