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Essay on Contributions to Second Languages Used in Education
For nearly four centuries, our understanding of human development has been controlled by the debate between nativism and empiricism. Nowhere has the contrast between these apparent alternatives been sharper than in the study of language acquisition. However, as more is learned about the details of language learning, it is found that neither nativism nor empiricism provides guidance about the ways in which complexity arises from the interaction of simpler developmental forces. For example, the child's first guesses about word meanings arise from the interplay between parental guidance, the child's perceptual preferences, and neuronal support for information storage and retrieval. As soon as the shape of the child's lexicon emerges from these more basic forces, an exploration of "emergentism" as a new alternative to nativism and empiricism is ready to begin .
The aspects of language examined here include auditory representations, phonological and articulator processes, lexical semantics, ambiguity processing, grammaticality judgment, and sentence comprehension. The approaches that are invoked to account formally for emergent patterns include neural network theory, dynamic systems, linguistic functionalism, construction grammar, optimality theory, and statistically-driven learning. The excitement of this work lies both in the discovery of new emergent patterns and in the integration of theoretical frameworks that can formalize the theory of emergentism .
Second language acquisition research is still widely considered to be a new and virtually unknown field that has yet to prove its significance for the learning and teaching of foreign languages and literatures. Indeed, almost all authors point to the difficulty in developing a common concept of the role and nature of second language acquisition research and its correlation to the practical aspects of teaching foreign languages. This paper excellently serves to introduce SLA research and scholarship to a broad audience, and to familiarize even the casual reader with recent trends in the foreign language profession...............
