The major aim of the current paper is to review and discuss three prevailing approaches to the study of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) since the middle of the twentieth century: Contrastive Analysis (CA, henceforth), Error Analysis (EA) and Interlanguage (IL). It begins with a general overview of how the CA approach was formulated and developed…

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent…

A research project is discussed involving the collection of production data from writing samples of 375 adult learners of English divided equally among five language backgrounds: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Spanish. Information is presented about three constructions: (1) subject relative clause, (2) infinitival complement on verb, and…

In this article, we argue against the Representational Deficit Hypothesis, according to which second language (L2) speakers can never acquire functional categories or features that are absent in the first language (L1), suggesting that fossilization is inevitable. Instead, we support the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis, which argues that the ultimate…

Answers to theoretical questions about the place of input in a formal second language acquisition model are dependent on a distinction between two kinds of learner hypotheses. Type-N hypotheses require "negative evidence" for testing, while Type-P hypotheses are tested on the basis of "positive data" alone. (Author/CB)

Just as learning a first language is sometimes compared to existence within the relatively sheltered world of the Garden of Eden, the process of learning a second language is viewed as analogous to survival after expulsion from the Garden into a relatively harsh world, in which the learner must come to a conscious understanding of form and meaning…

Research on the role of the first language (L1) in second language (L2) learning is reviewed, offering historical background but focusing primarily on work within the last two decades. Attention is given mainly to two aspects of the L1-L2 relationship: positive transfer of knowledge from L1 in the process of learning L2, and negative transfer, or…

Lexical semantics and contrastive lexical semantics can serve as a background discipline to describe and, to some extent, to explain errors in interlanguage. Two developments in lexical semantics that are relevant in this area are the description of sense-relationships and componential analysis. Contrastive lexical semantics involves mapping the…

A study investigated patterns in phonological errors occurring in the speaker's second language in both formal and informal speaking situations. Subjects were three adult learners of English as a second language, including a native Spanish-speaker and two Asians. Their speech was recorded during diagnostic testing (formal speech) and in everyday…

A certain group of English verbs, the ergatives, is consistently mis-passivized in Chinese-speakers' interlanguage. Comparison of the ergative construction in Chinese and English shows that they share similar properties. However, this does not seem to facilitate learning of the target English construction. Furthermore, the passive ergatives are…

This study evaluated a partial-immersion program in French in Victoria, Australia, an area in which little research has been conducted to date. The program has operated at an elementary school since 1991 and is the first English/French program of its kind in Victoria. French is the language of instruction for at least 40 percent of classes, with…

Presents an analytic foundation of English-as-a-Second-Language pedagogical research and application extending beyond the traditional "superficial" categories of morphosyntactic rule violations and false cognates. The study focuses on lexical-semantics, syntax, text-analysis, and pragmatics, and synthesizes major categories of…

Four papers on contrastive linguistics include: (1) "The Search for an Ideal Theoretical Model in Applied Contrastive Linguistics: A Wild Goose Chase" (Herman Wekker, Flor Aarts), which argues that contrastive linguists should feel free to adopt an eclectic approach to theory since no single linguistic model can be adopted in its entirety and…

The "state of the art" in the three fields of contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage is critically examined from the point of view of evolving an explanatory theory of a second language learner's performance. Each field is discussed with respect to its outreach, theoretical assumptions, methodology, claims and empirical…