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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study
Throughout history, human beings are changing, everything is changing, and sois the world. Nowadays, as every aspect of the world develops, communicationbetween people from all over the world becomes especially frequent and important.Language is the most basic tool for people to express: to express themselves or toexpress their needs. Since we have people from all over the world, who speakdifferent kinds of languages, there is a problem: how do people speaking differentlanguages understand each other? That is, how the communication between peoplewith different languages is successfully conducted? Accompanied with this question,the author will introduce a thorough account of what is known about SecondLanguage Acquisition (SLA). Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is a rather complex process involving manyinterrelated factors. The most famous English poet William Shakespeare writes inHamlet: “There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes” (Shakespeare,1603). SLA is of the same truth. It is about the process of acquisition. Even if peopleare to learn a same second language (L2), a thousand learners learn it in a thousanddifferent ways. Several key aspects should be identified about the second language.First, second language, actually, is different from foreign language. Secondlanguage stands in contrast to first language, while foreign language stands in contrastto mother tongue or native language. Second language refers to any language learnedin addition to a person’s first language. For most people, their first language is theirmother tongue, or native language. Although there are some very small differencesexisting between first language, mother tongue and native language, here, we willoverlook these tiny differences.
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1.2 Significance of the Study
Continuing the topic about ‘acquisition’ and ‘learning’, it is clearly seen that‘acquisition’ means much more than ‘learning’. In Krashen’s Acquisition-LearningHypothesis, he explains as follows, “i. There can be acquisition without learning.Competent language learners may speak the language without consciously knowingthe rules; ii. There are cases where people can ‘know’ a rule but do not use it innormal interaction.” Learning is the conscious study of language rules. It’s formal,systematic and unnatural. It is often classroom learning. Learners in this process mainly focus on language forms and rules, which is grammar learning. Acquisitionusually happens in naturalistic environment, for example, English acquired byChinese immigrants into America or England. It’s a language learning process aimingat obtaining or changing information. When Chomsky tries to study children’s SLA,he uses two words: competence and performance, which can be also calledI-Language and E-Language. I-Language, which is Internalized Language, indicatesthat the concept of language is internal, because it deals with an inner state of aspeaker’s mind, independent of other elements in the world. E-Language, which isExternalized Language, can be regarded as a set of sentences that speakers could use.A learner’s linguistic knowledge is his competence, or I-Language inside him, and hislinguistic representation is his performance, the actual use of the language. Accordingto Chomsky, language competence and language performance are dif本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。