COMPARING AND CONTRASTING FLA AND SLA 1

Comparing and Contrasting First and Second Language Acquisition

Boda Krisztina

University of Debrecen
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Abstract

In this paper I am going to summarize what has been said about the comparison and
the contrast between first and second language acquisition. By doing so, I am going to look at
several articles, including H. D. Brown’s Comparing and Contrasting First and Second
Language Acquisition, which is an article from his book, entitled Principles of Language
Learning and Teaching. This is one of the basic works on this topic, including Krashen’s
several books, for example Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition, which I
am going to also use in my research. Since the comparing and contrasting is a very broad
topic, I will just focus on a few issues that are very important when we talk about this topic.
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Comparing and Contrasting First and Second Language Acquisition

Knowing a language is crucial for every human being. Let it be spoken or written,

verbal or non-verbal, sign language or oral language, we all need some kind of language in

order to successfully communicate with others. Knowing a language is more than just a tool

for communication though. Our language has a high impact on us: it forms our thinking, our

cultural behaviour, and it even determines our knowledge of the world. In an ideal case, there

is a language that a person speaks perfectly, which is their mother tongue. In a lot of cases

however, there are bilingual people, who speak two languages on the same level. And there

are people who learn another language next to their mother language because of various

reasons. Therefore, first and second language can be compared with each other in different

aspects. Being interested in the whole concept of languages, there are a lot of linguists who

touched upon this topic, and there are some who have contributed to the researches so much

that their viewpoints can still be relevant today. The truth is though that we still do not know

what is actually happening with our brain during language learning, so there are a lot of

hypothesis and counter examples of different hypothesis. That is why in my essay I am going

to try and summarize the difference between first and second language acquisition by

different approaches.

H. Douglas Brown has a comparative essay entitled Comparing and Contrasting First

and Second Language Acquisition. In this essay, he discusses what has been revealed in the

topic by others, and he also gives his theory and the results of his researches. He claims that

“the comparison of first and second language acquisition has been quite carelessly treated.”

His basic problem was that when we talk about FLA, we think about children, and when we

talk about SLA, we assume that the learners are adults. However, the majority of people

might fall into this categorization, Brown suggests to create four types of comparison, from
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which he discusses three in detail, since the case of an adult learning a first language is

extremely rare. Therefore his categories are:

1. First and second language acquisition in children, holding age constant

2. Second language acquisition in children and adults, holding second language constant

3. First language acquisition in children and second language acquisition in adults

(Brown, 1994.)

In his work, he took many approaches into consideration. One of the most

controversial issues is whether we can talk about a critical period in first and second language.

The critical period is “a biologically determined period of life when language can be acquired

more easily and beyond which time language is increasingly difficult to acquire. The critical

period hypothesis claims that there is such a biological timetable.” Initially, it was just

connected to FLA, but linguists later started to examine SLA from this point. Most say that

the critical period for SLA occurs around puberty, beyond which learners are relatively

incapable of picking up native-like accent. This hypothesis produced a lot of questions

however, like: the role of accent in as a component of success, or what it really means to be

successful in language learning. Therefore linguists made neurological and psychomotor

considerations, which consisted of the idea of the lateralization of the brain and the role of

speech muscles in language learning. (Brown, 1994)

Brown also thought that from a language learning aspect cognitive, affective and

linguistic factors must be discussed as well. Now I will talk about these considerations in

details. When we talk about cognitive development, it is inevitable to discuss Jean Piaget’s

theory, which became a fundamental piece of work in this topic. He was the one who outlined

the cognitive developmental stages among children. “The most critical stage for a

consideration of first and second language acquisition appears to occur, in Piaget’s outline, at

puberty. It is here that a person becomes capable of abstraction, of formal thinking which
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transcends concrete experience and direct perception.” (Brown, 1994) Therefore, we could

conclude that after puberty, learners have a harder job learning a language, as they are aware

of the whole process. That is what Rosansky also states: “If awareness of contradictions acts

as an incentive to decentration, then perhaps what acts as a block to language learning, is

precisely the awareness of differences. This new consciousness of differences seems to

supplant the child’s previous limitation of being able to only focus on the underlying

similarities.” (Rosansky, 1975)

Brown elaborates on the difference between rote and meaningful learning as well. He

got his idea from another linguist called Ausubel, who says that “people of all ages have little

need for rote, mechanistic learning that is not related to existing knowledge and experience.”

He says that we mistakenly believe that children can profit from rote learning, that they make

a good use of repetition and mimicking. Adults, on the other hand have a more developed

concentration, so they are better rote learners. However, rote learning should be just used for

short-term memory and for artificial purposes. This means that the language learning

classroom should not be “the locus of excessive rote activity”, like rote drills, pattern practice

without context or reciting rules. “So if you compare adults learning a language by rote-

methods with children learning their first language in a natural meaningful context, you will

claim the superiority of the child’s learning! The cause of such superiority may not be in the

age of the person but in the context of learning. The child happens to be learning language

meaningfully and the adult is not.” (Brown, 1994)

One of the most interesting considerations of first and second language acquisition is

how our emotions play a part of the process. Let us see the affective considerations that

Brown is examining next. He says that the basic idea is that every human is an emotional

creature; therefore we are influenced by our emotions in a lot of cases. If we talk about

children, we can see that there are very much egocentric, meaning that they feel all events that
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happen with them are focusing on them. As they grow older, they become less egocentric, and

more self-conscious. Brown talks about Alexander Guiora, a researcher, who proposed the

term language ego in one of his works. “For any monolingual person, language ego involves

the interaction of the native language and ego development. Your self-identity is inextricably

bound up with your language.” He then suggests that this language ego may be the cause of

some difficulties in second language learning. A child’s ego is rather flexible and dynamic, so

adaptation to a new language is relatively easy for them. However, once the language ego

solidifies, the learner will feel threatened by other languages, because with the new language,

you need to form a new identity as well. A successful language learner is the one who can

bridge this affective gap.

Last but not least, Brown’s fifth consideration is the linguistic one. So far it is clear

that children who are learning tow languages at the same time acquire them by the use of

similar strategies. On the other hand, adults’ second language linguistic processes are harder

to follow. That is mainly because in Western cultures, second language learning among adult

take place in classroom environment. That is why a natural way of learning a second language

is extremely rare. What we do know is that while FLA takes place in an unconscious way,

second language learners approach the target language systematically and attempt to

formulate linguistic rules on the basis of what they already know about language in general.

What is also sure is that somehow second language learners make the same type of errors and

mistakes as children learning their first language.

Hulya Ipek, a Turkish researcher was also interested in the difference between FLA

and SLA. She claims that based on studies, we can see that both first and second language

acquisition follow a developmental pattern, which is mainly followed despite some

exceptions. The first stage of development is the silent period. When children acquire a first

language, they first listen to it and try to discover how a language works. In the case of second
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language learners, “learners opt for a silent period when immediate production is not required

from them. In general, however, many second language learners — especially classroom

learners — are urged to speak.” The fact that there is a silent period of earning a language is

widely accepted, however, linguists have different ideas of its role in language acquisition.

The other two stages are called formulaic speech, and the last one is simplification. These

three stages are the ones that are needed in order to successfully learn a language. (Ipek,

2009)

If we want to go deeper in SLA, we definitely need to consider the work of Stephen

Krashen, who has a work entitled Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. He

first determines the difference between acquisition and learning, which can be the basis of

further researches. The acquisition-learning distinction “states that adults have two distinct

and independent ways of developing competence in a second language.” The idea is that in

acquisition takes place unconsciously. We are not aware of the rules a language has, we just

feel that an utterance is coherent, or grammatical. On the other hand, learning is a conscious

process. Therefore, some second language theorists claimed that children acquire, adult can

only learn a language. “The acquisition-learning hypothesis claims, however, that adults also

acquire, that the ability to »pick-up« languages does not disappear at puberty. This does not

mean that adults will always be able to achieve native-like levels in a second language. It does

mean that adults can access the same natural »language acquisition device« that children use.”

(Krashen, 1982)

When we talk about the comparison between FLA and SLA, we also need to take a

look at how the first language affects the second language. The question is “not whether first-

language-influenced errors exist in second language performance (they clearly do), or even

what percentage of errors can be traced to the first language in the adult, but, rather, where

first language influence fits in the theoretical model for second language performance.”
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(Krashen, 1981) The difference between mistake and error can be found in Brown’s another

article from the same book I quoted before. A mistake, he says, “refers to a performance error,

that is either a random guess or a slip, in that it is a failure to utilize a known system correctly.

All people make mistakes, in both native and second language situations.” Mistakes should be

distinguished from errors though, since they are just specific to second language learners. “An

error is a noticeable deviation from the adult grammar of a native speaker reflecting the

interlanguage competence of the learner.” (Brown, 1994) If we turn back to Krashen, he

concluded that based on researches, first language influence appears to be stronger in complex

word order and in word-for-word translations of phrases. Furthermore, lack of

comprehensible input and the excessive use of translation exercises strengthen the notion of

making more errors. “This suggests that it is not simply the case that adults show first

language influence while children do not. We would expect to see first language influence in

situations where child second language acquirers obtain fewer intakes or where affective

conditions prevent or inhibit acquisition.” (Krashen, 1981)

Summary

In my essay, I tried to summarize the basic works that had been written in the topic of

comparing first and second language acquisition. I wanted to show how many different

theories are there and also that there are still unanswered questions. There are a lot of

hypotheses, which means that linguists just have a strong belief of some phenomena, but a lot

more evidence is needed to prove their beliefs. This is one reason why a lot of researches are

into this topic: it is so broad that it can be connected to many fields of language examination.

The essay I cited the most was the fundamental one from Douglas Brown, Comparing and

Contrasting First and Second Language Acquisition. I also quoted from his other work, which

was published in the same book as the previous one, when I was talking about the difference

between errors and mistakes. I used yet another famous person’s ideas, Stephen Krashen, who
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also has some very important researches in second language learning. With these, and some

minor works on this topic, I tried to summarize the bullet points of the differences and

similarities between first and second language acquisition.

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References

Brown, H. D. (1994). Contrastive Analysis, Interlanguage, and Error Analysis in Brown, H.

D., Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (192-225). White Plains, NY:

Longman.

Brown, H. D. (1994). Comparing and Contrasting First and Second Language Acquisition in

Brown, H. D., Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (48-73). White

Plains, NY: Longman.

Ipek, Hulya (2009). Comparing and Contrasting First and Second Language Acquisition:

Implications for Language Teachers. English Language Teaching 2: 155-163.

Retrieved May 7, 2017, from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1082388.pdf

Krashen, Stephen D. (1982). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition.

University of Southern California: Pergamon Press Inc.

Krashen, Stephen D. (1981). Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning.

University of Southern California: Pergamon Press Inc.

Rosansky, Ellen (1975). The critical period for the acquisition of language: Some cognitive

developmental considerations. Working Papers on Bilingualism 6: 98