PDF #116 – Roumyana Slabakova, Tania Leal, Amber Dudley & Micah Stack – Generative second language acquisition
The scholarly field of second language acquisition (SLA) aims to explain the process through which people who already speak their mother tongue learn a second, third, and additional languages. SLA focuses mainly on adult learners – people who start learning the additional language after puberty. Related but separate fields of inquiry, such as bilingualism, child SLA, third language acquisition, heritage language acquisition, and instructed second and foreign language learning and teaching ask slightly different research questions. For the past sixty years, SLA has aimed to reveal and describe different facets of the SLA process.