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THE EFFECT OF FORMAL INSTRUCTION ON SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 1
Author(s) -
Felix Sascha W.
Publication year - 1981
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1981.tb01374.x
Subject(s) - repertoire , psychology , naturalism , second language acquisition , german , language acquisition , naturalistic observation , linguistics , contrast (vision) , natural language , developmental linguistics , comprehension approach , mathematics education , language education , computer science , artificial intelligence , social psychology , philosophy , physics , acoustics , epistemology
Thirty‐four German high school students learning English as a second language under classroom conditions were observed for a period of eight months. It was found that the students' utterances showed many structural features which are also known to characterize LI and naturalistic L2 acquisition. It thus appears that formal instruction cannot eliminate or suppress those processes which constitute man's natural ability to acquire language(s). In contrast to naturalistic learners, however, the high school students were continuously forced to produce structures for which, developmentally, they were not yet ready. Here, the students used two basic strategies: (a) they followed principles of naturalistic acquisition; (b) they randomly selected any one structure from a finite repertoire.