SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Theory of Universal Grammar and second language learning and teaching



Second Language Learning

Introduction

Language is a means of communication, and everyone learns a language to communicate from early childhood. Language is very important because it serves as a means for people to exchange their ideas, thoughts and feelings with each other.Once a person learns a language, he becomes a member of a linguistic community. Since, language helps a person to express their love, sadness, anger, and happiness, it has become a component of every culture in this world. For this reason, people from across the globe develop a deep rooted love and emotional bonding for their mother tongues. However, with the concept of globalization which has over taken the entire world, the need to communicate in a uniform language has become increasingly important (Hawkins, 2008:328).

This research aims to explain about universal language and second language acquistion and the theory of universal language it also aims to highlight the implications of second language and native speakers and their development of second language. Theory of universal language is positively related to universal language teaching.

The first paragraph of the main body will explain abot universal lanuage. Furthermore, it will also explain about second language acquisition and development. Further paragraphs will describe about language acquisition and contact alongwith the theory of universal language. This research will also highlight the implications of second language acquistion and the heritage speakers of second language.

Main body

This paragraph will discuss about the universal language.In minimalist theory (e.g., Chomsky, 1993, 1995), it is proposed that the content of functional categories is defined by bundles of features. Features also have a crucial role in the operations merge, agree, and move. While these operations are assumed to belong to Universal Grammar (UG) and to be innate, not all features are activated or organized in the same way in all languages. Therefore, it is how learners activate and organize the features of the target language, as well as how they make them interact with the operations merge, agree, and move, that may be problematic for the second language (L2) learner. In other words, in order to acquire the grammar of a given language, the L2 learner has to combine elements from the target lexicon to form a derivation by means of the structure-building operation merge. The L2 learner also has to determine how agree establishes relations of syntactic dependency by means of features, as well as when and how move displaces an element (the goal) from its canonical position to have a feature checked or valued by the element that has the corresponding feature (the probe).

In the last decade, a substantial amount of research on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has dealt with whether and how L2 learners activate features which are not present in the first language (L1) and whether these learners make the appropriate use of those features for feature checking, agreement, and movement purposes (Hawkins, 1997:187).

SLA research refers only occasionally to parallels between diachronic change and developmental change ((Kroch, 1994:180), ...