The Study of Second Language Acquisition (Oxford Applied Linguistics)

As being a teacher of English as a second language in my country, I had the chance to read this valuable book which included all the aspects of acquiring English language, teaching and learning English as a second language. I have never read any books with great information in the same field before and after this book.

The author starts his book with the notion of acquiring a language and how it is different to learning. As a teacher or reseacher, you will get a full knowledge of it. Then he moves to display some important theories which have tried to explain how young children acquire their mother tongue. The book describes these theories in a very interesting explanation with many examples that work with or against them. It gives you their principles and it is only you who should decide which theory is the appropraite one. You will find yourself so involved in this section as I did.

Then, the author discusses a neglected area in a masterful way. It is the concept of errors. Before reading this book, I believed that errors were indicating a big problem in learners' progress. But, Ellis will convince you as he did with me that errors are made because the non-native learners hypothesise the language. According to him, this hypothsis is similar to that the young native speaker has. It is a natural situation since English language has many exceptions in the grammatical rules. The learner will generalise or simply many rules. For example, a young native speaker says correctly 'I went to the zoo', then later he says,'I goed to the zoo' and finally he says, correctly,'I went" Also the non-native speaker might say the same. Also someone says," I buyed a football' can be better than another says, 'I bought a football" Why? You can discover many answers to similar situations in this book. Another reason of errors is due to the mother tongue of the non-native speakers. It can influence the learners' second language. I think this section will give you the knowledge of the kinds of errors and how you can benefit from them to make your learners good in English. This happened to me. Now I treat my learners' errors with more respect and professionally.

After that, the author talks in more detail about another concept which is 'learner language' in another term, it is called 'interlanguage' He describes this concept as the learner's personal language which emerges because of his/her own hypothesis of English. It is English but with many new different rule because of the learners' hypothesis in order to use the language. By learning and practising English, this 'learner language' will be decreasing until it takes the shape of the target language.

With these concepts and issues and many which I did not mention, I believe this book can be considered as an encyclopedia of the aquisition of English language. From the theories and practices, you can a great resource of information to be a good reseacher or teacher of English as a second language.