ATTITUDE AND APTITUDE IMPLICATIONS IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND LEARNING

Second language acquisition, or SLA, is the process by which people learn languages in addition to their native language(s). The term second language is used to describe any language whose acquisition starts after early childhood (including what may be the third or subsequent language learned). The term „language acquisition ” became commonly used after Stephen Krashen contrasted it with formal and non-constructive „learning”. Though SLA is often viewed as part of applied linguistics, it is typically concerned with the language system and learning processes themselves, whereas applied linguistics may focus more on the experiences of the learner, particularly in the classroom. Researchers have found a very consistent order in the acquisition of first language structures by children, and this has drawn a great deal of interest from SLA scholars. Considerable effort has been devoted to testing the identity hypothesis, which asserts that first-language and second-language acquisition conform to the same patterns. Orders of acquisition in SLA do often resemble those found in first language acquisition, and may have common neurologica