The Pros And Stages Of Second Language

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“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart,” proclaimed Nelson Mandela. Language is the key to talking with someone. Language is the key to reaching out to someone. Language is the key to true communication. How is a language learned to begin with? A first language, a person’s mother tongue, is acquired through a mixture of nurture, nature, biology and the environment. A baby picks up the sounds around him and then pieces together where one word ends and the next one begins. A child usually fully learns a language by age five (Mahoney). It is from the acquisition of a first language that a child is able to move on and learn another language. A child can …show more content…

The learner must go through various stages in the process of completely picking up the second language. The first stage is the silent/receptive stage. This stage is the start of the learning and lasts a for few months. The learner is not always silent, but the learner is trying to pronounce the new words and therefore is not speaking very much (Education.cu-portland.edu). It is unclear what the L2 learners actually learn here but it is known that there definitely is some level of learning (Lakshmanan and Selinker 397). The second stage of L2 learning is the early production stage. The learner understands around one thousand words and begins to speak short, grammatically incorrect phrases. This is when the learner begins to attempt to talk in the new language. The third stage is the speech emergence stage. Here, the speaker’s vocabulary reaches approximately three thousand words and the user starts to use the second langue in reading and writing. Stage four of second language acquisition is intermediate fluency. The learner’s vocabulary reaches around six thousand words and the learner uses complex sentences and even begins to think in the newly acquired second language. The last stage of L2 learning is the advanced fluency stage. It can take up to two years to reach this point and up to ten years to fully master this newly acquired language

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