Second Language Acquisition - Case Study Example

Contemporary attitudes towards English learning in Cyprus is divided into two - the early Cypriots who were educated during the reign of British rule acknowledged English as a tool to enhance their culture, knowledge and relationships with other countries, and those who in this era consider English to access resources around the world. The new generation of English learners hold a more positive attitude toward second language acquisition (SLA) and consider it as a tool to 'globalisation'. Cypriot learners of new generation are positive to grasp English language (EL) concepts while at the same time many teachers have noticed that they have fear of public speaking, however once they get over their fears; they will enjoy engaging in public debates since learners are well aware of the skills they are developing in context of SLA.

SLA research suggests that a majority of English non-native speakers in Greek Cyprus are teaching English depending upon their Cypriot language backgrounds, level of education and training, teaching methods, aspirations and career prospects, and the status of English in Cyprus. Many linguists believe that an ideal teacher of English language is a native speaker, since native speakers of a language have a better command of fluent, idiomatically correct language forms, are more knowledgeable about the cultural connotations of a language, and are the intermediaries of the acceptability of any given samples of the language.

Such a native speaker fallacy pointed out a number of weaknesses and contradictions when the features attributed to native speakers of a language, and it was discovered that native language features can be instilled through teacher training. The general nature of our research will highlight various communicative language teaching methods in context with SLA but would not be limited to what linguistic researchers view SLA as the process of combining the structural components into their preexisting mental structures.

In fact it would be better to say that our research would seek means beyond traditional approaches learning SLA. The specific goals of research would follow a perspective varying from finding the most convenient theory of facilitating the integration of new systemic knowledge to discovering an ideal learner based linguistic system with the help of problem identification. Throughout each chapter we would be discussing various learning methods of SLA in context to the new changes and what made the initial learning methods to be criticised.

Chapter 1 highlights the significance of grammar and translation while highlighting on further advancement of methods discussed in previous chapter. Chapter 2 would proceed the learning methods while at the same time mentioning theories of language acquisition in the light of its pros and cons. Chapter 3 discusses the significance of silence language learning techniques while chapter 4 discusses how new methods of language acquisition to teachers have brought challenges to the preexisting teaching methods.

Learning or teaching a second language allows the learner to build a more comprehensive model of second language learning and this is done by creating a set of principles that are easily applied in the environment of classroom interaction practices. However in the case of Cypriot learners, it would be wrong to say that Greek Cypriot language would be helpful in communicating, it would not provide the learners with a new