L2 Journal Article Critique - Essay Example

There are discussions of few theories in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) such as Stephen Krashen’s theory though it had some drawbacks and failed to answer few questions. The 1990’s saw some good theories in relation to SLA such as Michael Long’s interaction hypothesis, Merrill Swain’s output hypothesis and Richard Schimdt’s noticing hypothesis. After this brief discussion, the author then goes on to highlight the differences between mother tongue and second language acquisition.

He says that learning of a mother tongue is a natural process and the child has the interest of learning it right from the moment he or she is born. On the other hand, learning a foreign is an artificial process and the child has little motivation towards learning it. After this, comes the problem in learning the second language where factors like age, attitude, background/ atmosphere is taken into consideration. It also discusses the interferences from the mother language such as sound, structure, word order and issues like vocabulary, capitalisation, apostrophes and pronunciation.

The author then continues the article by discussing the benefits as to how a mother tongue helps during the learning of a second language. Finally the author concludes the article by saying that the first language or the mother tongues definitely causes interference in the learning of the second language. (Bialystok & Hakuta, 1994) The author has done a very good in depth review of the subject at hand. He has started with a brief discussion about first and second to make the readers understand what it actually means.

Later on he also glanced into the history of the evolution of second language. In the later part the author has done a thorough discussion about the differences in the mother tongue and second language and how it can pose a problem in the learning. Since the topic of discussion is “Role of mother tongue in learning English as the second language”, this part is important