SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION And ENGLSIH LANGUAGE TEACHING

Magdalena Bobek
Introduction

Theories of second language acquisition have for many years tried to influence its development and continue to do so even today. Each perspective, though many have been based on little or insufficient evidence, has attempted to open the door to a newer and better understanding of what language learning really entails giving rise to new approaches to second language teaching. One of the many theorists, David Block (2003:4), has suggested the need for 'a broader, socially informed and more sociolinguistically oriented SLA that does not exclude the more mainstream psycholinguistic one, but instead takes on board the complexity of context, the multi-layered nature of language and an expanded view of what acquisition entails'.

In my assignment, by examining key theories that have attemped to influence second language acquisition (hereafter SLA) through the years, I would like to show an

understanding of the reasons why SLA has developed the way it has and in the light of my own teaching experience and the reading material, I will attempt to examine the validity of some of these theories in practice and try to show that besides the linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches in SLA, social context and sociolinguistic factors cannot be excluded, but play an important role in language learning and development, as advocated by Block.

The Behaviourist Theory and Contrastive Analysis

The 'wide variety' of SLA theories that have developed through the years, as pointed out by Thornbury (2006:1), is partly due to 'the enormous diversity of contexts in which second languages are learned', as well as the 'variety of situations and purposes for the learning of a second language (ibid:7). He informs us that the complexity of SLA is influenced by 'linguistic factors', such as the learner's first language; the different kinds of input that learners

are exposed to; external factors, such as the social context and the learner's 'internal factors', such as their personality and capabilities (ibid). This may help explain why many issues regarding SLA 'are still inconclusive, and often controversial' (ibid), which makes researchers' work even more difficult as they 'have not yet arrived at a unified or comprehensive view as to how second languages are learnt' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:2), but instead have tried to analyse language development each from their own perspective, namely from a linguistic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic point of view (Thornbury, 2006:22).

Early linguists and psycholinguists were primarily concerned with the learner's 'inner mental mechanisms [] for processing, learning and storing new language knowledge' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:24). As Mitchell & Myles (ibid:223) put it, they largely concentrated on modelling the development of language within the individual learner, in response to an environment defined fairly narrowly as a source of linguistic information. In much of this work sociolinguistic issues were addressed only as afterthoughts, if at all. One of the dominant early psycholinguistic theories known as behaviourism saw language learning 'as a formation of habits', where 'through repeated reinforcement a certain stimulus' would 'elicit the same response time and again' until it became a habit (ibid:30). 'Learning would take place by imitating and repeating the same structures time after time' and there was a strong belief that 'practice makes perfect' (ibid:31). Coursebooks and teachers' manuals that I came across in my early teaching career were full of drilling exercises, which proved to be very tedious for pupils at times and caused them quite a few problems, because the sole aim was to get to know the given structure at surface level without internalizing it. The drills seemed very archaic and robot-like, as many pupils had no mental register of the meanings of certain words or phrases that they were simply forced to repeat.

The learner's first language (L1) soon came into play, however, as it was said to 'interfere with this process, either helping or inhibiting it' depending on how different the structures in the second language (L2) were from those in the first (ibid). As a result teachers began concentrating on teaching 'structures which were believed to be difficult' that is 'those that were different in the first and second languages' (ibid:32). The emphasis on the differences and difficulties between languages led to so-called Contrastive Analysis, where researchers compared 'pairs of languages in order to pinpoint areas of difference' (ibid), which would in turn help in the teaching of the second or foreign language. However, teachers at the time

experienced that the predictions made by Contrastive Analysis did not always hold true in the classroom and were not always reliable (ibid:37). Even today, according to Pica (1994:52), both teachers and researchers acknowledge that there is no guarantee that the 'differences' or similarities' between a learner's L1 and L2 will bring about difficulty or ease in SLA. What has been proven, however, is that learners' L1 can be a powerful influence on language development, but it can be suppressed, enhanced, or otherwise modified by the contributions of a broad range of linguistic, psychosocial, and cultural factors. (ibid). Zobl, for example, found that 'L1 plays a different role at specific stages of L2 development', such as in mastering 'article rules' (ibid:53), which I have found is something that many young Slovenian learners of English as their L2 have difficutly with. Slovenian does not have as developed an article system as English, and nouns can stand alone in almost any situation. When speaking or writing English, pupils tend to use the more 'explicit one' (ibid) where 'a' or 'an' are required or use no article at all. Another observation I have made is that the pronunciation and structures learners use, change to suit the situation they find themselves in. Like Dickerson (ibid), I have found that pupils will transfer sounds from their L1 more often in casual conversation than when involved in more formal tasks such as reading or writing. This seems to be a sign of the need to satisfy their sociolinguistic need which is to be understood and accepted by their peers. It is also a fact, at least in my experience that 'certain L2 linguistic contexts are especially sensitive to influence from learners' L1', such as L2 final consonant clusters '/kt/ or /ks/' (Sato, 1984 in Pica, 1994:53), which are simply not pronounced by some learners even if they do write them correctly, often causing problems in the complete understanding of the utterance. Even the final /v/ sound as in the words believe, five, drive is pronounced as /w/ by many young Slovenian learners probably due to the fact that in Slovenian such an ending sound is not common and so cannot be automatically transfered to L2. The extent of L1 transfer, however, is only one of the many factors involved in understanding the language learning process.

Systemiticity and Variability in SLA

Key developments in the 1970s regarding first language acquisition in young children shed new light on SLA and led to fundamental changes in language research. Researchers became interested in 'the language produced by learners or their 'interlanguage', and focused on 'the systematic investigation of second language learners' errors', better known as 'Error Analysis'

(Mitchell and Myles, 2004:38-39), which involved 'charting and classifying learner language, including developmental patterns' (Thornbury, 2006:30). It was soon evident 'that the

majority of errors made by second language learners do not come from their first language', but are rather 'learner-internal in origin'(Mitchell and Myles, 2004:38). The shift from Contrastive Analysis to that of Error Analysis 'represents a shift from the behaviourist view of language-learning-as-habit-formation to the more mentalist view of language-learning-as hardwired' (Thornbury, 2006:30). Researchers found 'that children all over the world go through similar stages, use similar constructions in order to express similar meanings, and make the same kinds of errors' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004::34). The theory of Universal Grammar, developed by Noel Chomsky, states that in learning their L1 children have an 'innate language faculty to guide them' regardless of the 'messy input' they are exposed to, which may include 'false starts, slips of the tongue, etc.' (ibid:55), even though it could be argued that L1 input especially from parents and caretakers is not necessarily 'messy' (ibid) or 'noisy', but is ''simpler' than the full adult version' because it is 'designed for easy learning' (Larsen-Freeman and Long, 1991:115) as its main goal is 'to understand and be understood' (Brown, 1977:12). Chomsky claimed 'that children follow some kind of pre-programmed, internal route in acquiring language' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:37). Another development at the time was Brown's famous 'morpheme study' on first language learning, which proved that there exists an 'order of acquisition' of grammatical morphemes(ibid:34). When applied to second language learners, it proved that a 'set order' of acquisition holds true for SLA as well, where the learners are 'guided by internal principles [] largely independent of their first language' (ibid:43). All this helps explain why SLA is considered both 'highly systematic' and 'highly variable' (Myles, 2002 in Thornbury, 2006:12-13), two of the main focuses of language research. It is systematic in the sense of 'the route of development, (the nature of the stages all learners go through when acquiring the second language', which, according to Myles, 'remains largely independent of both the learner's mother tongue (L1) and the context of learning (e.g. whether instructed in a classroom or acquired naturally by exposure)' (ibid). It is considered variable with reference to 'either the rate of the learning process [] or the outcome of the learning process (how proficient learners become), or both', which Myles informs us 'are highly variable from learner to learner' (ibid). However, researchers, whose 'prime goal' is 'to document and explain the developmental route' taken in SLA and 'the universal mental processes available to all normal human beings', 'are less concerned with the speed or rate of development' and 'tend to minimize or disregard social and contextual differences among learners' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:24).

The Cognitive Approach versus Communicative Competence

A good example of this type of approach is the cognitive perspective, which does 'not view the learner as a social being', but is moreover 'interested in the learner's mind, as a processor of information' (ibid:129). Cognivists are interested in how human memory works and how it stores second language information (ibid:99). They believe that 'achieving mastery in a second language is essentially the same process as achieving mastery in a skill' (Thornbury, 2006:61), and that 'cognitive skills drive language development forward' (ibid:83). There may be some similarities between learning a skill and learning a language. Skills involve both theory and practice, and second language learners also have to have some sort of knowledge of language and its properties before they can produce it. There is also a certain amount of automaticity involved in language learning, especially where the acquisition of new grammartical structures and vocabulary is concerned. However, I do not find that 'the movement from controlled to automatic processing via practice (repeated activation)', as suggested by McLaughlin (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:101) or Anderson's 'declarative knowledge' becoming 'proceduralised', by activating 'the same routine' successfully 'a large number of times' (ibid:104), is enough for a learner's interlanguage to develop. Like Pica (1994:60) I find that today language skills are not dealt with in isolation, but are practised 'in conjunction with distinctively different activities involving student group work and classroom discussion'. I cannot fully agree with the view that just by ''chunking' the more mechanical elements of a task and moving them into long term memory' and then drawing on them whenever needed, (Thornbury, 2006:62) is enough for interlanguage development. 'Some language learning' does involve 'the memorisation of vocabulary, including multi-word units (chunks) as a means of achieving fluency' (ibid:79), but language is more complex than that, as each learning situation is a challenge in itself because it requires different levels of ability of which the learner must always be conscious. 'Routinized operations (automatic strategies)', as advocated by Donato and McCormick (1994:455), 'can become conscious goal-directed actions if the conditions under which they are carried out change', and learners then have to use different strategies to achieve their goal. It is, therefore, not only a matter of retrieving knowledge from long term memory, but knowing how to rearrange it and put it to use to suit a given situation. Communicative competence' or the ability to be able to 'participate appropriately' in 'speech events with their own distinctive structures and routines in current urban society', such as 'telephone conversations, service encounters (in shops, banks, etc.),

classroom lessons or job interviews [] has been seen [] as the broad eventual target of SLL' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:240). 'Knowing how to make a complaint', as Thornbury (2006:86) writes, involves not just knowing how to formulate the appropriate utterance, but also knowing under what conditions a complaint will be recognised as such'. 'Real-world situations', where there may not be a 'one-to-one match between form and function' (ibid:8586), but where the meaning can be deciphered from the context with very little use of grammar (ibid:89), need to be understood. Learners should be given as many opportunies as possible to participate in class activities involving conversations and dialogues, so that they can gradually learn to respond appropriately to the situations they will encounter in real life. It is, therefore, very important for learners to consider the effect of context on language and to be able to distinguish between the pragmatic and syntactic modes of expression.

Factors Influencing Input and Intake in SLA

Even though the route of language development may be the same, learners may 'differ greatly in the degree of success that they achieve' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:25), possibly, as summarized by Thornbury (2006:14-15), due to the 'extent of L1 transfer', their attitudes, motivation and learning style; the kind of opportunities that are available for language use; as well as the amount and type of input they are exposed to. Stephen Krashen's input hypotheses, encouraged researchers 'to examine more closely the characteristics of the language input being made available to second language learners' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:166). Krashen considered acquistion as a 'subconscious process' [] 'identical [] to the process children utilize in acquiring their first language', and learning as a 'conscious process', which occurs when the learner focuses on 'form' and learns about 'the linguistic rules of the target language' (ibid:45). Learning, according to Krashen, only helps monitor language output, which is otherwise entirely acquired (McLaughlin, 1987:24). In practice, however, it is very difficult or even impossible to assess when a learner's production is the result of a conscious or subconscious process. Perhaps at the very beginning of SLA one can say that learning has more of a monitoring or editing role, but as the learner becomes more fluent in the language, both acquisition and what has been learned merge into one. Successful L2 learning does not only involve knowing language grammar rules as such, but among other things also language structures, vocabulary, style and appropriateness. When a second language is being acquired in a country, where learners have very little or no opportunity to practise their L2 outside the classroom, they cannot acquire it subconsciously through their environment as they would

their L1. Pica reminds us that even if a learner 'lives in a country where the language under study is spoken widely in the community, does not guarantee opportunities for integration with its users. And even when there are opportunities for integration, language learning is not always guaranteed' (1994:70), which is why interaction in the virtual environment of the classroom is of such great importance in language acquisition even though it might be considered a poor substitute for the natural environment.

It is difficult to ascertain just how much direct exposure to the target language outside the classroom affects SLA, because it depends on the 'elusive connections between both the L2 culture and those cultural values that students bring to their learning experience'(ibid:72). Pica points out that 'learners who are exposed to more than one variety of L2 may choose 'higher prestige and teacher models as their target while others 'may select target models based on peers, friends, or members of their own ethnic group' (ibid:71). Still others may not feel the need for any kind of integration, or instruction for that matter, such as the example of Santo in the European Science Foundation Project (ESF), who, as Schumann states, 'seemed not to care a lot about integration, and was happy enough to speak a pidginised form of English, so long as he succeeded in getting his meanings across' (Thornbury, 2006:94).

According to Schumann (ibid:163) 'success in SLA could be predicted by the extent to which learners are willing to adapt to the target language culture, i.e. to acculturate'. One of the obstacles for failing to acculturate is social distance, which can be seen in the examples described by Norton (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:243) of the Polish immigrant girl, Eva, who, despite the fact that she was attending English classes, found it difficult to integrate into the target language community, because she had little or no opportunity to interact in the target language. Nonetheless she soon 'gained enough confidence to find conversational openings' and gradually 'gained acceptance as a 'legitimate speaker' (ibid). In Saliha's situation, however, even though she is a student at Plato College, in her real-life experience she feels very intimidated by her inability and struggle to express herself in L2 mainly due to the social distance between herself and her employer, who 'has the power to influence when she can speak, how much she can speak and what she can speak about' (Ternar, 1990:327-328 in Norton, 2000:1). These learners' success or lack of it depends largely on their ability to gain 'access to the social and verbal activities of the target language community of practice, drawing on social and intellectual resources to help overcome difficulties of subordination and isolation, and finally on the willingness from their respective communities to 'adapt and

accept them as legitimate participants' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:243-244). If the classroom is viewed in Toohey's words, as 'a community of practice'(ibid:241), and a good learning situation is evident, one in which there is little social difference between the target language group and the L2 group, where a positive attitude to assimilation prevails (Ellis, 2000 in Thornbury, 2006:163), then language acquisition can have fruitful results. However, attitudes towards language vary from learner to learner and some may be satisfied just by achieving the basic learner variety of language 'to meet their immediate communicative needs' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:156), and may not have the desire to go beyond it while others may have low self-esteem, which may hinder their understanding of the input regardless of how receptive to it they are. Even though Norton states that '[I]t is through language that a person negotiates a sense of self within and across different sites at different points in time, and it is through language that a person gains access to or is denied access to powerful social networks that give learners the opportunity to speak' (2000:5), a 'learners motivation to speak is mediated by investments that may conflict with the desire to speak' (Pierce, 1995:19). It may be a question of the learner's social identity [] whether defined by ethnicity, by language, or any other means' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:246). If these learners find themselves in 'life-threatening situations', where their interlanguage is being questioned, they may show 'resistence' or 'a complete withdrawal from second language interaction' and look for 're-assertion' in their first language identity and switch to using their L1 only (ibid:248), or they may adopt 'the strategy of silence to avoid humiliation'(Thornbury, 2006:171). Learners have to feel comfortable in the environment where SLA is taking place and be positively motivated by their teachers as well as by their peers if they are to develop their interlanguage.

A Look at Comprehensible Input and Comprehensible Output

Another factor to consider is input itself. According to Krashen the only thing learners need for language acquisition to take place is 'comprehensible input', which he defines in his input hypothesis as 'second language input just beyond the learner's current second language competence' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:48), the level of which is very difficult if not impossible to determine, as each individual's current second language competence is unique. In Krashen's view 'If input is understood, and there is enough of it, the necessary grammar is automatically provided' (ibid), so teachers do not have to explicitly teach it. It would seem, therefore, that grammar instruction is a waste of time. However, in many cases in the classroom teaching grammar has proven to be essential in getting learners acquainted with

how language functions, especially if the rules governing L1 differ greatly from those governing L2, as the differences may cause even greater difficulties in mastering more complex L2 structures later on. I would have to agree with Pica (1994:67) that 'the effectiveness of grammar instruction appears to depend largely on selection and sequencing of grammar rules and careful assessment of learner readiness'. It also depends on how effective and relevent the grammar is to the learner's needs and purpose for learning the language, especially if these purposes are academic, such as school-leaving exams, in which case the learner cannot afford not to master them. Put simply, mastering grammar gives the learner the advantage over his/her knowledge of L2, and makes working with L2 easier and less stressful with whatever task is at hand. Of course, the ideal method of instruction would be 'a balance [] between explicit instruction and more inductive, communicative procedures' (ibid), which allow the learners not only the opportunity to practice the rules, but also to use language more freely in different situations. It is also important that learners 'let [] input in' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:48). Bardovi-Harlig and Reynolds (1995:127) argue that 'input enhancement which includes focused noticing as well as positive evidence provides learners with an awareness which helps input [to] become intake'. They advocate 'using authentic text to present positive evidence', followed by 'focused noticing exercises', as well as 'a range of production tasks to provide contexualized practice' (ibid:124).

Michael Long argues that 'in order to understand more fully the nature and usefulness of input for SLL, greater attention should be paid to the interactions in which learners are engaged'(Mitchell and Myles, 2004:160), because when learners are 'engaged with their interlocutors in negotiations around meaning, the nature of the input might be qualitatively changed' and 'become increasingly well-targeted to the particular developmental needs of the individual learner' (ibid). Long found that when it came to solving ongoing communication difficulties in interactions between native speakers and non-native speakers, native speakers would resort to conversational tactics such as 'repetition, confirmation checks, comprehension checks or clarification requests [] not with any conscious motive to teach grammar', but to 'fine-tune the second language input so as to make it more relevant to the current state of learner development' (ibid:167). Therefore 'negotiation work that triggers interactional adjustments [] facilitates acquisition because it connects input, internal learner capabilities, particularily selective attention, and output in productive ways' (Long, 1996:451-452). Long's interaction hypothesis supports 'the need to provide classroom opportunities for interaction' and the idea that 'interaction is a necessary condition for second language learning'

(Thornbury, 2006:113). Research has shown that teaching a language 'should be an interactive process between teachers and students and among students themselves', allowing for 'negotiation' and 'simply encouraging students to ask questions about input they do not initially understand' which 'may have positive results on their comprehension' (Pica,1994:56).

To ensure successful language learning, learners do indeed 'need opportunities to modify their interlanguage production and thereby to produce [] comprehensible output' (ibid:56). However, given the different attitudes that learners have towards language some may need to be stimulated to produce any sort of output. Others may be demotivated from the very beginning and producing output such as speech, may be a long and tedious task. Waiting for speech to 'emerge on its own', as Krashen (1985:2) seems to think, may take forever. That is why teacher motivation is so important here. A positive teacher-pupil, pupil-pupil relationship can have a positive impact on the output of students lacking in motivation. Again we must not forget those learners with low self-esteem or a feeling of not belonging, who may experience difficulty in making input become intake and so will need more time to produce any sort of output. Like Swain, I believe that producing output is necessary for language development, because it 'may push learners to become aware of gaps and problems in their current second language system [] provides them with opportunities to reflect on, discuss and analyse these problems explicitly' as well as 'oppotunities to experiment with new structures and forms' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:174-175). This focus on input, interaction and output referred to by Block as the 'Input-Interaction-Output model' (2003:9) brought about new approaches involving communicative language teaching, which 'ever since its beginnings in the mid1970s [] has argued for the need to provide classroom opportunities for interaction' (Thornbury, 2006:113), where learners can 'take part in interactive activities in which real meanings are being communicated, where the language is not always predictable, and where negotiation of meaning might result' (ibid:197-198). In other words, giving learners opportunities to 'learn language through using language''(ibid).

Interactive Activities - The Task-based Approaches

There have been attempts at interactive approaches in the past such as that of Peter Skehan, who tried to view the cognitive approach to SLA from a practical perspective and suggested a task-based approach, which involves 'reversing the traditional order of instruction' in that 'declarative knowledge does not precede proceduralization', as suggested by Anderson above,

'but emerges out of the process of proceduralization and helps shape it' (Thornbury, 2006:6566). It has to do with 'basing the instructional process around a series of tasks' (ibid:65). What makes this task-based approach different from other cognitive approaches is that its primary goal is 'the communication of meaning' and that it 'has a real-world relationship' (Skehan, 1996:38). Skehan explains that: [] a task which requires personal information to be exchanged, or a problem to be solved, or a collective judgement to be made bears a relationship to things that happen outside the classroom in a way that separates these activities from doing, for example, a transformation exercise (ibid). This seems to fit into the communicative approach very nicely, but because the emphasis among the task participants is on interaction and communicating meaning, it is feared that interlanguage may suffer because 'processing language to extract meaning does not guarantee automatic sensitivity to form' (ibid:41), and the goals for achieving 'native-like proficiency in language, that of accuracy, complexity (restructuring) and fluency, may be inhibited. Even though Skehan attempted to focus on 'contexualized language use' and 'social interaction', which are central in communicative language teaching (Thornbury, 2006:77-78), because of the major concern with form, 'the social dimension' [] is largely ignored' here as 'what is happening inside the learner is seen as being more important than the social context in which learning is taking place' (ibid). However, teachers can 'exploit tasks for their language potential, not simply as exercises in fluency' (ibid:79) by manipulating 'the way in which attention is directed', or being 'explicit immediately before the task is done as to whether they want accuracy stressed, or whether they want specific structures to be used' (ibid:55). Learning problems such as 'a lack of interest', learners not taking risks with their interlanguage or using their L1 just to get the task done, can be avoided if tasks are 'sequenced' and if teachers 'adjust task performance factors, such as the time available, or the urgency of the task, or they can pre-teach language that might be useful' (Thornbury, 2006:69).

In the negotiation of meaning investigated by Nakahama et al (2001:378) in interactions between native speakers and non-native speakers involving information gap activities and conversation, it would seem obvious that because 'repair negotiation appears to lead to better comprehension' (ibid:380), and since there is more repair negotiation in the information gap activities than in open-ended conversation, (ibid:386), that information gap activities are superior to conversation. However, Thornbury notes that:

In the information gap the speakers are ''not pushed to produce language'' [] but only a solution to the task; they do not need to attend to the global coherence of the talk, but only to the immediate details' (2006:117) Even though information gap activities do 'create opportunities for two-way interaction', like Thornbury, I believe 'they are hardly representative of communication in the 'real world' and therefore not, perhaps, a reliable means of measuring the amount or effect of negotiation of meaning in live talk' (ibid:115). The purpose of negotiation in the information gap activities is to 'achieve local cohesion', where the opportunities for language use are mininal and the focus is on single words in order to complete an activity (Nakahama et al, 2001:401). Knowing how 'learners' utterances influence each other in terms of form and function' is not the only important characteristic of language use. It has to do with appropriating and internalizing 'knowledge or skill which is collaboratively developed in the course of the interaction' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:206-207). Although it has been argued that 'in more open-ended conversation interlocutors can quickly drop language and topics that cause communication difficulties or avoid them altogether' (Nakahama et al, 2001: 378), conversation does provide learners with more opportunities to produce more complex utterances, and learners feel more challenged because they have to understand their interlocutors and pay close attention to and relate their utterances to the context at hand in trying to achieve global cohesion and coherence (ibid:400-401). Information gap activities are very useful with younger learners as they reinforce certain vocabulary items and structures and give them an opportunity to use L2 even if only in a narrower and more controlled atmosphere. Open-ended conversation activities, on the other hand, allow learners to challenge and debate issues as well as give their own opinion about a given topic. Interesting topics open up debate especially when they involve the learners' schema and I must say that in the majority of cases learners want to be heard. Learners learn from each other and there is a lot of negotiating taking place. By urging learners to use their L2, they gradually internalize it, which gets them thinking in L2 as well.

Because we are dealing with non-native speakers in the classroom, some of which may not find it necessary to improve their interlanguage at all, we should also consider that successful interaction should not only provide an environment that 'triggers mental processes', but also one that gives learners the opportunity for 'face-to-face interaction' where they can experience 'shared processes such as joint problem solving and discussions' (ibid:195). If we consider the fact that interaction is 'social rather than individual in nature' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:193),

learners, who may not at first be 'capable of independent functioning', will gradually 'achieve the desired outcome' by doing tasks 'under the guidance of other more skilled individuals' or 'in collaboration with more capable peers', (ibid:195-196) who can provide 'scaffolding appropriate to the learner's current Zone of Proximal Development' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:213). It is amazing to see peer interaction at work, namely 'how learners support each other during oral second language production, how they work together during 'focus on form' activities, and how they collaborate around second language writing activities' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:214) even in mixed ability groups. In the example given by Donato (1994:44), even though the members of his group do not have the complete knowledge to do the task at hand without some sort of help, they manage to do so 'through their successive individual contributions' within the group, the results of which show that 'peer scaffolding results in linguistic development within the learner' (ibid). As Wells puts it, 'whenever people

collaborate in an activity, each can assist the others, and each can learn from the contributions of the others' (1999:333). 'Classrooms should provide opportunities to create constructive, cohesive learning communities [] where students and teachers negotiate their identities and subject-matter knowledge together in culturally respectful and equitable ways through social interaction' to make the distance between the 'dominant' learners, and those 'silent, marginal' ones who seem 'disconnected [] from peers, curriculum, activities' (Duff, 2002:289-290) shorter. By 'creating a positive, collaborative group dynamic' with 'teacher support in linguistic needs', learners may want to participate in 'the community of practice' which will prevent 'a core vs periphery division' between the learners from developing (Thornbury, 2006:199).

Conclusion

It is very important for practioners like myself to understand the linguistic, psycholinguistic, socio-cultural and sociolinguistic views of SLA, as they all influence language development each from their own perspective. Central to SLA is the learner, who may be learning the 'target language formally in school or college or 'picking it up' in the playground or the workplace' (Mitchell and Myles, 2004:23), and whose reasons for learning a second or foreign language may be very diverse. That is why there is definitely the need to take each theoretical approach into consideration in order to get the full understanding of what SLA entails followed by intensive collaboration between educators and researchers, which would certainly help improve language teaching and development.

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