Second language

One of the dominant linguistic theories hypothesizes that a device or module of sorts in the brain contains innate knowledge.

Many psychological theories, on the other hand, hypothesize that cognitive mechanisms, responsible for much of human learning, process language.

[5][6][7][8] In acquiring an L2, Hyltenstam found that around the age of six or seven seemed to be a cut-off point for bilinguals to achieve native-like proficiency.

Before a child goes through puberty, the chemical processes in the brain are more geared towards language and social communication.

Whereas after puberty, the ability for learning a language without an accent has been rerouted to function in another area of the brain—most likely in the frontal lobe area promoting cognitive functions, or in the neural system of hormone allocated for reproduction and sexual organ growth.

However, when it comes to the relationship between age and rate SLA, "Adults proceed through early stages of syntactic and morphological development faster than children (where time and exposure are held constant)".

[11] In other words, adults and older children are fast learners when it comes to the initial stage of foreign language education.

[15] Due to such factors, learning foreign languages at an early age may incur one's perspective of his or her native country.

Despite persistent efforts, most learners of a second language will never become fully native-like in it, although with practice considerable fluency can be achieved.

Children are exposed to a language environment of errors and lack of correction but they end up having the capacity to figure out the grammatical rules.

In the learning of a second language the correction of errors remains a controversial topic with many differing schools of thought.

[18] In the 1970s, Dulay and Burt's studies showed that learners acquire grammar forms and structures in a pre-determined, inalterable order, and that teaching or correcting styles would not change that.

[18] The 1990s brought back the familiar idea that explicit grammar instruction and error correction was indeed useful for the SLA process.

[18] Mackey, Gas and McDonough had similar findings in 2000 and attributed the success of this method to the student's active participation in the corrective processes.

So learners in both their native and second language have knowledge that goes beyond what they have received, so that people can make correct utterances (phrases, sentences, questions, etc) that they have never learned or heard before.

[19] The emotional distinction between L1 and L2 indicates that the "effective valence" of words is processed less immediate in L2 because of the delayed vocabulary/lexical access to these two languages.

[26] They looked at four types of motivations—intrinsic (inner feelings of learner), extrinsic (reward from outside), integrative (attitude towards learning), and instrumental (practical needs).

According to the test results, the intrinsic part has been the main motivation for these student who learn English as their second language.

For example, English in countries such as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Philippines, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands is considered a second language by many of its speakers, because they learn it young and use it regularly; indeed in parts of South Asia it is the official language of the courts, government and business.

A similar phenomenon exists in post-Soviet states such as Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, where Russian can be considered a second language, and there are large Russophone communities.

However, unlike in Hong Kong, English is considered a foreign language in China due to the lack of opportunities for use, such as historical links, media, conversation between people, and common vocabulary.

George H. J. Weber, a Swiss businessman and independent scholar, founder of the Andaman Association and creator of the encyclopedic andaman.org Web site, made a report in December 1997 about the number of secondary speakers of the world's leading languages.