Foundations of Language and Language Acquisition
Language as a system
Questions in this domain ask you to analyze English at five levels. Phonology is the sound system: phonemes, minimal pairs (ship/sheep), syllable stress, and intonation. Morphology covers meaningful units: free morphemes stand alone (book), bound morphemes do not (-s, un-). Inflectional affixes change grammatical form without changing word class (walk → walked); derivational affixes often change word class (teach → teacher). Syntax covers phrase and sentence structure, including word order and embedding. Semantics covers meaning, including polysemy and connotation. Pragmatics covers use in context: register, speech acts, and politeness conventions.
Acquisition theory
Know each framework and what it predicts. Behaviorism explains imitation and reinforcement but not creative errors such as goed. Innatism (Chomsky) posits an innate capacity and a sensitive or critical period. Interactionist and sociocultural views (Vygotsky's zone of proximal development) emphasize negotiated meaning and scaffolding. Krashen's monitor model separates acquisition from learning and includes the input, natural order, monitor, and affective filter hypotheses. Cummins distinguishes BICS, conversational fluency (roughly 1–2 years), from CALP, academic proficiency (roughly 5–7 years). Interlanguage theory treats learner errors as rule-governed approximations; errors may be developmental or traceable to L1 transfer, and they can fossilize.
Traps and a worked rule
Frequent traps: labeling developmental errors as L1 interference, confusing phonemes with graphemes, counting affixes as separate words, and reversing the BICS/CALP timelines.
Worked example: Count the morphemes in unbelievably. Segment as un- + believe + -able + -ly = four morphemes: one free morpheme and three bound derivational affixes.