Second Language Acquisition and Learning Principles
Domain 2 - Second language acquisition and learning principles
This domain tests how learners acquire Chinese as a second language and how principles such as input, interaction, output, feedback and individual differences should shape teaching decisions.
Core principles
- Comprehensible input: Krashen’s i+1 idea says learners need input slightly beyond current competence, made meaningful by context, visuals and gestures. Input alone is necessary but not sufficient.
- Interaction and output: The interaction hypothesis claims negotiation of meaning promotes acquisition; the output hypothesis argues that producing language forces learners to notice gaps and test hypotheses.
- Noticing: Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis holds that learners must notice a form for it to become intake. Teachers can push noticing through input flood, typographical enhancement and focused tasks.
- Interlanguage: Learner language is a rule-governed system that develops; errors are evidence of hypotheses, not laziness. Fossilization can occur when communication succeeds without pressure to improve.
- L1 transfer: Similarity and difference both matter; transfer can be positive or negative. Error analysis distinguishes systematic errors from performance slips.
- Affective and cognitive factors: Motivation, anxiety, aptitude, learning strategies and the ZPD/scaffolding shape what learners can do with support.
Worked example
A beginner says 我吃饭在食堂. The target is 我在食堂吃饭. Diagnosis: this is a systematic word-order error, likely negative transfer from English “I eat in the canteen.” It is not a careless mistake, because the learner repeats it. Teaching response: provide meaningful input containing location-before-verb patterns, use contrastive examples, then a communicative task (“Where do you eat?”), with corrective feedback that recasts the whole phrase. Reasoning: the goal is to reorganize the interlanguage rule, not just repeat the correct sentence.
Traps
- Calling every error a “mistake”; mistakes are slips learners can self-correct, errors are systematic.
- Assuming all errors come from L1 transfer; developmental sequences and overgeneralization also operate.
- Correcting every error during fluency work, which raises the affective filter and blocks output.
- Treating comprehensible input as “easier and easier” input rather than meaning-focused challenge.