Language II: Second-Language Acquisition and Classroom Strategies
Language II carries 30 marks and tests pedagogy for a language that is often not the child’s home language. The focus is on how second-language competence develops and how teachers can support it through comprehensible input, interaction and purposeful reading and writing.
Core concepts
- Communicative competence covers grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competence; correct sentences alone are not enough.
- Learners need comprehensible input slightly beyond their current level, plus opportunities to use the language in pairs, games, role play and short tasks.
- Errors have different sources: interference from the first language, developmental overgeneralisation, and simple slips. The response should match the cause.
- Reading strategies include predicting, skimming, scanning and inferring meaning from context. Writing should move through planning, drafting, revising and editing rather than one-shot copying.
Worked example
A learner writes “He go to school every day.” The reasoning: the missing third-person -s may be first-language interference if the home language does not mark subject–verb agreement, or it may be a developmental error as the learner overgeneralises the base form. The teacher recasts the sentence correctly in speech, gives focused practice with a few familiar verbs, and later checks the learner’s own writing. Public humiliation or a full grammar lecture is not justified by one error.
Traps that cost marks
Do not confuse interference with developmental error. Do not assume silence means failure; a silent period is common in early second-language learning. Avoid teaching vocabulary only as isolated word lists, and do not rely solely on translation. Overcorrecting every utterance reduces willingness to speak.