By: Nane Magdalena / 06920090052
ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE
FOR L2 USE PART 1
Topics covered...
Acquisition of Communicative Competence
• Competence and Use
• Academic vs. Interpersonal Competence
• Competence of Language Knowledge
*Competence and Use
Communicative Competence: everything that a
speaker needs to know in order to communicate
appropriately within a particular community.
Culture
Knowledge
Content
Language
Knowledge
Language
Use
Context
Competence and Use
Includes Pragmatic Competence: how to interpret and
convey meaning within communicative situations, the
choice, language in social interaction, and the effects.
Includes prior knowledge and social experience.
*Academic vs. Interpersonal Competence
L1 competence: the broad repertoire of knowledge,
people communicate for many purposes within their
native language community.
L2 competence: more restricted, especially when SLA
takes place in a foreign language setting.
e.g. Chinese native speakers in China learn English L2 to prepare
for Olympic games, pursue graduate degrees in Englishdominant country.
Motivations for learning L2 entails very different
combinations of linguistic and cultural knowledge and
different levels and types of proficiency.
Priorities for L2 Use
Academic competence: the knowledge needed by L2
learners to learn about other subjects, scholarly
research, as a medium in a specific professional or
occupational field. (specific vocabulary, reading, academic listening,
academic writing, however doesn’t necessarily require fluent speaking ability)
Interpersonal competence: the knowledge needed by
L2 learners primarily in face-to-face contact with other
speakers. (vocabulary is the most important, listening, speaking, “online”,
reading, speaking)
*Components of Language Knowledge
5 components for purposes of description and analysis:
1. Vocabulary (lexicon)
2. Morphology (word structure)
3. Phonology (sound system)
4. Syntax (grammar)
5. Discourse (ways to connect sentences and organize
information)
1. Vocabulary
• is the most important level to develop.
• Function words: determiners, prepositions,
conjunctions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs. For spoken:
interjections, contractions, verbs expressing opinion or
feeling.
• For academic contexts: modifier, scientific concepts,
technical terms.
• Borrowed and commonly inherited words can be a
trap for learners (German, gross – large; Spanish, largo – long,
embarazada – pregnant).
1. Vocabulary
• Interpersonal situations: affective (interactional) and
task-oriented (transactional) purposes (how are you today? vs.
How’re ya doin’?).
• Idioms, metaphors, collocations. These “chunks” are
typically memorized as holistic units (the big picture, a ballpark
guess).
• The most frequent multiple-word combinations:
greetings, formulaic routines, discourse fillers, hedges,
smoothers (you know, kind of, never mind).
1. Vocabulary
The types of knowledge:
• Linguistic knowledge: syntactic information;
constraints on possible word meaning, patterns in word
structure; meanings of surrounding words.
• World knowledge: understanding of the concepts
which the words represent; familiarity with related
conceptual frameworks; awareness of social
associations.
• Strategic knowledge: control over cognitive resources.
2. Morphology
• it’s very important for vocabulary development and
achieving grammatical accuracy.
• derivational morphology: adding prefixes and suffixes
that can create new meanings (un- + kind = unkind, friend + -ly =
friendly).
• inflectional morphology: word parts that carry
meanings, such as tense, aspect, and number (kicked,
coming, and books).
3. Phonology
• the first priority during the middle of the 20th century.
• proficiency in perception and intelligible production are
essential for successful spoken communication, degree of
“foreign accent” is acceptable.
• the following aspects of the sound systems are likely to
differ for L1 and L2:
 phonemes
 possible sequences of consonants & vowels (phonotactics)
 syllable and word positions
 intonation patterns (stress, pitch, duration)
 rhythmic patterns
4. Syntax
• 1st step: realizing that certain aspects of language are
universal, but how they are expresses may vary greatly.
• the most common orders is S V O
• Old English was more like Russian and Latin:
Se cyning seah ðone bisceop
 (‘The king saw the bishop.’)
 ðone bisceop seah se cyning.
 Se cyning ðone bisceop seah.
Modern English has lost the flexibility.
4. Syntax
• the concepts of grammatical gender and number,
which determine the choice of pronouns, singular, plural.
• to form yes/no and Wh- questions, passive form,
negation, time and perspective in the verb system.
• Nominalizations – whole sentenced are transformed
into fillers for noun phrase positions.
5. Discourse
• function beyond the scope of a single sentence.
• Microstructural discourse: sequential indicators, logical
connectores, and other devices to create CoHeSioN.
• Macrostructural discourse: characteristic of particular
GenRes and of interactional strategies.
• CoHeSioN devices link 1 element of discourse to
another, integrating them into a unified text.
• different GenRes: different classes of participants,
addressing different topics, requiring different language
styles and organization.
5. Discourse
• Contrastive Rhetoric: focus on predicting and
explaining problems in L2 academic and professional
writing.
• Intercultural Communication: politeness and turntaking conventions from L1 to L2, expression,
interpretation – misunderstanding of speaker intent and
message tone.
Thank You…