Chapter One and Two:

            Chapter one sparked my interest in that I never really looked at L2 learning through a variety of perspectives. It has excited me to learn and explore the different perspectives this semester mostly because, throughout my reading, I was able to apply my personal learning experience with many of the bolded key terms. For example, my first language is Polish, my second language is English and my foreign language is Spanish. Also, I learned my second language through a combination of formal and informal L2 learning; however, most of the learning took place informally. That is to say that, while I took an ESL class as a young child, I was more so forced to learn the language from my surroundings because I only received a formal learning experience (ESL) for a short period of time.

            As mentioned before, the three perspectives pointed out in this chapter—linguistic, psychological, and social interest me and I am looking forward to exploring the ideas behind these perspectives individually as well as combined. For example, in my personal experience, through a linguistic perspective, one might say that it was easy for me to learn how to read and write Spanish because the sentence structure is very much similar to Polish, it can also be argued through the social perspective that it is not easy for me to actually speak the language because I have not been culturally exposed and immersed in the language.

            The second chapter of this text further explored the three perspectives. The author ponders and points out interesting insights on multilingualism and children L2 learners. For example, Saville-Troike writes, “The ability to acquire language could not be dependent upon intellectual powers alone, since children with clearly superior intelligence do not necessarily begin to speak earlier, or with better results, than children of ordinary intellect” (15). What is it that has the most influence on the learning of another language? This is a question that I would like to learn more about. Additionally, why is it that it is easier to learn another language at a younger age? Since I was exposed to English at a young age, quickly I learned the language and lost a Polish accent, where as my parents still have difficulty today with English grammar and vocabulary, and their accent is very thick. What is it that makes a child so susceptible to acquiring a second language fluently?

            I also wanted to point out something that the author states that truly stood out to me. “Regrettably, there is a common attitude among educators, sometimes pursued with almost religious fervor, that socially “inferior” or “uneducated” varieties of a language are a moral threat and should be completely eradicted” (12). As a future educator, I think that these “inferior languages” are something I will most likely encounter with many students, and I think that teachers need to realize that these are not inferior languages at all, but simply languages of other cultures. While it is important to teach proper grammar of standard English, who is to say that standard English is in fact the “superior” language. The acceptance, appreciation and acknowledgement of other dialects per say, is very important to a student. Additionally, language is always changing. This is to say that a very proper and grammatically correct standard English sentence today, could have been slang one hundred years ago. The main purpose of a language is for communication, and if a language needs to change in order for society to communicate better, so be it.