Innatist and Interactionist theories and their teaching implications

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Innatist and Interactionist theories and their teaching implications

Introduction

Although second language acquisition (SLA) varies from first language acquisition in different aspects such as the chance of success and degree of linguistic competence, there are some similarities between the two processes which are worth to be studied. These similarities help linguists to understand second language acquisition from the background knowledge of first language acquisition. Because of this, many theories of second language acquisition such as the Innatism and Interactionist are based on the theories of first language acquisition. In this essay, I am going to first, discuss these two second language acquisition theories, Innatism and Interactionist and their teaching implications; second, select a theory which I believe will influence me most in my future teaching career and explain the reasons behind.

Innatism

According to Chomsky's (1959) theory, every child are biologically equipped with a language acquisition device (LAD) which contains a set of universal grammar (UG) principals common to all language. Opposite to the view of interactionists which emphasizes on the role of environment to language learning, Chomsky claimed that the environment only plays a small part in language learning which only stimulates the working of the