Adult Language

ADULT LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: CROSS-LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES

The book Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives, Vol. I, written by members of the European Science Foundation and edited by Clive Purdue, contains the field methods of an international research project on second language acquisition. The subjects were adult immigrants. The writers claim this project went further than other studies in three aspects: "in the number of languages studied simultaneously; in the organization of co-ordinated longitudinal studies in different linguistic environments; and in the type and range of linguistic phenomena investigated," (Purdue i). The study, known as Second Language Acquisition by Adult Immigrants, was designed to determine the dynamics and success of adult learners who must acquire a second language. The phenomena behind these processes were sought as well as an attempt to bring empiricism to the approach of second languages and inter-ethnic discourse. Ten different linguistic cases of second language acquisition were studied in five European countries: France, Germany, Great Britain, The Netherlands and Sweden, (Purdue xi).

Many immigrants who must acquire a second language do so through the process of interacting with speakers of the language where they immigrate as opposed to formal instruction. As such, there are social, educational and linguistic factors that play a role in their acquisition of the second language

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orpho-syntatic development towards one TL. In addition, they not the research is lacking in regard to this study because it deals with extrinsic factors (social, psychological, etc.) that "are not the place to look in order to explain what determines the detailed characteristics of the course of the acquisition process," (Purdue 21). After all, the attempt of this study if to reconstruct how learners deal with certain language tasks. The subjects of the study are discussed in Chapter Three, twenty-six individuals of different nationalities who were acquiring five different languages, including English, German, Dutch, French and Swedish. The study was designed to investigate, and did investigate, longitudinal data for forty learners with a combination of four learners for each pairing of source and target languages. The authors do a good job of pinpointing some inherent limitations and flaws in their research design. One of these has to do with the broad age range the studied encompassed, "the Turkish informants are at the lower end, or below, the desired age range, whereas the Hispanic speakers are all above this range�the overall age range is therefore greater than we would have wished," (Purdue 47). There are three main h

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