Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

acculturation: the ways in which L2 users adapt to life with two languages
Keywords

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hand, they feel that the learning of a new language threatens what they have
already gained for themselves. Successful L2 learning takes place in additive situa-
tions; learners who see the second language as diminishing themselves will not
succeed. This relates directly to many immigrant or multi-ethnic situations; a
group that feels in danger of losing its identity by learning a second language does
not learn the second language well. Chilean refugees I taught in the 1970s often
lamented their lack of progress in English. However much they consciously wanted
to learn English, I felt that they saw it subconsciously as committing themselves to
permanent exile and thus to subtracting from their identity as Chileans. It is not
motivation for learning as such which is important to teaching, but motivation for
learning a particular second language. Monolingual UK children in a survey con-
ducted by the Linguistic Minorities Project (1983) showed a preference in order of
popularity for learning German, Italian, Spanish and French. Young people in the
European Community as a whole, however, had the order of preference English,
Spanish, German, French and Italian (Commission of the European Communities,
1987).
A useful model of attitudes that has been developed over many years is accultur-
ation theory (Berry, 1998). This sees the overall attitudes towards a second culture as
coming from the interaction between two distinct questions:
1 Is it considered to be of value to maintain cultural identity and 
characteristics?
In my experience as a teacher in London, Hungarian students of English
tended to merge with the rest of the population; they did not maintain their
separate cultural identities. Polish students, on the other hand, stayed within
their local community, which had Polish newspapers, theatres, churches and a
Saturday school; they were clearly maintaining their cultural differences. What
the Poles valued, the Hungarians did not.