What does aquiring a second language “look like”?
As a student begins to acquire a second language, a language “iceberg” of daily words emerges above the “water line”. The student initially struggles with the surface features of the second language (e.g. pronunciation, common greetings, acquiring the first 2500 words), but underneath the iceberg, there is a common underlying proficiency factor (CUP). The human brain is hard at work trying to make “order” out of “disorder”. It uses this common underlying proficiency, thought by linguists to be “hard-wired” in the human genetic makeup, to transfer and translate all that is already developed in the first language (L1) to efficiently learn the second language (L2).
