Second-language

Second-language acquisition

The distinction between acquiring and learning was made by Stephen Krashen as part of the monitor theory he developed in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Krashen, the acquisition of a language is a natural process; whereas learning a language is a conscious one. In the former, the student needs to partake in natural communicative situations. In the latter, error correction is present, as is the study of grammatical rules isolated from natural language. Not all educators in second language education agree with this distinction; however, the study of how a second language is learned/acquired is referred to as second-language acquisition (SLA).