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. Because of the difficulty in acquiring a second language in such an environment, the research project was designed to cover six aspects that illustrate the difficulty of the linguistic tasks facing such learners, “Six areas of research were chosen, in order to reflect the complex linguistic tasks such learners face in an environment where, initially, they interact with native speakers of an unknown language in situations where they have to make themselves understood. These areas a...