Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Attainment in naturalistic SDA
- 3 Acquiring a second dialect
- 4 Differential attainment: Age effects and linguistic factors
- 5 Additional individual and linguistic factors
- 6 The difficulty of SDA
- 7 SDA in classroom contexts
- 8 Educational approaches for SDA
- 9 Explaining the results and taking further steps
- Notes
- References
- Index
6 - The difficulty of SDA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Attainment in naturalistic SDA
- 3 Acquiring a second dialect
- 4 Differential attainment: Age effects and linguistic factors
- 5 Additional individual and linguistic factors
- 6 The difficulty of SDA
- 7 SDA in classroom contexts
- 8 Educational approaches for SDA
- 9 Explaining the results and taking further steps
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
As mentioned in Chapter 1, the popular consensus appears to be that SDA is easier or “less traumatic” than SLA (Escure 1997: 7). This is because of the small linguistic distance between the D1 and the D2 compared to that between the L1 and L2. However, some scholars have the opposite point of view – that SDA is more difficult than SLA – and for the same reason – i.e. the small distance between the D1 and D2. For example, Haugen (1964: 125) wrote: “Bidialectalism may actually be harder to acquire than bilingualism. All scholars have agreed that it is harder to keep two similar languages apart than two very different ones.” And Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1998: 287) noted: “In some ways, it may be easier to work with language systems that are drastically different, since the temptation to merge overlapping structures and ignore relatively minor differences is not as great.”
Rather than get into an argument about whether SDA is more difficult than SLA overall, this chapter presents some of the particular aspects of SDA that are especially difficult compared to SLA. Of course, because of the age effects described in Chapter 4, these difficulties do not pertain to children 7 years and younger, and are relevant mainly to older children, adolescents and adults. While I still restrict the discussion to naturalistic contexts, some of the observations are also relevant to educational contexts, as described in later chapters.
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- Second Dialect Acquisition , pp. 134 - 156Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010