한국의 다문화적 교실에서의 영어 습득: 전망

초록

In this review paper, we examine major results from studies on acquisition of a language as the first language (L1), the second language (L2), and the third language (L3), so that we may extract implications on acquisition of English as L3 in the multicultural classroom in Korea. We have adopted the transformational generative grammar framework for linguistic analysis that includes the innateness hypothesis concerning the faculty of language, crystallized as the Universal Grammar. L2 acquisition from this perspective was concerned with the following issues: (i) What does the initial state look like? (ii) Is the UG available in L2 acquisition? Concerning the first issue, we reviewed the Minimal Tree Hypothesis (Vainikka & Young-Scholten 1994, 1996a,b), the Valueless Features Hypothesis (Eubank 1993/4, 1994, 1996), and the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse 1994, 1996), among others. Concerning the second issue, on the other hand, we reviewed various proposals stating that the UG principles or parameters are unavailable in different degrees, including the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (Hawkins & Chan 1997), which claims that formal features cannot be learned anew in L2 acquisition. Concerning L3 acquisition, we have reviewed some studies on the L3 acquisition of the lexicon in section 2.3, and acquisition of relative clauses (Flynn et al. 2004) and of nominal and verbal categories (Leung 2005, 2006a). We learned that these studies imply that L2 as well as L1 can influence L3 acquisition positively or negatively. In section 3, lastly, we have discussed that bilingualism can contribute to L3 English acquisition if any previously acquired language has a similar feature to the target language, and proposed the Cumulation Hypothesis, which claims that a pre-acquired feature is never completely deleted and that any feature can function positively or negatively regarding acquisition of a new language.

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