A brief summary i made on an article that was published in the early 90's by Patsy lightbown

1. Anniversary Article
Classroom SLA Research and Second Language Teaching
(SUMMARY)
At the time SLA was being specifically investigated (1985) to get the appropriate answers on research
done to answer questions that were relevant at that point, investigators did not have points of
reference or a vast amplitude study on where to start. The main concern about this issue is how
teachers address the problems in the SLA classrooms, problems targeting most pedagogical structures
that can be quite relevant depending on how the interaction between teacher-student might be.
While getting a better perspective of the problems in the SLA classroom more and more questions and
doubts came to life, doubts on how effectiveness in transfer or age could have been a problem in both
teachers and learners. Research was starting to pick up and the main question was “how SLA research
might influence second language teaching”? Lots of hypothesis came in to play one of them being that
students- teachers believed that the multiple activities that makes students participate and interact will
lead to a better understanding of SLA taking into considerations that some attention to language forms
are also important. Another hypothesis was the participation of empirical support this being that the
learners could learn not only from the focused instruction but from the freedom of using language
interaction freely.
Methods that were always used like the memorizing grammar rules and memorizing vocabulary were
always accepted in classrooms, but there were more activities that students like teachers were
interested in learning about, one of them being the audio-lingual learning technique that at first was not
accepted in most classroom and teachers did not have liability on. Teachers were getting more involved
in the evolving of the researches done and wanted to use methods in which the students interact no
matter the mistakes they made. The following generalizations were proposed by the author in de SLA
research:
1. Adults and adolescents can “acquire” a second language.
The word “acquire” in this sense meant that adolescents as well as adults in some cases receive
information unintentionally
2. Progressively the amount of perception of L2 is well influenced by the participation of L1 and
how the student manages production on what might be grammatical or not on the language
being taught.
3. In order to conform a target language there has to be a sequence that does not have to be
formal in every way, as long as the development of the student receiving input is recognizable
by the teacher and does not necessarily mean that there has to be a sequence to obtain results.
4. In SLA, by practicing does not necessarily mean you will perfection proficiency.
5. Knowing a grammar or language rule will not give a SLA student the certainty that he or she will
use it in an interaction, in some cases students can get high scores on a language test but still
fail on an oral presentation, this is because there is no self-monitoring so that the student can
focus on the acquired knowledge.

2. 6. SLA students that have a recurrent error in a grammatical context and are being corrected for
every mistake made are not likely to have a positive language behavior. Instructors must know
the correct way and time in which the student is ready for a general or specific feedback.
7. In SLA adult learners’ intake or input stops at a certain stage of the process for a native-like
mastery of the target language this is because of a general acquisition of the language.
8. For a student to achieve a native-like mastery on a SL it is necessary that he or she has more
interactions other than classroom activities with people that are native speakers, or be a part of
different activities that endure more and more contact with the language to achieve a native
like proficiency.
9. Learning a SL is highly complex, a person who seeks a SLA has to take in to considerations that
he or she must be surrounded by people that have the same interest in learning the language
and that there has to be a great amount of exposure to the language to make the learning
process easier
10. SLA students with contextual cues and world knowledge can make it easier to learn a SL, they
need more language knowledge for them to produce another language and it can be as complex
as their L1. Students must be 100% exposed to the language for them to master the lingualism.