Problem Solving and Theory Change in Second Language Acquisition by Michael H. Long

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Problem Solving and Theory Change in SLA 

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Important empirical problems for SLA theories are salient, robust findings, or significant facts that are widely accepted as such by reputable scholars. To illustrate, with one or two potential exceptions, a minimally adequate SLA theory needs to be able to explain such phenomena as the following:

Age differences: Why is child SLA generally so successful but adult achievement so variable, often amounting to failure, despite prima facie the advantages adult learners would seem to share, such as superior cognitive development and the valuable experience of already having successfully learned at least one language (i.e., their mother tongue)? Are there critical, or sensitive, periods for SLA? If so, what is the scope and timing and what underlies them?

Individual variation: Which individual variables – age of onset, aptitude, memory, intelligence, attitude, motivation, personality, learning style, and so on – account for (which kinds of) significant variation observed in adult acquirers’ rate of acquisition and ultimate L2 attainment?

Cross-linguistic influence: What accounts for the influence of the L1 on some dimensions of process, course, rate, and ultimate attainment in SLA, but not others, and what accounts for similar effects of subsequently acquired languages on earlier acquired ones? What are the roles of, and interactions among, such factors as (various notions of) markedness subset relationships, perceptual salience, frequency, linguistic complexity, communicative redundancy?

Autonomous interlanguage syntax: What mechanism, language-specific or general cognitive systems, and/or characteristics of the linguistic environment underlie well-documented patterns in interlanguage development, especially those not easily explained as a product of L1 transfer or L2 input: common errors and error types, accuracy order, developmental sequences, gradual approximation (cf. sudden, categorical learning), stabilization, and fossilization?

Interlanguage variation: What linguistic, learner, and environmental sources account for both individual, common, and universal patterns of diachronic and synchronic variation in interlanguage development?


Long, Michael H. 2007. Problems in SLA. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

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