This book discusses about the place of second language in the world today, why study second language acquisition, development of the field of study of second language acquisition,
the scope of second language acquisition research Follow by Language: from intelligence or innate ideas? The quest for the perfect circle, empiricist, and rationalist answers, the empiricist view: no knowledge is innate, the Rationalist view: basic knowledge is innate, Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, arguments are intelligence and Universal Grammar, Chomsky’s ease and speed of child acquisition argument, objections to ease and speed of child acquisition argument, Chomsky’s inadequate language data argument, objections to the inadequate language data argument, Chomsky’s poverty of stimulus argument, objections to Chomsky’s poverty of stimulus argument, Chomsky’s irrelevance of intelligence argument, objections to the irrelevance of intelligence argument, the rationalist view: basic knowledge is innate, mentalism and behaviorism contrasted, language, thought, and culture speech as the basis of thought, arguments against this idea in speech, understanding precedes production, speech understanding by people with speech disabilities, thinking while paralyzed by a drug, talking about one thing while thinking about another, language as the basis of thought, arguments against this idea, deaf children without language can think, bilinguals are not schizoids, creoles: new languages from old, where language does affect thought, thought as the basis of language, the non-linguistic origin of meaning, the true relationship between language and thought, language and the brain, brain structure and function, hemispheric dominance and lateralization, language areas and functioning, brain maturation and critical age for learning language, language disorder, Broca’s aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia, other speech – related aphasias, reading, and writing aphasias: dyslexia, localism and holism, methods of investigating brain and language, established methods: post-mortem, injured people, electrical stimulation, new high-tech methods: CAT and PET, mind and brain, culture and foreign language teaching. By reading this book the students are expected to be able to understand the concept of language acquisition.