What Does Acquiring the Second Language Look Like?
As a student begins to acquire a second language, a language iceberg of daily words emerges above the water line. The student initially struggles with the surface features of the second language (e.g. pronunciation, common greetings, acquiring the first 2500 words), but underneath the iceberg there is a common underlying proficiency factor (CUP). The human brain is hard at work trying to make order out of disorder. It uses this common underlying proficiency, thought by linguists to be “hard wired” in human genetic makeup, to transfer and translate all that is already developed in L1 to efficiently learn L2.
