الفهرس 
Introduction…Only 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
This chapter presents a brief discussion of language acquisition and a review of some theories that have a great impact in this field. It also provides a brief background of L2 English in Jordan. Moreover, this chapter presents a review of the theories and studies that shape current conceptualizations of LA, and studies that have been conducted on the relationship between the anxiety variable and speaking performance.
3.2. Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, comprehend and produce language to communicate (Lightfoot, 2010). Children have been the focus of developmental psycholinguistics and language acquisition theories in their attempts to explain this longitudinal process. “Developmental psycholinguistics examines how children go about constructing the complex structures of their mother tongue” (Scovel, 1998, p.1). Researchers study and observe how speech emerges over time in a developmental scene. Hence, children undergo several stages of language development. The first stage of language development is crying which is a relatively primitive stage, but also considered a preparatory stage to speech (Singleton & Ryan, 2004). Infants start to communicate using crying which is considered a language without speech. Using crying, infants deliver messages to their caretakers to express their needs or discomfort (Scovel, 1998). The loudness of crying may vary to express a more specific state, for instance, when infants feel hungrier, they cry louder. This primitive stage of language development may extend from birth time to about eight weeks to start another stage of language development. The next stage of language development is cooing or phonation in which infants start to recognize and produce sounds (Oller & Eilers, 1988). This stage starts at the age of about two months, but when the infant is about six months old, cooing changes to babbling when infants tend to produce consonants which may or may not be found in their mother tongue. For instance, an Arab child raised by Arabic speakers can produce the /v/ sound which is found in English but not in Arabic. At the age of about seven months, babies start to repeat speech syllables or produce combinations of syllables, for instance, (da-da-da or da- ka- bu) (Gobet, 2015).
Speech sounds develop over time which has caught researchers’ attention and interest in phonetics, and which plays a significant role in child maturity of vocal organs such as the larynx. At the age of eight months, the infant starts to babble with the native-surrounding language melody. At the age of about one year, children reach the summit of their early language development (Scovel, 1998). This stage reflects the beginning of understanding one-word utterances, and children start to make the first one-word utterances beginning to refer to prominent objects that they deal with in their everyday life like “mama” and “milk”, even if they appear to invent their own vocabulary “idiomorphs”, which is not found in their mother tongue, to express objects around. This ability is referred to by Chomsky (1981a, 1981b, 1995) as the innate knowledge of language. The first few words, whether idiomorphs or words found in the native language are the beginning of vocabulary growth. In this one-word utterance stage, children tend to overextend a word’s meaning; they may use the word ‘mum’ to refer to anyone at home or the word ‘dog’ for any four-legged animal, so matching words to referents is not easy and develops over time (Rowland, 2014).
After acquiring the first few words, children start to use single words as truncated sentences, this stage is so-called the holophrastic stage. For instance, a child may say ‘milk’ meaning ‘I need more milk’. Holophrastic speech is the bridge which transports the child from the primitive land of cries, words, and names into the next stage. The next stage is telegraphic stage in which children start to produce two-word utterances. This stage starts at about the age of two and a half years and in this stage children acquiring L1 English tend to omit function morphemes such as articles, auxiliaries, and verbal inflection. For instance, ‘teddy lost’ might mean ‘the teddy is lost’ but at the age of three years old, these function morphemes begin to appear and children start to produce syntactic structures (Lust, 2006). At the age of four years old, children acquire most of adult syntactic competence producing full sentences with few errors (Rowland, 2014). By school age, children learn up to 3000 words each year (Gobet, 2015).
3.3. Second Language Acquisition
SLA is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics and it is a relatively recent academic discipline referring to the process by which people learn a second language. According to Ellis (2015), the systematic study of how people acquire their L2 has begun since the 1960s. But it is difficult to identify the precise starting date of L2 acquisition research; “As SLA began as an interdisciplinary field, it is hard to pin down a precise starting date” (Gass & Selinker, 2008, p.1). However, there are two publications that are considered as instrumental to the development of the modern study of L2 acquisition: Pit Coder’s 1969 essay The Significance of Learner’s Error, and Larry Selinker’s 1972 article Interlanguage (Vanpatten & Benati, 2010, pp. 2-5). SLA is the scientific discipline devoted to the studying L2 acquisition, Ellis (2015) defines