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In the book The Study of Second Language Acquisition, Rod Ellis (1994) makes a very detailed study on the process the learners pass through while learning and acquiring a second language. Based on what he states in his work, analyze the following statements and judge them as true (T) or false (F):
I. In the case of L1 acquisition, children go through a lengthy period of listening to people talk to them before they produce their first words. This silent period is necessary for the young child needs to discover what language is and what it does.
II. All learners go through a silent period, as Rod Ellis’s study shows.
III. The silent period provides learners with opportunities to prepare themselves for social use of the L2 by means of private speech, which they engage in while they are “silent”.
IV. Learners, particularly children, tend to begin speaking first in single-word utterances and then in increasingly longer utterances, many of which are novel. However, the nature of this progression is not as well-defined as in L1 acquisition, perhaps because L2 learners have more developed processing capacities.