A Study on Factors Affecting Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

This study is an attempt to present an analysis of the social factors affecting second language acquisition of the secondary level students inMakawanpur district. The study focuses mainly on the production aspect oflanguage. The study was carried out with the assumption that the role ofsocial factors associated to the learners play a vital and crucial role inlanguage learning, especially in second language learning. The study has theobjectives to find out the social factors affecting second languageacquisition. The sample population of this study was forty students includingnineteen boys and 21 girls of two community schools of Makawanpurdistrict. The sample population contained students from ten different castes.The researcher developed a questionnaire and constructed different testitems for writing and speaking. The testing continued for three subsequentdays. Head masters and language teachers were interviewed. Theinformation obtained through interview were recorded and the writtenanswers to the questionnaires were collected. Simple statistical tools ofpercentage and measures of variability (mean and standard deviation) wereused in order to process, analyse and tabulate the collected data and comparethe significance of the proficiency difference according to gender, caste,economical background of the family and educational background of thefamily.After the conduction of the thesis the researcher found that overallachievement of the studentswas much lower, so called lower caste studentswere found how hesitant in getting involved in learning than the studentsfrom the so called upper caste, more matured students had lowerperformance than those who were at an appropriate age related to the level,social status and income factor had an indirect role to play in theperformance of the learner. The research contains four subsequent chapters. First chapter isintrocuctory chapter, second chapter is about methodology, third chapterdeals with analysis and interpretation of data, and the last chapter is aboutfindings and recommendations.