Jasmin Essay

The current paper is a case study of a Filipino housekeeper Jasmin, who has lived and worked in the Middle Eastern country of Jordan (specifically the capital, Amman) for six years. The study examines the extent to which her L1, i.e. Filipino, affects the successful acquisition of vocabulary in the L2, namely English. Specifically the study inspects the extent of semantic fossilization in Jasmin's L2, and her receptiveness to correction, whether overt or covert. Historically, second language acquisition (SLA) research has either tended to direct attention to the process of acquisition itself, or as is the focus of the present study, investigating specific linguistic features in terms of fossilization (Chen 2009:65). An influential analytical model in the latter scope of research is that of Han’s (2009) Selective Fossilization Hypothesis (SFH), which attempts to seek out "both the acquisitional and fossilizable potential of linguistic features [and] is a unique attempt to make sense of fossilizable forms by probing into factors purportedly promoting fossilization in the acquisition

The formal stage entails that a lexical entry including no more than formal specifications is conventional for an L2 word. The L1 lemma mediation stage (i.e. the second stage) entails that the L2 word mutually obtains the lemma information (i.e., semantic and syntactic information) of the word’s L1 counterpart, as well as the L2 lexeme information (i.e., formal information). It is for the duration of this conciliator stage, that the previous category of information is relocated into the latter, and intervenes in L2 word use. The final stage, also referred to as the L2 integration stage entails that L2 information (i.e., semantic, syntactic, morphological specifications) is incorporated into the lexical