ABSTRACT
There are many research areas that are related to the field of second language acquisition, some of which were mentioned in chapter 1. This chapter briefly touches on some of these “neighboring” disciplines as a way of introducing the reader to these areas, showing similarities and dissimilarities. While SLA is now an autonomous area of research, it had its roots and initial justification in other areas-for example, language teaching-and it has been strongly influenced by other disciplines, such as linguistics and psychology. However, it had a special relationship with child language acquisition in that child language acquisition formed the basis of research in second language acquisition, with many of the original second language research questions stemming from the same questions in child language acquisition. Other areas, such as third language acquisition or heritage language acquisition, are special instances of second language acquisition and, particularly in the case of heritage language learning, have developed in recent years. Finally, bilingual acquisition blends issues related to second language acquisition and those related to first language acquisition.
