When we think of "language learning" we need to understand two clearly distinct concepts. One involves receiving information about the language, transforming it into knowledge through intellectual effort and storing it through memorization. The other involves developing the skill of interacting with foreigners to understand them and speak their language. The first concept is called "language learning," while the other is referred to as "language acquisition." These are separate ideas and we will show that neither is a natural consequence of the other.
The distinction between acquisition and learning is one of the hypotheses (the most important) established by the American Stephen Krashen in his highly regarded theory of foreign language acquisition known as the Natural Approach.
1. Language Acquisition
Language acquisition refers to the process of natural assimilation, involving intuition and subconscious learning. It is the product of real interactions between people in environments of the target language and culture, where the learner is an active player. It is similar to the way children learn their native tongue, a process that produces functional skill in the spoken language without theoretical knowledge. It develops familiarity with the phonetic characteristics of the language as well as its structure and vocabulary, and is responsible for oral understanding, the capability for creative communication and for the identification of cultural values.
In acquisition-inspired methodology, teaching and learning are viewed as activities that happen on a personal and psychological level. The acquisition approach praises the communicative act and develops self-confidence in the learner.
A classic example of second language acquisition are the adolescents and young adults that live abroad for a year in an exchange program, often attaining near native fluency, while knowing little about the language. They have a good pronunciation without a notion of phonology, don't know what the perfect tense is, modal or phrasal verbs are, but they intuitively recognize and know how to use all the structures.
2. Language Learning
The concept of language learning is linked to the traditional approach to the study of languages and today is still generally practiced in high schools worldwide. Attention is focused on the language in its written form and the objective is for the student to understand the structure and rules of the language, whose parts are dissected and analyzed. The task requires intellectual effort and deductive reasoning. The form is of greater importance than communication. Teaching and learning are technical and based on a syllabus. One studies the theory in the absence of the practice. One values the correct and represses the incorrect. Error correction is constant leaving little room for spontaneity. The teacher is an authority figure and the participation of the student is predominantly passive. The student will be taught how to form interrogative and negative sentences, will memorize irregular verbs, study modal verbs, learn how to form the perfect tense, etc., but hardly ever masters the use of these structures in conversation.
Language-learning inspired methods are progressive and cumulative, normally tied to a preset syllabus that includes memorization of vocabulary. It seeks to transmit to the student knowledge about the language, its functioning and grammatical structures, its contrasts with the student's native language, knowledge that hopefully will produce the practical skills of understanding and speaking the language. However, the effort of accumulating knowledge about the language with all its irregularity becomes frustrating because of the lack of familiarity with the language.
Innumerable graduates in Brazil with arts degrees in English are classic examples of language learning. They are certified teachers with knowledge about the language and its literature but able to communicate in English only with poor pronunciation, limited vocabulary and lacking awareness of the target culture.
So, I conclude that Acquisition occurs naturally over time. That is why continuous, meaningful practice in contextually rich language environments is essential in acquiring language. Learning remains secondary to acquisition and happens incidentally when one "acquires" an understanding of the sounds, words and patterns of language needed to facilitate aural comprehension and oral comprehensibility. And “Learning” is a much more focused and cognitively demanding task. As accuracy and depth of vocabulary become increasingly essential in formal and professional settings, so does learning. The greater the requirement for accuracy, the greater the need for awareness of the formal structures that language learning can provide.
Language learning is where you sit down and learn all the grammar, vocabulary and etc, that goes with the language such as in a lesson in school. For example: when we learn about Simple Present Tense, we learn it in a classroom, there is a teacher that give you explanation about the tense, then you get the point from the teacher. While language acquisition is if you learn a language without sitting down a formally learning. But learning it by talking to people such as how you learn to talk English or another native language. The same example as Language Learning, but we do not learn the tense in a classroom with a formal teacher. We acquire it from our daily life, it could be when we have a conversation with our friends about habitual, then we get the main point about simple present tense from the convertation.