Lecture 4Second language acquisition

investigates the human capacity to learn additionallanguages during late childhood, adolescence, oradulthood, once the first language, in the case ofmonolinguals, or the first languages, in the case ofbilinguals and multilinguals, have been acquired.

Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA), examineslanguage development among infants and children whenthey grow up surrounded by two or more languages frombirth,

First Language Acquisition (FLA), also known as ChildLanguage Acquisition investigates how infants andchildren learn their first language when they grow upsurrounded by one language only.

Behaviorist Theory dominated both psychology and linguistics in the 1950’s.This theory suggests that external stimuli (extrinsic) can elicit an internalresponse which in turn can elicit an internal stimuli (intrinsic) that lead toexternal responses.

The learning process has been described by S-R-R theorists as a processforming stimulus-response-reward chains. These chains come aboutbecause of the nature of the environment and the nature of the learner.

The environment provides the stimuli and the learner provides theresponses. Comprehension or production of certain aspects of languageand the environment provide the reward.

The environment plays a major role in the exercise of the learners’ abilitiessince it provides the stimuli that can shape responses selectivelyrewarding some responses and not others.

Imitation provides the learner with arepertoire of appropriate, productiveresponses. The learner learns to imitate orapproximate the productive responsesprovided by the environment.

The characteristics of human and non-humanlearners include the ability to:

1. respond to stimuli in a certain way;

2. intuitively evaluate the reward potential ofresponses;

3. extract the important parameters thatmade up the stimulus response (positivereward chains); and

4. generalize these parameters to similarsituations to form classes of S-R-Rchains.

The role of native language in second language acquisition hascome to be known as “language transfer.”

It has been assumed that in a second language learning situationlearners rely extensively on their native language.

According to Lado (1957) individuals tend to transfer forms andmeanings, the distribution of the forms and meanings of their nativelanguage and culture to the foreign language and culture.

Lado’s work and much of the work of that time (1950’s) was basedon the need to produce pedagogically relevant materials. Acontrastive analysis of the native language and the target languagewas conducted in order to determine similarities and differences inthe languages.

Contrastive analysis is a way of comparing languages inorder to determine potential errors for the ultimatepurpose of isolating what needs to be learned and whatdoes not need to be learned in a second languagelearning situation.

Lado detailed that one does a structure-by-structurecomparison of the sound system, morphological system,syntactic system and even the cultural system of twolanguages for the purpose of discovering similarities anddifferences.

The ultimate goal of contrastive analysis is to predictareas that will be either easy or difficult for learners.

Where the two languages were identical, learning could take place through positive transfer to the native-language pattern.

Where the two languages were different, learning difficulty arose and errors occurred resulting from negative transfer.

The L1 system is used for both comprehension and production.

An interlanguage system is also used in comprehending andreceiving messages.

The L1 system is used in hypothesis construction responsible forinterlanguage development.

Comprehensible input serves as a major source of information forhypothesis construction.

L2 output may be used for hypothesis construction.

Cognitive theories of interlanguage claim that with the assistance oflearning strategies, learners build mental grammars of the secondlanguage.

Learners draw on the rules they have constructed to interpret andproduce utterances.

Learner’s utterances are only erroneous with reference to the targetlanguage norms, not to the norms of their own grammars.

The interlanguage continuum consists of a series of overlappinggrammars. Each share some rules with the previously constructedgrammar, but also contains some new or revised rules.

A rule has the status of a hypothesis.

An error is systematic. It is likely to occur repeatedly and is notrecognized by the learner as an error. The learner has incorporateda particular erroneous from the perspective of the target languageinto his/her own system.

Errors are only errors with reference to some external norm such asthe target language. For example, if a learner produces “No speak.”or “No understand.” and if we assume that these are consistentdeviations and form a part of a learner’s system, then it is onlypossible to think of them as errors with regard to English, but notwith regard to the learner’s system.

Error analysis is a type of linguistic analysis that focuses on theerrors learners make. The comparison made in EA is between theerrors a learner makes producing the target language and the targetlanguage form itself.

In a nutshell, Krashen proposed that:a) the core ingredient of additional language learning is

meaningful, comprehensible input;b) the processes of additional language acquisition are

implicit and subconscious and any explicit andconscious processes that may be summoned in theclassroom can only help careful monitored performancebut will have little effects on true language knowledge oron spontaneous performance; and

c) the main obstacles to additional language learning foradults stem from affective inhibitions.

Despite its popularity, already in the mid-1980s the MonitorModel was evaluated as being too metaphorical to lenditself to proper empirical investigation.

So…

Language is normally produced using our acquiredlinguistic competence.

Conscious learning has only one function…as the“Monitor” or “Editor.”

After we produce some language using the acquiredsystem, we sometimes inspect it and use our learnedsystem to correct errors. This can happen internallybefore we actually speak or write, or as a self-correctionafter we produce the utterance or written text.

Another position (McLaughlin 1987) held that learningan additional language is a complex, cognitive processsimilar to any other human learning (cooking, playingchess, riding a bike, thinking mathematically, knowinghistory); as such, it involves great amounts ofexperience aided by attention and memory and it mustinclude the development of sufficient declarativeknowledge about the language and sufficient deliberatepractice to eventually support fully automatic use oflanguage.

• A cognitive interactionist prism (Larsen-Freeman andLong 1991) was strongly influenced by Swisspsychologist Jean Piaget and easily accommodatedwithin it the interlanguage research tradition as well asthe skills acquisition theory.

• It called for the examination of L2 acquisition as the sumcontributions of learner-internal factors, such asattention and memory, and learner external factors, suchas the interactions offered to learners in the targetlanguage and the quality of any formal instruction theymight seek.

• a formal linguistic SLA prism (Hawkins 2001; White1989) was strongly influenced by US linguist NoamChomsky and flourished out of the strides made by thislinguistic theory during the late 1980s.

• This research program sought to tease out the degree towhich Universal Grammar knowledge, knowledgestemming from the first language, or a combination ofthe two, guided the construction of mental L2 grammars.

At the heart of the figure is the individualstudent going through the process ofacquiring a second language at school.

Central to that student’s acquisition oflanguage are all of the surrounding socialand cultural processes occurring througheveryday life within the student’s past,present, and future, in all contexts-home,school, community, and the broadersociety.

Sociocultural processes may includeindividual student variables such as self-esteem, anxiety, or other affective factors.

At school the instructional environment in aclassroom or administrative program structuresmay create social and psychological distancebetween groups.

Community or regional social patterns such asprejudice and discrimination expressed towardsgroups or individuals in personal and professionalcontexts can influence students’ achievement inschool, as well as societal patterns such as thesubordinate status of a minority group oraccuturation vs. assimilation forces.

These factors can strongly influence the student’sresponse to a new language, affecting theprocess positively only when the student is in asocioculturally supportive environment.

1. Age: what are the effects of an early or a late start?.

2. Crosslinguistic influences stemming from already known

languages

3. Environment and cognition: what are their contributions

to additional language learning?

4. Three approaches to explaining variability of L2 learning

across individuals

5. The role of instruction in SLA

1) Age: what are the effects of an early or a late start?. No researcher denies that starting age greatly affects the

eventual success of additional language learning. it is an empirically established fact that people who begin

learning an additional language by naturalistic immersionvery early in life tend to attain high levels of linguisticcompetence, often (but not always) similar to others whobegin learning the same language at birth.

1) Age: what are the effects of an early or a late start?. critical period hypothesis: the belief that the explanation is

biological, in that they posit a maturational, time-lockedschedule after which it is no longer possible to learn alanguage in exactly the same ways and to exactly thesame high degrees of competence as any individual doesbetween birth and age three or four.

1) Age: what are the effects of an early or a late start?. non-biological reasons for the attested age effects, all of which are

related to the many differences in experience (linguistic andnonlinguistic) between infants and adults.

For one, it may be that a later start leads to differential resultsbecause one or more other languages have been learned so wellalready

It may also be that the diverging linguistic competencies we observeat increasingly older starting ages are reflective of the varied social,educational, and emotional complications as well as the varieddemands on time and pursuits that come with adult life, compared tothe more uniform and restricted lives that infants and toddlers leadbefore they enter school.

2) Crosslinguistic influences stemming from alreadyknown languages

how previously known languages, and particularly the mother

tongue, influence the process of learning an additional language.

learners rely on their first language and on other languages they

know in order to accomplish something that is as yet unknown to

them in the second language.

2) Crosslinguistic influences stemming from alreadyknown languages

Crosslinguistic phenomena can slow down the pace of learning in cases of language

areas where negative transfer occurs, but also accelerate learning and facilitate

development in many areas where positive transfer occurs (e.g. for language pairs

that are typologically or genetically related and whose lexicons contain many helpful

cognates, as in Spanish-English creatividad = creativity).

Second, similarities in a given language pair can often lead to greater learning

difficulties than differences do (e.g. in the case of false friends, as when assuming

that the words actualmente in Spanish and actually in English mean the same thing).

A third well-attested finding is that crosslinguistic influences are not linearly related to

proficiency; instead, different areas of the languages of the individual can result in

interactions at some levels of proficiency and not others.

3) Environment and cognition: what are their

contributions to additional language learning?

o linguistically mature interlocutors can facilitate additional

language learning by rewording their messages through

simplifications and elaborations, by asking for

clarifications and expansions, and by using language

that is appropriate, interesting, and yet slightly above the

level of their interlocutors

3) Environment and cognition: what are their

contributions to additional language learning?

o many additional language learners are actively involved

in their own learning processes, both regulating

challenges and maximizing learning opportunities as

they seek environmental encounters

3) Environment and cognition: what are their

contributions to additional language learning?o much of a new language is learned via implicit attentional processes

of extraction of meaning-form correspondences and their associated

frequencies and distributions of occurrence

o There is already firm empirical support, for example, that language

features that are highly frequent in the input are acquired earlier by

L2 learners, provided that they are also phonologically salient and

semantically prototypical

4) Three approaches to explaining variability of L2

learning across individuals

1. individual differences research

2. socio-dynamic perspective

3. qualitative, sociocultural, and critical perspective

4) Three approaches to explaining variability of L2

learning across individuals

1. individual differences research

• This research is quantitative and correlational, and it assumes

multiple causal variables interacting and contributing together to

explaining variation systematically.

• We know from SLA research on individual differences that people

differ in how much of a gift they have for learning foreign languages

and that this natural ability can be measured with precision via

language aptitude tests.

4) Three approaches to explaining variability of L2

learning across individuals

2. socio-dynamic perspective

• in the socio-dynamic approach all research is made to

be centrally and primarily about variability.

• variability is thought to be an inherent property of the

system under investigation and increased variability is

interpreted as a precursor for some important change in

the system as well.

4) Three approaches to explaining variability of L2

learning across individuals

3. qualitative, sociocultural, and critical perspective

• constructs such as motivation, aptitude, and other individual

differences are reconceptualized as stemming from the interplay

between people’s understanding of themselves in the world and the

constraints, material and symbolic, that their worlds afford them.

• These understandings are dialectically shaped by the hopes and

aspirations of individuals and by the power structures of the societal

milieus that they inhabit.

The role of instruction in SLA

best language teaching practices have been sought by

researchers who specialize in classroom SLA or

instructed SLA

investigating theoretical questions, of which two seem

particularly salient: the integration of form and meaning

and the gauging of ideal degrees of explicitness in

instructional options.

First, more SLA researchers are becoming interested in not only the

areas of language traditionally investigated the most (grammar,

lexis, and phonology, and to a lesser extent pragmatics) but also in

novel areas such as L2 gestures, conceptual structures, literacy,

discursive practices, and identities

Second, we are likely to see more in-depth investigation of the

multiple directions in which all the languages known by an individual

interact, for example, as seen in transfer from the L2 to the first

language or from the L2 to a third language

Third, more SLA researchers will hopefully explore the actual

empirical consequences of acknowledging that additional language

learning is fundamentally about learning to become a bilingual or a

multilingual and, therefore, about developing multicompetence

Finally, we are likely to see an expansion of the learner populations

studied by SLA researchers, a trend that has already begun, with

some researchers representing a variety of theoretical standpoints

currently investigating additional language acquisition by younger

children, heritage learners, and youth with low alphabetic print

literacy.

38