Exploring Second Language Acquisition: Factors and Processes

1. Freeman: Staking out territory • Since its emergence some 42 years ago, the field of second language acquisition research has focused on : the nature of the language acquisition process and the factors which affect language learners.

2. A broadening perspective of process • Before the emergence of SLA as a field, researchers conducted contrastive analyses between the learners’ L1 and L2 to anticipate areas of divergence which were likely to cause the learners difficulty and those of convergence where one could expect positive transfer. • (what’s significance of italicized portion?)

3. Ironically, it was learners’ errors, so threatening to behaviorists, which were to lead to the shift in awareness that spawned the SLA field. Overgeneralization errors (*J eated it) typical of first language acquirers were discovered in the oral production of L2 learners. Since such errors could not have resulted from imitation of target language (TL) speech, the errors were taken as support for Chomsky’s proposal that the acquisition process was essentially one of rule formation, not habit formation.

4. EA incomplete because… a focus on errors neglected learners’ actual successes. In addition, since learners could sometimes avoid making errors in the L2 by not attempting to produce difficult structures, error analyses did not even account for all sources of learner difficulty (Schachter, 1974).

5. Analysis of speech data indicated… • learners of all types passed through common developmental stages in their acquisition of certain structures. • Since the intermediate stages in the developmental sequences looked like neither the Li nor L2, they reinforced the observation that learners were not merely reshaping their Lis to conform to the L2s, but learners were creatively constructing the L2. Does this mean they did not reshape their L1 at all?

6. Explain this • often there was backsliding or forgetting when new forms were introduced, resulting in a learning curve that was more U-shaped than smoothly ascending (Kellerman, 1985).

7. Sometimes, too, not all stages in a sequence were traversed, leading to arrested development or fossilized forms. Moreover, learners were freely making use not only of rule-governed utterances, but also of rote-learned formulaic utterances, both routines and patterns (ilakuta, 1976), leading some investigators to suggest that rule-governed language developed from formulaic speech, which was later analyzed by the learner (Wong Fillmore, 1976).

8. Recognition of the need to examine not only the learner’s performance hut also the input to the learner, introduced a whole new area of inquiry, namely discourse analysis (Larsen-Freeman, 1980). Hatch has been the SLA researcher who has most promoted the value of examining what learners could be learning when engaged in collaborative discourse. For Hatch, a significant vehicle for acquisition is interaction with other speakers.

9. Narrowing the perspective: language Transfer • the contrastive analysis hypothesis, which stated that those areas of the TL which were most dissimilar to the learners’ Li would cause the most difficulty, was refuted by research that indicated that it was often the similarities between the two languages which caused confusion.

10. A second question concerning transfer, which stimulated much research during the decade, was precisely what effect transfer had on learners’ ILs. We have already seen how it was responsible for errors as well as positive transfer and underproduction or avoidance (explain and discuss)

11. Transfer manifests itself • 1. Overproduction of a particular TL form (Schachter & Rutherford, 1979) • 2. Inhibiting or accelerating passage through a developmental sequence (Zobl, 1982) • 3. Constraining the nature of hypotheses that language learners make (Schachter, 1983) • 4. Prolonging the use of a developmental form when it is similar to an Li structure (potentially resulting in fossilization) (Zobl, 1983) • 5. Substitution (use of Li form in the L2) (Odlin, 1989) • 6. Hypercorrection (overreaction to a particular influence from the Li) (Odlin, 1989) • Clearly, transfer is a much more pervasive phenomenon in SLA than was once thought. (examples and discussion)

12. Input • Research in the area of input quality searched for a link between certain characteristics of the input (perceptual saliency, frequency of occurrence, syntactic complexity, semantic complexity, instructional sequence) and some aspect of the learners’ output. Again, although not without challenge, a recurring finding was the correlation between the frequency of certain forms in the input and their appearance in learners’ ILs.

13. What are the values implications of the following input: • Foreigner talk (FT) • Teacher Talk (TT)

14. Variation • When learners are carefully attending to form, the style they exhibit is at the other end of the continuum This style is more permeable i.e., more open to influence from other languages, and is therefore the most variable, or least systematic (But see Sato, 1985.) • Relevance to teaching?

15. Additional explanations • 1. Learners’ monitoring their performance (Krashen 1977) • 2. Sociolinguistic factors (Beebe, 1980) • 3. Adjustment of one’s speech towards one’s interlocutor (convergence) or away from one’s interlocutor (divergence) (Beebe & Zuengler, 1983) • 4. Linguistic or situational context of use (Ellis, 1985) • 5. Discourse domains (Selinker & Douglas, 1985) • 6. The amount of planning time learners have (Crookes, 1989) • 7. A combination of factors: stage of acquisition, linguistic environment, communicative redundancy (Young, 1988) • 8. Learners’ use of other-regulated or self-regulating speech (Lantolf & Ahmed, 1989) • What seems to be accepted at the moment is that what appears at first to be random variation can be accounted for by variable rules.

16. Learning process explanation • Following Ellis, Larsen_Freeman and Long, the author, adopts a threefold classification schema of theoretical perspectives in the SLA field: • nativist (learning depends upon a significant, specialized innate capacity for language acquisition), • behaviorist/environmentalist (the learner’s experience is more important than innate capacity), and • interactionist (both internal and external processes are responsible).

17. Nativist Universal Grammar • major assumption Chomsky makes is that the linguistic input children acquiring their first language underdetermines or insufficient to account for language acquisition. • Children do not receive negative evidence (they are not told that a given utterance is ungrammatical) and thus must learn from the positive evidence instantiated in the input alone. Since the input is supposedly inadequate, it is assumed that the children possess an innate UG which constrains their grammatical development.

18. Environmentalist: Connectionism/Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) • PDP theorists assume no innate endowment. Learning is held to consist of the strengthening of connections in complex neural networks. The strength of their connections or their weight is determined by the frequency of patterns in the input.

19. PDP continued • a computer simulation showed a machine can generalize based on input and output, but some computer output isn’t plausible from a human standpoint, “One possibility is that L2 learning may be associative in the connectionist sense, whereas L1 acquisition may be more rule driven in the generative sense” (Sokolik, 1989, p. 358).

20. Interactionist: Variable Competence Model • Interlanguage data, Tarone (1983) argued, contradict what is called the “homogeneous competence” model of Chomsky, which assumes that there is a homogeneous competence of an ideal speaker-learner available for inspection through intuitional data. Instead, Tarone interprets the IL data to suggest that learners develop heterogeneous capability which is systematic and which is composed of a range of styles, and Tarone maintains that the proper data for the study of this capability is natural speech.

21. Learner description • Age • Aptitude • Social-Psychological Factors: Attitude and motivation. • Personality • Cognitive style • Learning strategies

22. Learner factors: Explanation • Acculturalization/ pidginization model • Socioeducational model

23. Acculturalization/ pidginization model • Social distance comprises eight group-level phenomena: social dominance, integration patterns, enclosure, cohesiveness, size, cultural congruence, attitudes, and intended length of residence. • Psychological distance is a construct involving four factors operating at the level of the individual: language shock, culture shock, motivation, and ego permeability.

24. Socioeducational model • “The acquisition of a language involves social adjustment. . . . Languages are acquired in order to facilitate communication, either active or passive, with some cultural community… Emotional adjustments are involved and these are socially based” (p. 125). • Like the other models examined here, the socioeducational model was not intended to explain all of second language learning. It purports to account for a significant and meaningful proportion of the variance in second language achievement.

25. Relevance to teachers • 1. The learning/acquisition process is complex (This is why good language teachers are and always have been eclectic (p. 383). • 2. The process is gradual.. A conservative estimate of the number of hours young first language learners spend “acquiring” their first language is 12,000-15,000 (Lightbown, 1985); our expectations of second language learning should be realistic. • 3. The process is nonlinear. Learners do not tackle structures one at a time, first mastering one and then turning to another. Even when learners appear to have mastered a particular form, it is not uncommon to find backsliding

26. Relevance continued • 4. The process is dynamic. As Gleick (1987) put it: “The act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules” (quoted in Diller, 1990, p. 238). Teachers should know that what works for learners at one level of proficiency may not do so when learners are at a later stage of proficiency. • 5. Learners learn when they are ready to do so. What evidence exists suggests that learners will only acquire that for which they are prepared. • 6. Learners rely on the knowledge and experience they have Second language learners are active participants in the learning process.

27. Relevance continued • 7. It is not clear from research findings what the role of negative evidence is in helping learners to reject erroneous hypotheses they are currently entertaining (Carroll & Swain, 1991) • 8. For most adult learners, complete mastery of the L2 may be impossible.Learners can get very good; however, for most, some aspects of their IL will likely fossilize, and for (nearly all?), there appears to be a physiologically determine critical period for pronunciation • 9. There is tremendous individual variation among language learners. • 10. Learning a language is a social phenomenon. Most learners acquire a second language in order to communicate with members of the TL group or to participate in their institutions.