Freeman: Staking out territory

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.
• (whats 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 Chomskys
  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
  learners 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 ones speech towards ones
  interlocutor (convergence) or away from ones
  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.

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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 learners
  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 isnt 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.