Archive for November 2013

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9. Instruction and L2 Acquisition


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Some researchers have studied what impact teaching has on L2 learning. There are three branches of this research. The first concerns whether teaching learners grammar has any effect on their interlanguage development. The second draws on the research into individual learner differences. The third branch looks at strategy training.

Form-focused instruction
Traditionally, language pedagogy has emphasized form-focused instruction. More recently, however, language pedagogy has emphasized the need to provide learners with real communicative experiences. Communicative Language Teaching is premised on the assumption that learners do not need to be taught grammar before they can communicate but will acquire it naturally as part of the process of learning to communicate. In some versions of CLT, then, there is no place at all for the direct teaching grammar.

1.    Does form-focused instruction work?

One way in which we might investigate whether formal instruction has any effect on interlanguage is to compare the development of untutored and tutored learners. Teresa Pica found that instruction had had little overall effect on acquisition. She suggests that the effects of the instruction may depend on the target structure that is being taught. If the structure is formally simple and manifest a straightforward form-function relationship instruction may lead to improve accuracy. If the structure is formally simple and silent but is functionally fairly complex instruction may help learners to learn the form but not its use so learners end up making a lot of errors.  If a structure lacks saliency and is functionally very complex instruction has no effect at all. Instruction then may be effective in teaching items but not effective in teaching systems, particularly when these are complex. There are strong theoretical grounds for believing that instruction will not have any long lasting effect on the way in which learners construct their interlanguage systems. This claim can be tested by comparing untutored and tutored learners. The result suggested that the instruction had had no effect on the processing strategies involved in the acquisition of these word-order rules. However, the tutored learners proceeded through the syllabus rapidly than the untutored learners, and were more likely to reach the final stage
2. Teachability hypothesis: This hypothesis predicts that instruction can only promote language acquisition if the interlanguage is close to the point when the structure to be taught is acquired in the natural setting. There is no ample evidence that the effects of form focused instruction are not restricted to careful language use but are also evident in free communication.
3.    What kind of form-focused instruction works best?
An experimental study carried out by Phill Van Patten and Teresa Cadierno suggests that form-focused instruction that emphasizes input processing may be very effective. It also supports theories of L2 acquisition that emphasize the role of conscious noticing in input, input based instruction may work because it induces noticing in learners. The second issue, concerns consciousness-raising—attempts to make learners aware of the existence of specific linguistic features in the target language. This can be done by supplying the learner with positive evidence or negative evidence. Martha Trahey and Lydia White’s study also suggests that positive evidence is not sufficient to reset a parameter and, perhaps, that Universal Grammar is not available to L2 adult-learners.
Learner-instruction matching
A distinct possibility, however, is that the same instructional option is not equally effective for all L2 learners. Individual differences to do with such factors as learning style and language aptitude are likely to influence which options work best. It is obviously important to take individual differences into account when investigating the effects of instruction. For example, even if it is eventually shown that input-based instruction works better overall than production-based instruction, it does not follow that this will be true for all learners.
Strategy training
Teaching learners specific grammatical structures constitutes an attempt to intervene directly in interlanguage development. An alternative approach is to intervene more indirectly by identifying strategies that are likely to promote acquisition and providing training in them. The idea of strategy training is attractive because it provides a way of helping learners to become autonomous. The main problem is that not enough is known about which strategies and which combinations of strategies work best for L2 acquisition.
 Questions:
  1. Why do some instruction have effects for long lasting but the others are durable?   
  2. Please could you explain more clearly; what do you know about teachability hypothesis byPienemann?


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8. Individual Differences in L2 Acquisition


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SLA acknowledges that there are individual differences in L2 acquisition. Social factors to do with the context of learning have an effect of how successful individual L2 learners are, and possibly on how interlanguage developed as well. Affective factors and learners’ preferred ways of learning are the example of psychological dimensions of difference. Now, we will focus on two of the major dimensions—language aptitude and motivation—and also explore how differences in learning strategies can affect development.

Language Aptitude
Language aptitude is a natural ability that is possessed by learners for learning an L2. Learners who score highly on language aptitude tests typically learn rapidly and achieve higher levels of L2 proficiency than learners who obtain low scores. According John Carroll, there are four components of language aptitude:
  1. Phonemic coding ability: the ability to identify the sounds of a foreign language and to handle sound-symbol relationship. (i.e. to identify the sound which ‘th’ stands for).
  2. Grammatical sensitivity: the ability to recognize the grammatical functions of words in sentences (i.e. to recognize the subject, predicator, or object of sentence)
  3. Inductive language learning ability: the ability to identify patterns of correspondence and relations between form and meaning (i.e. to recognize the relation between word “to” and the meaning as “direction”, and “at” which means “location”)
  4. Rote learning ability: the ability to form and remember associations between stimuli. This is believed to be important in vocabulary learning.
Motivation
Motivation involves the attitude and affective states that influence the degree of effort that learners make to learn an L2. It can result from learning as well as cause it. Moreover, it is dynamic in nature, and it is not something that varies from one moment to the next depending on the learning context or task. There are various kinds of motivation. Those are:
  1. Instrumental motivation: Learners may make efforts to learn an L2 for some functional reasons: to pass an examination, to get a better job, or to get a place at university.
  2. Integrative motivation: Learners learn L2 because they are interested in the  people and culture represented by the target language group.
  3. Resultative motivation: Learners may learn L2 because they motivate from the success of other people. So, motivation is the cause of L2 achievement.
  4. Intrinsic motivation: The motivation involves the arousal and maintenance of curiosity and can ebb and flow as a result of such factors as learners’ particular interests and the extent to which they feel personally involved in learning activities.
Learning Strategies
Learning strategies are the particular approaches or techniques that learners employ to try to learn an L2. They can be behavioral (i.e. repeating new word to remember it), or they can be mental (i.e. using the linguistic or situational context to infer the meaning of a new word).
There are different kinds of learning strategies which have been identified. Those are:
  1. Cognitive strategies: These strategies are involved in the analysis, synthesis, or transformation of learning materials. An example is recombination.
  2. Metacognitive strategies: These strategies are involved in planning, monitoring, and evaluating learning. An example is selective attention.
  3. Social/affective strategies: These strategies concern the ways in which learners choose to interact with other speakers. An example is questioning for clarification.
Some studies show that successful learners use more strategies than unsuccessful learners. They have also shown that different strategies are related to different aspects of L2 learning. Thus, strategies that involve formal practice contribute to the development of linguistic competence whereas strategies involving functional practice aid to development of communication skill.

Questions:
  1. Please could you suggest other learning strategies that can be used for L2 learners?
  2. Why does an instrumental motivation seem to be the major force determining success in L2 learning?


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7. Linguistic Aspects of Interlanguage


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Typological universals: relative clauses
Languages vary in whether they have relative clause structures. Some languages have them, while other languages do not. The linguistic difference influences the ease with which learners are able to learn relative clauses. Learners whose L1 includes relative clauses find them easier to learn than learners whose L1 does not, and they are less likely to avoid learning them. A hierarchy of relativization, known as the accessibility hierarchy serves an example of how SLA and linguistics can assist each other. On the one hand, linguistic facts can be used to explain and even predict acquisition. On the other hand, the result of empirical studies of L2 acquisition can be used to refine our understanding of linguistic facts.

Universal Grammar
Noam Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar argues that language is governed by a set of highly abstract principles that provide parameters which are given particular settings in different languages. The question of whether learners whose L1 permits both local and long-distance binding of reflexives can learn that a language like English permits only local binding may seem a rather trivial matter. In fact, though it concerns an issue of considerable theoretical importance-the extent to which a language other than our mother tongue is fully learnable.

Learnability
Chomsky has claimed that children learning their L1 must rely innate knowledge of language because otherwise the task facing them is an impossible one. His argument is that the input to which children are exposed is insufficient to enable them to discover the rules of the language they are trying to learn (poverty of the stimulus). The input consists not only positive evidence (it provides information only about what is grammatical in the language), because learners can never be sure they will not hear sentence where the adverb is between the verb and direct object, but also negative evidence (input that provides direct evidence of what is ungrammatical in a language) that would make it possible for children to find out that sentences like the one above are ungrammatical.

The Critical Period Hypothesis
The critical period hypothesis states that there is a period during which language acquisition is easy and complete (native-speaker ability is achieved) and beyond which it is difficult and typically incomplete. It was grounded in research which showed that people who lost their linguistic capabilities, for example as a result of an accident, were able to regain them before puberty but were unable to do so afterwards.

Access to UG
  1. Complete access: It is argued that learners begin with the parameter settings of their L1 but subsequently learn to switch to the L2 parameter settings.
  2. No access: It is argued that Universal Grammar is not available to adult L2 learners. They rely on general learning strategies.
  3. Partial access: It is argued that learners have access to parts of Universal Grammar but not others. L2 acquisition is partly regulated by Universal Grammar and partly by general learning strategies.
  4. Dual access: It is argued that adult L2 learners make use of both Universal Grammar and general learning strategies (blocking the operation of Universal Grammar, causing learners to produce ‘impossible’ errors and failing to achieve full competence).    

Markedness
Markedness refers to the general idea that some structures are more ‘natural’ or ‘basic’ than other structures. In typological linguistics, unmarked structures are those that are common in the world’s languages. In Chomskyan linguistics, unmarked structures are those that are governed by Universal Grammar and which, therefore require only minimal evidence for acquisition. Marked structures are those that lie outside Universal Grammar.

Cognitive Versus Linguistic Explanation

The answer whether linguistic universals and markedness are seen as exerting a direct effect on L2 acquisition or whether they are seen as having only an indirect effect, mediated by psycholinguistic mechanism of the kind considered earlier. In short, there is no consensus on whether L2 acquisition is to be explained in terms of a distinct and innate language faculty or in terms of general cognitive abilities issue. It should be noted however that Universal Grammar does not claim to account for the whole of a language or even the whole of the grammar of a language.

Questions:
  1. What can you infer from this statement ‘The accessibility hierarchy serves as an example of how SLA and linguistics can assist each other’?
  2. What is substantively meant by markedness?


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6. Psycholinguistic Aspects of Interlanguage


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Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental structures and processes involved in the acquisition and use of language.
 
L1 Transfer
L1 transfer refers to the influence that the learner’s L1 exerts over the acquisition of an L2. This influence is apparent in a number of ways. First, the learner’s L1 is one of the sources of error in learner language, negative transfer. However, in some cases, the learner’s L1 can facilitate L2 acquisition, positive transfer. L1 transfer can also result in avoidance (learners make fewer errors in relative clauses). Finally, L1 transfer may be reflected in the overuse of some forms. Behaviourist theories cannot account for L2 acquisition. This led to two developments. The first development sought to play down the role of L1 transfer. The second development was to reconceptualize transfer within a cognitive framework (This was begun by Larry Selinker). The learner’s stage of development has also been found to influence L1 transfer. This is clearly evident in the way learners acquire speech acts like request, apologies, and refusals. When language transfer takes place there is usually no loss of L1 knowledge. A better term for referring to the effects of the L1 might be ‘cross-linguistic influence’.

The Role of Consciousness in L2 Acquisition
There are two opposing positions on the role of consciousness in L2 acquisition. First, Stephen Krashen has argued the need to distinguish ‘acquired’ L2 knowledge and ‘learned’ L2 language. He claims that the former is developed subconsciously through comprehending input while communicating, while the latter is developed consciously through deliberate of the L2. Second, Richard Schmidt has pointed out that the term ‘consciousness’ is often used very loosely in SLA and argues that there is a need to standardize the concepts that underlie its use. For example, he distinguishes between consciousness as ‘intentionally’ (learner makes a conscious and deliberate decision to learn some L2 knowledge) and consciousness as ‘attention’. Schmidt argues that learning cannot take place without noticing (the process of attending consciously to linguistic features in the input). Explicit knowledge may aid learners in developing implicit knowledge in a number of ways. First, a direct interface may occur. Second, explicit knowledge may facilitate the process by which learners attend to features in the input. Third, explicit knowledge may help learners to move from intake to acquisition by helping them to notice the gap between what they have observed in the input ant the current state of their interlanguage as manifested in their own input.

Processing Operations

1.  Operating Principles
Dan Slobin has argued about operating principles, the identification of a number of general strategies which children use to extract and segment linguistic information from the language they hear. Operating principles provide a simple and attractive way of accounting for the properties of interlanguage.
2. Processing Constrains
Multidimensional model proposed that some grammatical features can be acquired at any stage of development. Thus, it distinguishes a developmental and a variational axis. Progress along one axis is independent of progress along the other axis. To account for progress along it,a number of processing constrains have been proposed. It is possible for a learner to move from one stage to another. 

Communication strategies
If learners do not know a word in the target language they may ‘borrow’ a word from their L1 or use another target-language word that is approximate in meaning, or try to paraphrase the meaning of the word, or even construct an entire new word. As Selinker has pointed out, communication strategies constitute one of the processes responsible for learner errors. We might expect that the choice of communication strategies will reflect the learner’s stage of development.

The Role of Consciousness in L2 Acquisition
There are two radically different types of apparatus have been proposed.
1. Serial Processing
Information is processed in a series of sequential steps and results in the representation         of  what has been learned as some kind of ‘rule’ or ‘strategy’.
2. Parallel Distributed Processing
This credits the learner with the ability to perform a number of mental tasks at the same time. Models based on it reject the whole notion of ‘rule’.

Questions:
  1. What can you explain about ‘cross-linguistic influence’?
  2. What is the difference between implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge?


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