SLA Topics Vivian
Cook
Some
KEY issues for SLA RESEARCH
Vivian
Cook, Newcastle University
draft of paper in Luciana Pedrazzini, Andrea Nava (eds.) Learning and Teaching English: Insights from Research, Polimetrica Publisher, Italy (2012)
[Sorry this still won't behave on the page!]
There have always been those with a broad interest in how people acquire a second language (L2) whether Aristotle or Roger Bacon (Thomas, 1998). With the advent of academic psychology and linguistics, there came a certain amount of curiosity about second language acquisition (SLA) (Thorndike, 1928; Cheydleur, 1932); some linguists kept diaries of bilingual language acquisition (Leopold, 1939); others were interested in multilingualism and bilingualism, particularly in the USA (Weinreich, 1953; Fishman, 1966). Methods for teaching second languages such as Lado (1965) were bolstered with ideas from contemporary language learning theories usually derived from general psychological theories such as Skinner (1957) rather than those specifically about either second language learning or language acquisition in general. In the 1960s these interests from psychology, linguistics and language teaching came together to found a specific discipline of SLA research. For some fifty years this has set itself up as an independent discipline with its own theories and issues. This has not, however, stopped people in other disciplines from researching second language acquisition with little or no reference to the discipline of SLA research itself, whether neurolinguists (Fabbro, 1999), psychologists (Beauvillain & Grainger, 1987), or others.
The banner which the new SLA research discipline raised had on it the word interlanguage, a term coined by Selinker (1972); 'what gave SLA its excitement was the concept of interlanguage' (Davies, Criper & Howatt, 1984, p.xii). Since the early 1960s, first language (L1) acquisition researchers such as McNeill (1966) had insisted that the child should be treated as having a different grammar from the adult rather than having a defective adult grammar. A two-year-olds sentence such as Baby highchair should not be interpreted as a crude version of the adult sentence The baby is in the highchair but as a childs sentence in its own right. The analysts task was not to measure the mistakes in the childs sentence against the rules of adult grammar, e.g. the missing articles, preposition and copula in Baby highchair, but to see how the rules of the childs grammar worked as a combination of pivot and open words (Braine, 1963).
This independent grammar assumption (Cook, 1993) was seized on by applied linguists working with language teaching, whether as transitional competence (Corder, 1971) or 'approximative system' (Nemser, 1971). The accepted term, however, became interlanguage, leading to journals such as Interlanguage Studies Bulletin Utrecht, later Second Language Research. Interlanguage became the almost theory-neutral term for the system of implicit L2 knowledge that the learner develops and systematically amends over time (Ellis, 1994, 354).
Second language learners are then developing an interlanguage of their own that draws not only on the first language they already know and on the second language they are learning but also on other elements such as the language provided by their teachers and their own language learning strategies. L2 learners interlanguage thus has unique qualities of its own rather than being a deficient version of the target language; it is no more defective than a two-year-olds grammar is defective but has a logic of its own.
A fine example of interlanguage was the discovery of a basic stage of grammar common to adult L2 learners (Klein & Perdue, 1997). Regardless of which first and second languages are involved, L2 learners share a simple grammar with three grammatical rules, namely that a sentence may consist of:
- a Noun Phrase (NP) followed by a Verb, optionally followed by another Noun Phrase, girl take bread
- a Noun Phrase followed by a copula and another Noun Phrase or an adjective, its bread
- a Verb followed by a Noun Phrase, pinching its
L2 learners create an interlanguage with its own distinctive characteristics, resembling neither the target nor the first language.
Without the concept of interlanguage, most SLA research would cease to exist; it provides a unique subject matter for the discipline that is not the main focus of other disciplines; the aim of SLA research is to discover why ... adults attain the state they do (Klein & Perdue, 1992, 334). In line with the independent grammar assumption, the learner is not a defective native speaker but something unique, sui generis; the implicit aim of research is to discover what the L2 learners language is like and how it is developing, not to see how L2 learners fall short of monolingual native speakers.
Yet in practice this principle has not been thoroughly assimilated by SLA researchers, as seen in a typical quotation: Relative to native speaker's linguistic competence, learners' interlanguage is deficient by definition (Kasper & Kellerman, 1997, 5). Learners are still treated as wannabe native speakers. The question of whether age affects success in L2 learning for example is interpreted as whether older L2 learners speak less like native speakers than younger L2 learners. SLA research methods have implicitly treated L2 learners as defective by using monolingual native speakers as the yardstick for comparison. Grammaticality judgments that ask for L2 users to decide whether a sentence is grammatical are usually set against those of monolingual native speakers (Hawkins & Chen, 1997); the obligatory occurrences technique that looks for occasions when certain words or structures must be used (Pienemann, 1998) usually define them in terms of when monolingual native speakers use them; and many others (Cook, 1997).
The starting point for SLA research is that L2 learners are not, and can never be, monolingual native speakers by definition. Without this assumption, SLA research becomes an ancillary study of why L2 users fail to become native speakers and at best provides a footnote to first language acquisition by detailing the L2 problems and pitfalls. If L2 users are unique specimens, SLA research can take on a true independence, looking at their distinctive qualities in their own right independent of monolinguals. SLA research deals with one way in which humans learn language, part of a greater discipline of language acquisition that encompasses L1 and L2 acquisition. Indeed monolingual L1 acquisition can be seen as an aberration that it only occurs when children are deprived of exposure to a second language (Cook, 2009).
1. Are people who know two languages special?
Since 1990 the multi-competence perspective has tried to enumerate the diverse ways in which L2 users differ from monolingual native speakers (Cook, 1993; Cook, 2010).
L2 users have different ways of thinking
The relationship between language and cognition has become a vital new area of research. During the 1930s Whorf put forward the linguistic relativity principle that a persons way of seeing the world is relative to the language they speak (Whorf, 1941/1956). This was mostly interpreted as a claim that language actually determines thinking, named the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis. While actively researched in the 1950s (Ervin-Tripp, 2011), this became largely discredited. In the 1990s the language and cognition link was revitalised by Lucy (1992) about differing ways of categorising the world, Levinson (1996) about differing concepts of direction and Roberson et al (1999) about varying colour perception, using a new set of ideas and methods. It became apparent that certain ways of thinking go with particular languages, even if language does not necessarily cause or determine the way of thinking.
So what happens to the thinking of people who know more than one language? Here are some of the possibilities:
L2 users use language in different ways
If your standard or norm is how a
monolingual native speaker communicates with other monolingual native speakers
then you are bound to find non-native speakers less effective in their second language.
On the one hand this assumption ignores the L2 uses that the person does not
have in their L1;
students studying through the medium of a second language may be able do things they
cannot do in the first language write essays and reports for example. On the
other hand it ignores the things that only L2 users can do. The main examples of
distinctive L2 use are codeswitching
in which the speaker alternates between two languages, translation in which the speaker
turns utterances in one language into a second, and the
ability to communicate with other L2 users. These are some of the
unique things that L2 users can do; while they ultimately lead to specialist
professions such as simultaneous interpreting, they are also probably present in
the everyday lives of most bilinguals, for example young bilingual children
acting as interpreters when their parents see a
doctor. The skills of codeswitching have been well-documented, for example
through the 4M model (Myers-Scotton, 2006) which sees codeswitching broadly as
relying on a matrix language for the structure of the sentence and an embedded
language for the content words.
L2 users have an increased awareness of language itself
Time
and again research has shown that in some sense L2 users are more aware of the
nature of language
itself than monolinguals. Young children who learn another language
are more conscious of the arbitrariness of language, for example that small
words like train
may refer to long things while long words like caterpillar
may refer to short things (Bialystok, 2001). One intriguing aspect concerns
theory of mind the ability to see the others point of view: bilingual children acquire
this ability slightly earlier than monolingual children (Goetz,
2003); children who
were bilingual in a sign language and a spoken language are better at theory of mind
than monolingual children (Meristo
et al., 2007).
L2
users have a slightly different knowledge of their first language
Everyday experience shows that your L1 exerts a strong influence on your L2. Only
recently have people come to see that the L2 also affects your knowledge
and use of your L1
(Cook, 2003). A simple example reported by many L2 users concerns the subject of
the sentence. In pro-drop languages such as Italian, sentences need not have a
subject Sono di Milano; in
non-pro-drop languages like English, they do I am from Milan. Many overseas students with pro-drop L1s coming to
England have reported problems in speaking their first language when they go
home, such as their parents telling them they sound English because they use too
many subjects. Research with Japanese users of English shows that the first
language of more advanced L2 users is affected by English in that they find the
presence of subjects more natural (Cook, Kasai & Sasaki, 2005). This effect
of the L2 on the L1 has been found in a number of language areas such as
intonation (Mennen, 2004), voice onset time (Zampini & Green, 2001), and
pragmatics
(Pavlenko, 2003 ). A person who speaks another language is no longer a
pure speaker of their first language but speaks a version that has been
affected by the other language or languages they know (Cook, 2003).
L2 users have greater effectiveness in their
first language
Learning another language may also change your ability to communicate in your first language. This might be a general effect of learning any second language or the specific effect of learning a particular language. To take two examples, Hungarian children who had been taught English were better at L1 essay-writing than those who had not met English (Kecskes & Papp, 2000); English children taught Italian for an hour a week were better at reading English (Yelland et al, 1993). Not to mention such bilingual writers as Nabokov, Conrad or Brink. Indeed the claims for a knock-on effect on L1 support the old adage of brain-training often used in England to justify the teaching of Latin.
People
who know more than one language
are distinct from monolingual native speakers in
several ways. Learning a L2 changes people overall in thinking and language knowledge and
use. Learning a L2 is not just adding an extension to
the exterior of your house; it is rebuilding most of the interior walls.
2 What is the best age for
learning a second language?
The
question of the best age for learning
a second
language has aroused many peoples curiosity and has practical concerns
for parents bringing children up bilingually and
for governments deciding the age to start teaching a second
language to children.
Undoubtedly there is a popular belief that young children
are best at L2 learning, shared by many mainstream linguists: It
is a common observation that a young child of immigrant parents may learn
a second
language in the streets, from other children, with amazing rapidity . . . while
the subtleties that become second nature to the child may elude his parents
despite high motivation and continued practice (Chomsky, 1959, 49). But is
there any empirical support for this common observation?
It
looks a simple matter: test some people who start young and some who start old
and see who is better. However, like most academic questions, it turns out to be
almost unanswerable in the form in which it is asked. The answer cannot for
example be assumed to be the same for those acquiring the second
language in natural circumstances and for those being taught
in a classroom; though it may be that situations for natural L2
learning are fairly few in number, those for classroom learners vary according
to the educational system and the language teaching methods involved. Even
the word age is problematic; L2 researchers often use it to refer
to the age of arrival (AoA) in another country, thus confounding age with
immigration, restricting the people studied to immigrants, usually to the USA
far from a random selection of L2 learners (Cook, 1986) and leaving it
uncertain how much L2 teaching or exposure the people had received before
immigrating one reason for going to a specific country may be a familiarity
with the language spoken there. The research design is also highly problematic:
a proper balancing of young and old would also involve them having the same
amounts of L2 exposure (Munoz, 2008); The
crucial comparison is between the language proficiency of
learners of
two age
groups who have learnt the second language for the same period of
time; time
has to be taken into account not only as the age at which learning started, but
also as the duration of learning (Cook, 1986). Comparing childrens
acquisition with that of adults is also fraught with problems, given the many
non-language ways in which children
are developing (Cook, 2010), for example memory capacity and Piagetian stage of development,
and the many differences in their situations and language input.
Underlying much of the discussion is the idea of critical period. The ethologist Konrad Lorenz originally based the idea of critical period on the imprinting behaviour of ducks (Lorenz, 1949); after hatching, ducklings imprint a single person as mother once and for all and cannot do so after this critical period. The idea that there are certain periods of physiological development during which an organism can learn particular behaviour then spread to much study of animal behaviour and was applied to language development by Eric Lenneberg, who suggested the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) that the ability to learn language naturally atrophies after the early teens (Lenneberg, 1967); for example while all babies start by distinguishing pairs of sounds like /ba~da/ by the age of 12 months they are only sensitive to the sound contrasts used in their first language (Werker & Tees, 1984) and cannot distinguish between non-native sounds.
A
common way of expressing the conclusions on age in SLA initiated by Krashen,
Scarcella & Long (1982) is as a set of slightly paradoxical statements, given
in Cook (1986) as:
1.
Older
children are better than younger children at learning a second language
2.
Adults
are better than children at learning a second language
3.
Immigrants
who start learning a second language younger end up better speakers than those
who start older
More
recent research does not seem to have undermined these mixed findings. Given
the same circumstances for acquiring the second
language for the same amount of time, older children are better than younger children, particularly in school. Cenoz
(2003) for
instance
compared Spanish/Basque speaking children
aged
4, 8 and 11 who had learnt English for the same period and found the older children
were better.
Munoz (2008) sums up the current view on classroom acquisition
as supporting the ideas that older learners learn faster than younger ones and
that younger learners only have an advantage when they have more exposure,
particularly in listening comprehension.
If we apply the idea that L2 users are intrinsically different from monolingual native speaker presented earlier to the age issue any conclusions become problematic. The measure of success in age studies is always approximation to monolingual native speakers (Birdsong, 2005); Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson (2003) for instance claim absolute nativelike command of an L2 may in fact never be possible for older learners; Johnson and Newport (1989) find that later age of acquisition determines that one will not become native [-like] or near-native [-like] in a language. The effects of age on second language acquisition are not necessarily established by demonstrating that speakers speak more like or less like monolingual native speakers.
3
How is second language vocabulary acquired?
The
acquisition of vocabulary has
turned out a difficult area to research. It is possible to describe the nature
of the vocabulary that
people have to learn in a first or a second language; it is possible to test how
many words people know in a language;
it is far harder to say how they actually acquire them. This section draws on ideas
that are developed further in Cook (2009).
The nature of vocabulary
It
is conventional to start the discussion of vocabulary acquisition
by describing the sheer complexity of the problem. Most psychologists
and many language teachers for example assume that a word has a single
distinct meaning that bridges the real world and the concept in the human
mind, the relationship called reference diagrammed in Fig 3. In English the word
dog refers to the thing 
, i.e. it links a real dog to
the concept of dog. The relationship always involves the human mind,
whether wanting to talk about a and saying dog
or hearing dog and working
out it means . 
Would
that vocabulary were
so simple! Dog
can refer to people dirty dog, things that fail that
record was a real dog, a constellation in the sky the dog star, an instrument with jaws iron dog, and many more: most
words in English have more than one meaning. The word with
the highest number of distinct meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED,
1996) is set, with no less than 430.
Learning a language means far more than learning one meaning per word. It
involves learning a variety of information about a word, such as: dog is pronounced /d
g/ and written <dog>; it is a noun and occasionally a verb she
dogged his footsteps;
the noun dog is countable and animate
so you can say the dogs died; it
occurs in phrases such
as going to the dogs; and so
on. Multiplied by the thousands of words each of us knows.
But
discrete objects in the world are only one type of word meaning.
Many words refer to abstractions like people
and government, to things we cant see such as air
and truth, or to things that
probably dont exist like unicorns
and Kryptonite. Nouns are only one
type of word and we also need lexical words like verbs fly, adverbs highly and
adjectives red, as well as structure
words like prepositions for and
articles the that have primarily grammatical meanings. According to rough calculations a speaker
of a language knows around 60,000 words and children learn ten of them every
day of their lives up to at least fifteen (Bloom, 2002).
For most linguists the crucial thing is not the word in isolation as studied in psychology experiments but the relationships that words have with each other in the mind. Dog is not cat, i.e. the two words reflect a categorisation of objects in the world and are antonyms: words contrast with other words. Dog is a basic level term included in the superordinate level term animal and itself including subordinate level terms terriers, corgis and sheepdogs: words are structured into levels of categorisation. Dog is associated with other words in the minds, such as cat, collar, bark, leg, Alsation, berry, bite, black, bow, carnivore (Edinburgh Word Association Thesaurus, 2011).
So what happens in a second language? One possibility is seen in Fig. 4 below, using English as L1 and French as L2, though of course it cheats as it uses a picture rather than a real object to paraphrase Magritte Ceci nest pas un chien.
The
thing connects to the L2 word chien as well as to the L1 word dog;
the words link in turn to the same concept of dog. De Groot (2003) calls
the L1 and L2 words dog and chien
the lexical level, the concept of dog the conceptual level. So this is the three-components
two-levels model of L2 lexical representation three components (L1 word,
L2 word, and concept), two levels (lexical and conceptual). The interesting
question is how the two languages interact.
One
possibility is that the object links to the L2 word chien
and then to the concept, the parallel route shown in Fig 4. This is called the
concept mediation model as the link between L2 word and the L1 word is via the
concept. Another possibility seen in Fig 5 is that the learner does not link the
object
to the concept but the word chien to
the word dog at the lexical level: L2
access to the concept is mediated by the L1. This is the word association
model as it links L2 word to L1 word; the route from object to concept has
been diverted via the L1.
Figure 5
These two alternatives hark back to the distinction between compound bilingualism in which the languages are closely tied together in the mind and coordinate bilingualism in which they exist side by side (Weinreich, 1953).
So
the complexity of vocabulary in L2 users is more than doubled. To the vast
number of words with many meanings in the L1 are added the vast numbers of
L2words via direct or the indirect links to the concepts. The L2 user has to
learn all the other attributes of words, for example not just the associations
for dog but also those for chien,
some of which may be similar, some quite different.
The two models vary in how
they relate the two lexicons in the mind. They might be entirely distinct as in
the concept mediation model or they might be inextricably tied together. Some
research indeed shows that it is impossible to switch one language off while you
use another. Spivey and Marian (1999) for example tested peoples eye-movements as they processed
pictures of objects, showing they never switched off either language.
Learning vocabulary
People continue to be
amazed by the sheer size and complexity of the learning task for vocabulary when the number of words that learners acquire is multiplied by the
number of meanings, relationships, associations and all the other paraphernalia
that go along with every word we know. The question of learning vocabulary is still largely baffling. The
commonsense view depends on the idea of reference given above and is often
called naming. To take a well-known hypothetical example (Quine, 1960),
suppose a parent says gavagai to their
child and points at a rabbit: how does the child know what they mean? Gavagai
might mean rabbit in general, or it might be the pet-name for a particular
rabbit. Or it could mean one for the pot. Or it could describe various
aspects of the rabbit such
as its fur, its colour, its size, etc. Or a particular part of the rabbit
such as its
nose, legs etc. The problem with learning how words go with things is sorting
out which aspects of what we see are important, which are irrelevant. What is
more, Tomasello (1999) has shown in
experiments in which objects with new names are hidden in boxes that it is
perfectly possible for children to acquire words
for physical objects they have never seen.
A main approach to L2 acquisition of vocabulary in recent years has been to look at the strategies that L2 learners apply to the task (Cook, 2008). One set of strategies are for understanding the meaning of new words. Suppose that you were an L2 learner of English who encountered the phrase the phone-hacking scandal and didnt know what hacking meant. The strategies you might adopt are:
-
guess from the context.
Obviously hacking is some scandalous activity to do with phones.
-
use a dictionary. The
OED suggests hacking is The use of a
computer for the satisfaction it gives; the activity of a hacker A
person who uses his skill with computers to try to gain unauthorized access to
computer files or networks. It has not caught up with phone-hacking but gives
some idea of naughty activity.
-
make
deductions from the word form.
This is not of much use here apart from the -ing ending showing that some sort of activity is involved.
-
link
to cognates. If youre
German, it might suggest hackend;
otherwise like much computer-based vocabulary
this seems an international term
used across many languages.
On the other hand suppose that you want to learn hacking as a new word: your strategies might be:
-
repetition
and rote learning. So you repeat
hacking over and over to yourself.
- organising words in the mind. This involves putting hacking into say the set of words for communication such as internet, Google etc.
- linking to existing knowledge. This strategy consists of tying the word hacking into something else you know, for example a French speaker might remember hacking as a pirate wearing a hat the French translation is piratage.
These are all conscious ways of tackling new words. Undoubtedly as in L1 acquisition most L2 words are picked up unconsciously as we use the language.
4. How
important is grammar in acquiring and using a second language?
Undoubtedly
the word grammar poses
a problem. It makes some think of the school grammar famous for such claims as A noun is the name of a person, place or
thing. It makes others think of the traditional EFL idea
of structures found
in every coursebook: You use the present perfect to mean contemporary
relevance. It makes teachers
think of the loathed teaching technique of presenting
grammatical rules to the
students. It makes linguists think of Chomskys use of grammar to
refer to knowledge
of language
in a persons mind encompassing syntax, vocabulary and
phonology. Many SLA researchers now prefer the term morphosyntax,
at odds with linguists who regard morphosyntax as the small intersection between
syntax and morphology rather than
an inclusive term for both. Some people think of grammar as a book, some as knowledge in the mind.
The sense of grammar that is most relevant here is the linguists idea of grammar as an internal property of peoples minds. When we know a language, we know its phrase structure: the sentence I like green tea has a structure consisting of NPs I and green tea and a VP like green tea; the NP green tea consists of an adjective green and a noun tea. When we know a language we know how to construct and understand sentences, that is to say to link the words in it together and put them in sequence. Some of this knowledge consists of syntactic parameters: I like green tea shows the English syntactic parameter-setting for non-pro-drop rather than the Italian setting for pro-drop languages Amo il t verde, and shows the English Adjective Noun setting green tea, rather than the Italian setting Noun Adjective t verde.
Second language acquisition of grammatical knowledge
In the early days of SLA research the study of grammar had two aims: to establish SLA research as an independent discipline and to discover the sequence in which L2 learners acquired grammar. The classic study by Dulay and Burt (1974) took some ideas from the Roger Brown work with childrens language (Brown, 1972) and applied them to young Spanish-speaking learners of English. Brown had made a distinction between content words like tea or walk and grammatical morphemes, which include not only structure words like the and to but also grammatical inflections such as the plural form -s and the present participle -ing. Like many, Brown had observed that young children start by leaving out the grammatical morphemes; a two-year-old is more likely to say Mummy go shop than Mummy is going to the shops. By studying three English-speaking children over several years, he discovered a particular sequence over time in which children introduce the most crucial grammatical morphemes in their sentence:
1 -ing playing
2 plural -s tables
3 irregular past tense ran/took
4 possessive -s John's
5 articles a/the a booka
6 regular past tense -edliked/waited/played
7 third person -s likes
Brown
(1973) L1 acquisition sequence for English in
chronological order of acquisition
I.e. children start with the -ing form going; progress to the plural -s shops; then the irregular past tense went; and so on till they master them all.
The first generation of SLA researchers adapted this methodology to second language acquisition by scoring the proportion of morphemes missing from Spanish-speaking childrens description of pictures in English. A typical result from Dulay and Burt (1974) was:
1 the/a
2 -ing
3 plural -s
4 reg. past -ed
5 irreg. past
6 poss. 's
7 3rd person -s
Dulay & Burt (1974) difficulty order for English
This shows that there is indeed a definite sequence for grammatical morphemes in English with learners supplying the/a more than -ing, and -ing in turn more than plural -s etc.
Though similar to the L1 sequence, it is not identical: articles the/a rise from no 5 in the L1 sequence to No 1 in the L2 sequence, while irregular past slips from no 3 to no 5, etc. The differences here may be simply due to the different research methodologies: long-term comparison of data from different occasions versus short-term observation of data from single occasions. VanPatten (1984), for instance, separates the morphemes into NP, V and AUX groups and finds that, within each group, there is no difference between L1 and L2. The main similarity between L1 and L2 is not so much the details of the sequence as the fact that both L1 and L2 acquisition have sequences at all.
Nevertheless the notion of order for grammatical morphemes was replicated in a vast number of studies, reported in Goldschneider & DeKeyser (2001). A subsequent example is a study of Bengali primary school children in the East End of London, which combined one-off testing with comparison of different year-groups and focussed solely on verbal grammatical morphemes (Hannan, 2004). The chronological sequence of acquisition was:
1 -ing
2 past -ed pronounced as /t/
3 past -ed pronounced as /d/
4 irreg. past
5 past participle
Hannan (2004) The sequence of Bengali childrens acquisition of verbal grammatical morphemes
So far as the comparable morphemes are concerned, this
clearly resembles the Dulay and Burt order with -ing coming first but there are differences from both Brown and Dulay
and Burt for irregular past went,
which is learnt after rather than before regular past -ed.
Again the explanation may be methodological with Hannans method combining
aspects of both Browns and Dulay and Burts approaches.
Dulay and Burt claimed that the discovery of a common acquisition sequence for L2 learners is 'surely one of the most exciting and significant outcomes of the last decade of second language research' (Dulay & Burt, 1980). Yet was it about grammar at all? Grammar is a system for conveying meaning. Here morphemes are discussed in terms of physical presence in the sentence, not of their grammatical meaning. Does an L2 speaker using the progressive John is going to Paris mean the same as a native or something different, for instance whether the -ing is supposed to convey present or future meaning? The question should surely not be whether the word the occurs in the noun phrase the man but whether it is used properly to show definiteness.
The
idea of sequence of acquisition became a driving force
in SLA research; what mattered was whether people learnt one aspect of language before another whether sounds (Major 1994), syntactic structures (Zobl &
Liceras, 1994), or countless other areas. Usually the method relied on
cross-linguistic comparison of different stages rather than
on longitudinal development over time like the ESF project
(Klein & Perdue 1997) or Wodes study of his children (Wode 1981). Chomsky
has argued that sequence itself is the product of all sorts of accidental
circumstances (Chomsky, 1981): what counts is what people actually know, their
destination, not the arbitrary route they follow getting there. Indeed the very
concept of stages of acquisition is problematic.
According to Ingram (1989), it might be a continuous stage referring to
a point on a continuum, a plateau stage where change halts for some
time, a transition stage before change takes off again, and an
acceleration stage where there is rapid acquisition before reaching a
plateau.
Grammar processing
in second language acquisition
Grammar is
not only the knowledge of
grammatical relationships in peoples minds but
also the processes through which they construct and comprehend sentences.
Theres not much point in knowing English is
a non-pro-drop language
if you cant work out that the
subject of John loves cream cakes is John.
Interesting as
sequences of acquisition may be they
dont matter if we cant say why
things happen in a particular order; dismissing it as natural is no explanation.
The Processability Model (Pienemann, 1998), however, bases the sequence of development
upon the learners increasing capacity to process a new language:
1
using single content words. At the onset the
learner only has enough capacity to process one word at a time and so produces
utterances consisting of individual content words: Husband.
Fly. Plane. Thursday.
2
adding function words. With slightly
extra capacity, the learner can start to put function words into the sentence: Husband.
Fly. To Paris. On Thursday.
3
making phrases. Given more capacity,
the learner can now assemble these words into phrases My
husband. Will fly. To Paris. On Thursday .
4
making sentences. With still more
capacity the learner can assemble the different parts into a sentence: My husband will fly to Paris on Thursday. This is the point at which
the learner
has command of the phrase structure
and order of the simple sentence.
5
adding subordinate
clauses. Finally the learner gains enough capacity to be able to insert
subordinate clauses within the sentence: My
husband will fly to Paris on Thursday if the airport is open.
Each
stage then reflects the learner
increasing capacity to process
crucial elements of the sentence.
The
Competition Model associated with Brian MacWhinney (1987) is also used in SLA
research.
This claims that the limitations in the human speech processing system mean that
languages have to compromise between different ways of processing syntax. How
for example do we know something is the subject of the English sentence Mr
Bean loves Teddy?
Word order.
One possibility is to look for the NP that comes in a particular place in the sentence
order, in English first,
i.e. Mr Bean, in Arabic after the
verb, and so on. Its the position in the sequence that makes an NP the
subject.
Animacy.
Another possibility is to choose the NP that is alive rather than dead. So
in a sentence like Mountains like people speakers
of languages with strong animacy cues, such as Japanese or Italian, prefer the
animate second NP people as the
subject where English speakers
still regard mountains as the subject,
albeit with a very odd meaning.
Agreement. You may also find the subject by looking for the NP that agrees with the Verb in number, say plural or singular. In The cat likes mice we know the cat is the subject NP because it is singular as is the verb likes but mice is plural.
Case.
In many languages
the forms of words vary to show their grammatical function, called case.
You locate the subject by finding the word in the subjective (nominative) case,
as in Amor vincit omnia Love
conquers all where Amor is in the
Latin subjective case, as opposed to amorem (objective), amoris
(genitive) etc. It doesnt matter where the NP comes in the sentence
Vincit omnia amor (to the
despair of students of Latin verse) provided the case is right. English uses
case minimally for deciding the subject with regard to pronouns I/me,
they/them, etc.
While
these are all potential cues to the subject of the sentence,
we cant handle all four at once. So each language
has opted to emphasise one cue over the
others, in English
word order, in Latin case, in Japanese
animacy, etc. This does not mean that other cues are completely disregarded, as
shown in such lines of poetry as
Where the bee sucks there suck I or In
my beginning is my end.
SLA
research originally looked at this competition between cues in terms of transfer
between the L1 and L2. Dutch L1 speakers rely less on word order in English and more on
agreement than native English speakers (Kilborn & Cooreman, 1987). Animacy
is more importance for English and Turkish learners of Dutch (Issidorides &
Hulstjin, 1992): case is important to Dutch learners of English (McDonald,
1987). More recently the Competition Model has been applied to reverse transfer,
that is to say, the effects of the L2 on the L1. This involves comparinmg
monolinguals and L2 users in their first language.
Sure enough speakers of Japanese, Greek and Spanish who know English have been influenced by the English
word order preference in their first language
(Cook et al, 2003), later extended to Arabic, Korean and Chinese (Cook et al,
2007).
Grammar
has then been a major
theme in SLA research but it has been used in a large number of fairly
incompatible ways from a variety of linguistic and psychological perspectives.
To many, grammar is the core system of language, providing the bridge between the
sounds and meanings of language
through the computational
system. To others it is of lesser importance than say vocabulary. Many have
seen the concentration on the individuals knowledge and processing of grammar
as a distracting from the foundation of language in
social interaction (Firth & Wagner, 1997).
5
How do people learn to write in a second language?
Until
recently writing systems
have been ignored in SLA
research. One reason was the way language
teaching since the 1880s has emphasised the spoken language;
virtually all teaching methods from
the audiolingual to task-based learning have in principle emphasised getting
people to speak, not to write. The reasons largely stemmed from an
inappropriate analogy with L1 acquisition and a lack of realisation that adult
minds have been transformed by literacy (Cook, 2010).
Mostly teachers simply followed the accepted wisdom disseminated
by linguists since Aristotle that writing is an off-shoot of speech: 'the spoken language is primary
and writing is essentially a means of representing speech in another medium'
(Lyons, 1968, 38). Modern
writing system research, however, treats written language as parallel to spoken language
with
its own grammar,
vocabulary and independent systems of punctuation, spelling etc (Cook &
Bassetti, 2005). Giving writing a secondary role ignores not only its distinctive
nature but also its importance in everyday life whether for texting, business
contracts, religious works, art, etc.
The theory
and descriptions of writing systems
research are at least as complex as those of phonetics and phonology so the
following can only sketch its potential for SLA research. The heart of any writing system is what the written signs stand for: the major division is between
systems in which signs represent the sounds of the language and
those in which they represent
meanings; thus the English word cinema
represents the sounds /sinema:/,
the Chinese character 
means
body. So an English
word like cinema can be read
aloud with no idea of what it means, unless you already know that cinema
= place for showing films. The pronunciation of a
Chinese character like
is
irrelevant to understanding it; indeed the spoken form of the word may vary in
different dialects
Reading
the English word
dog involves working out how the
letters correspond to phonemes <d> to
/d/, <o> to //, <g> to /g/
the convention in writing systems
research is that arrow brackets enclose orthographic symbols: <d> means
the letter d, /d/ meansits pronunciation.
Having worked out <dog> corresponds to /dg/
then you check its meaning
in your
mental lexicon. Reading the Chinese character 
involves matching
it against a meaning
in your mind;
there is no stage for sounds.
Overall
then English has a
sound-based writing
system which
relates the letters to the sounds of the language;
Chinese
has a meaning-based system which relates characters to meanings with little
reference to their sounds. In the Mandarin dialect of Chinese
the spoken word for dog is in fact gou3 (using the pinyin
transcription system where numbers show tones), in the Hakka dialect 'gieu,
in Min gau4; each dialect has a
separate spoken word. But speakers of any
Chinese dialect know what 
means
an enormous unifying factor in keeping Chinese as a single language
regardless of dialect.
These
two overall systems of sound-based and meaning-based writing have
many variations. They are both as effective in their own way with particular
languages. Characters suit Chinese because it
does not have variable word forms the character uses
a single form. Letters
suit English because
a word can have many different forms,
dog, dogs, dogs, dogs, dogging,
dogged, dogger, ..... The problem comes when a persons first writing
system and the second come from different major
systems. A Chinese learner of English
doesnt just have to learn English spelling: they have to learn a whole new type of writing
system. Vice versa, learning
the
Chinese writing
system looks very daunting to an English
speaker. In practical terms the cost may be high: Chinese
university students read English at about one third of the speed of their peers
(Haynes & Carr, 1990).
Writing systems also vary in the direction in which the symbols are read. While English and Arabic are both
sound-based systems, English is
read from left to right in lines from top to bottom: the word dog is read from the left-most letter <d> to the rightmost
<g>; the Arabic word
كلب
(kalib) is read from right to left from
rightmost كـ (k) to ـلـ
(l)
to leftmost ب (b). While much Japanese is read from left to right,
some is still in traditional vertical columns, read from right to left in
columns as well as top to bottom when English is in columns as on shop signs etc, they are read from left to right. So
again it is tricky to go from a writing system
with one direction to a writing system
with another. Arabic children in England often to try to write Arabic from left
to right and English from right to left; some examples are on the
web (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/EnglishSpellingSystem/Children.htm).
The consequences can be profound: writing direction
may affect how you organise and see the world (Tversky et al, 1991).
Within sound-based systems, there are also
large differences. We see above that Arabic represents the consonants of the
word, not the vowels: كلب
tells
you how to pronounce /k.l.b/ but you have to work out the vowels for yourself.
Hence characteristics of Arabic writing in
English may be leaving out vowels or supplying the
wrong vowels. Within alphabetic systems, there may be very different letters,
say Greek σκύλος
(skylos, dog) or Russian собака
(dog). Again going from Greek to
English or Russian to Greek may be far from easy. The constant emphasis of the
internet on the Roman script means that writers of Greek, Chinese and Arabic
have all devised ways of representing their languages in Roman letters for use
in emails etc. Indeed one of the interference problems for many L2 learners of English is the use
of roman transliterations in their first language scripts, such
as pinyin for Chinese or romaji for Japanese, which is
misunderstood as being in English
script.
Sound-based
alphabetic writing systems also differ in terms of transparency a system
in which each letter invariably corresponds to a sound and vice versa is
transparent; a system in which a letter may correspond to several sounds and
vice versa is opaque. Languages that were standardized orthographically
comparatively recently, such as Italian
and Finnish, are usually the most transparent, those with longer histories such as English
have become more opaque as they have aged. The links between sounds and letters
often involve complex rules, like those for consonant doubling and silent
<e> in English; indeed a residue of English words have to be learnt as
one-offs like characters, whether yacht /jt/, lieutenant (British /leftenənt/ or
common function words like of /v/ (the only English word where <f> corresponds
to /v/). A
major difficulty in acquiring a second writing system is learning how its level
of transparency relates to the first language one knows already.
For many learners of English the chief issue is
spelling mistakes. While people mostly tolerate a foreign accent or a level of
grammatical mistakes in speech, they are highly intolerant of spelling mistakes,
often regarding them, quite unjustly, as signs of illiteracy, carelessness,
rudeness or downright stupidity. Despite the use of spelling checkers, the
writing of advanced users of English is still littered with spelling mistakes
(as is indeed that of many native speaker users). A sample of common
misspellings from my own collection is given in Box 1. In the interlanguage
tradition the sources of these mistakes are diverse; some come from the
phonology of the L1, some from the L2 writing system at different levels,
whether letter forms, direction, transparency or other areas it is usually
quite easy to detect peoples spelling accent; others come from the
inherent complexity of the fairly opaque English writing system itself and
problems for everyone, not just L2 users.
This piece has then tried to
give some idea of the richness and depth of SLA research today, partly to
compensate for the impression the field often gives of being obsessed with
minutiae of syntax. Its worthy
attempt to establish itself as an independent discipline has resulted in it
being isolated from contemporary developments in language teaching,
linguistics and psychology. What it needs to feed back into these disciplines is
the message that people who know two languages
are
not exceptions but the norm, both in terms of their numbers and in terms of the
human potential to learn more than one language; the study of say monolingual
first language acquisition depends on realising that many children are bilingual
and that all children could be
bilingual; a second
language is
not an afterthought but a core element in human existence.
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FURTHER
READING
Introductory books with a similar orientation are:
Cook,
V.J. (2008), Second Language Learning avnd
Language Teaching, London: Hodder Education. 4th edition
Grosjean,
F. (2010), Bilingual: Life and Reality,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P.