Understanding Second Language Acquisition

Lourdes Ortega

Created: Over 3 years ago

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In addition, with more studies to aggregate, an interesting difference emerged regarding the effects of negotiation on grammar learning, as opposed to vocabulary learning. Namely, average grammar benefits were initially of medium size (d = 0.59) and only grew stronger and became large (d = 1.07) when measured up to a month after the interaction had taken place. An important insight from both meta-analyses, and one that lends support to early claims by Gass and Varonis (1994) and Mackey (1999), is that the benefits of interaction on L2 learning may need some time to manifest themselves.
interlanguage researchers believe that the same general cognitive learning mechanisms that help humans learn and process any other type of information help them extract regularities and rules from the linguistic data available in the surrounding environment.
Elite Olshtain (1983) studied crosslinguistic influences on apologies and found that learners' sociopragmatic judgements about what situations and offenses warrant an apology were transferred from their L1. As a consequence, L2 English speakers of an L1 Hebrew background were at risk of sounding too impolite and, conversely, L2 Hebrew speakers of an English background were at risk of sounding overly polite.
Learning and using a foreign language poses a threat to one's ego. It makes people vulnerable – particularly grown-ups who are accustomed to function perfectly well in their own language. For example, many beginning L2 learners resentfully report feeling ‘infantilized’ when they use the L2 (Spielmann and Radnofsky, 2001). At least until high levels of proficiency have been reached, someone who is trying out a new language cannot have good control over what they say in the L2, how they say it and what image of self they are able to project for their interlocutors. Similarly, they may be embarrassed and frustrated by the realization that they are unable to understand interlocutors fully and cannot respond appropriately.
Canadian researcher Merrill Swain (1985) at the University of Toronto formulated her Pushed Output Hypothesis (you will also see the terms Comprehensible Output Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis used interchangeably).
L2 learners end up building mental representations that are different from what the target input in their surrounding environment (be it the classroom or the wider society) looks like, and also different from the grammar representations available in their first language.
Furthermore, while learning without intention is possible, people learn faster, more and better when they deliberately apply themselves to learning. Thus, learning with intention remains of central importance in SLA because of its facilitative role, as Hulstijn and Laufer (2001) have argued with respect to vocabulary learning.
The accumulating evidence suggests that providing negative feedback in some form results in better post-test performance than ignoring errors (Russell and Spada, 2006). Much less agreement has been reached, however, with regard to when, how and why negative feedback works, when it does.
The most motivated individuals will develop high motivation (correlated to a self-reported strong intention to invest effort to learn the L2) and high levels of all motivational antecedents, including high instrumentality, positive attitudes towards the L2 speakers and culture, and general high interest in learning foreign languages. These motivated individuals exhibit this pattern because of a well-developed ideal L2 self. The highly motivated individual will be also instrumentally or more extrinsically motivated by anticipated pragmatic rewards and utility that we see in learning an L2. After all, ‘[i]n our idealized image of ourselves we want to appear personally agreeable (associated with positive attitudes towards the L2 community and culture) and also professionally successful (associated with instrumental motives)’ (Csizér and Dörnyei, 2005b, pp. 637
Recasts occur when an interlocutor repeats the learner utterance, maintaining its meaning but offering a more conventional or mature rendition of the form.
This is what Jin (1994) found in a study of 46 L1 English speakers who were learning L2 Chinese. Participants at early stages of proficiency had difficulty adopting a topic-prominent orientation to syntax and discourse.
According to Krashen, the single most important source of L2 learning is comprehensible input, or language which learners process for meaning and which contains something to be learned, that is, linguistic data slightly above their current level. This is what Krashen termed i+1.
The accumulating evidence suggests that knowledge of two (or more) languages can accelerate the learning of an additional one. Research on lexical transfer in L3 acquisition has found substantial vocabulary rate advantages for multilinguals (several of the studies can be found in a pioneering volume published by Jasone Cenoz and other colleagues in Europe; Cenoz et al., 2001).
many errors that at first blush might be attributed to the influence of the mother tongue can be, in fact, unrelated to the L1 and instead reflect developmental universal processes that have been attested in the acquisition of human language in general (and often in L1 acquisition as well, where no pre-existing knowledge of a specific language can be assumed to influence the process).
The strong claim that comprehensible input is both necessary and sufficient for L2 learning proved to be untenable in light of findings gleaned by Schmidt (1983) and by many others, who documented minimal grammatical development despite ample meaningful opportunities to use the language, even with young L2 learners – for example, children attending French immersion (Swain, 1985) and regular English-speaking schools (Sato, 1990). Input is undoubtedly necessary, but it cannot be sufficient. In addition, the expectation that more comprehension necessarily brings about more acquisition has not been borne out by the empirical evidence. Several researchers have noted that comprehension and acquisition are two distinct processes (e.g. Sharwood Smith, 1986), and some studies (e.g. Doughty, 1991; Loschky, 1994) have shown that learners can comprehend more than they acquire and can acquire more than they comprehend.
For L2 development, the general implication is that marked forms tend to be more difficult to learn and therefore cause more interlanguage solutions.
In their work they have shown that when bilinguals recognize or produce words, information encoded for both languages, not just the one of current use, is initially activated. This phenomenon is known as non-selectivity and has been documented also for three languages in trilinguals by Lemhfer et al. (2004).
As Smith and Thelen describe, ‘Development can be envisioned, then, as a series of evolving and dissolving patterns of varying dynamic stability, rather than an inevitable march towards maturity’
When individuals engage in behaviour that they understand as self-initiated by choice and largely sustained by inherent enjoyment in the activity (that is, as an end in itself, for the sheer sake of learning), they are said to be intrinsically motivated. This quality of motivation is considered optimal because it has been experimentally shown to be consistently associated to higher levels of achievement (Vansteenkiste et al.,
Joan Rubin (1975) summarized the first-generation findings in six key attributes of good learners, all related to strategic behaviour: ● they are good guessers ● they pay analytical attention to form but also attend to meaning ● they try out their new knowledge ● they monitor their production and that of others ● they constantly practise ● they cope well with feelings of vulnerability for the sake of putting themselves in situations where they communicate and learn.
Skill acquisition theory defines learning as the gradual transformation of performance from controlled to automatic.
it gradually became clear that, once again, factors other than externally defined L1–L2 differences needed to be considered when explaining avoidance behaviours.
There is a well-known power law of learning, by which practice will at some point yield no large returns in terms of improvement, because optimal performance has been reached (Ellis and Schmidt, 1998). In addition, proceduralization is skill-specific. Therefore, practice that focuses on L2 production should help automatize production and practice that focuses on L2 comprehension should help automatize comprehension (DeKeyser, 1997).
MacIntyre has emphasized communicative anxiety as rooted in direct contact with L2 speakers in second language settings, and he has pursued explanations that emphasize social attitudes and behavioural communication correlates.
If these findings withstand the test of time and replication, we may eventually need to revise the intuitive dictum that ‘good memory helps foreign language learning’, and replace it with a more nuanced formulation, such as ‘good memory helps vocabulary learning in the beginning and grammar learning later on’.
In the early 1980s, Michael Long proposed the Interaction Hypothesis (best explained and updated in Long, 1996).
This is what we call the question of incidental L2 learning, which asks: Is it possible to learn about the L2 incidentally, as a consequence of doing something else in the L2, or does all L2 learning have to be intentional? It is unanimously agreed in SLA that incidental L2 learning is possible indeed.
Within a year and a half of immersion in the L2 environment, most naturalistic adult learners will develop a rudimentary but systematic and fully communicative system, called the Basic Variety by Klein and Perdue (1997). After some more time, and probably pushed by the need to communicate complex messages, many but not all of them will grammaticalize resources and develop morphology and subordination.
Besides lower achievement, several other more subtle effects experienced by overly anxious students have been uncovered. These include slower speed in their learning and processing of L2 materials, a tendency to underestimate their true L2 competence and a propensity to engage in risk-avoiding behaviours, such as speaking less and attempting less complex messages (Steinberg and Horwitz, 1986; MacIntyre and Gardner, 1994; MacIntyre et al., 1997).
our success in understanding L2 aptitude has been limited.
These early findings quickly indicated that beyond natural language ability (i.e. aptitude) and personal commitment to learning (i.e. motivation), these ‘good’ learners were also characterized by a high degree of active involvement in their own learning processes.
Two misinterpretations of skill acquisition tenets are common: (a) that automaticity is simply accelerated or speedy behaviour; and (b) that L2 learners simply accumulate rules that they practise until they can use them automatically.
For example, in the largest scale motivation study to date, Dörnyei and Csizér (2005; see also Dörnyei et al., 2006) investigated attitudes towards five L2s (including English and German, the most studied in that context) among more than 8,500 13- and 14-year-olds studying foreign languages in schools in Hungary. Their findings suggest that respondents who were residents of regions with relatively small volumes of tourism but reported high frequency of personal encounters turned out to exhibit the most positive attitudes. By contrast, respondents who resided in top touristic areas (e.g. Budapest) and reported similar frequency of contact entertained more negative attitudes than the former group. Dörnyei and Csizér speculate that at some point, if the presence of foreigners is very large in a particular foreign language setting, a deterioration in attitudes is observed, possibly because students of the target language come to entertain more realistic perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks of tourism and globalization (for more on L2 contact, see also Chapter 9, section 9.5). Taking a more critical perspective, Lamb (2004) also notes that some of the Indonesian students’ comments suggested ‘not so much [… a sense] of language learners reaching out to integrate with the foreign culture or community, but of knowing they must embrace the changes already sweeping their own culture’ (p. 13) and a sense of learned urgency to become functional English users in order ‘not to be pushed away’ (p. 11). Thus, some foreign language learners will develop positive attitudes towards the somewhat distant image of English speakers or even ‘foreigners’ in general and will entertain a positive international posture, but other learners may grow disappointed after sufficient actual contact or they may contest such positive international attitudes and even subvert them, depending on complex and dynamic forces of identity formation that may change over the life span.
Perhaps the most contested matter is whether new L2 material can be learned without attention, that is, if just detected pre-attentively.
Perhaps the most significant change in how we may understand motivation in future years is the L2 Motivational Self System, formulated by Dörnyei (2005; Csizér and Dörnyei, 2005b).
Second language learning under an emergentist perspective has the potential to look less like development that proceeds teleologically towards the ultimate attainment of a so-called native grammar, and more like a complex deployment of human multi-language capacities as a function of experience in the world.
Three important tenets on which emergentist approaches build are associative learning, probabilistic learning and rational contingency (Ellis, 2006a).
Psychologists interested in individual differences have traditionally made a distinction among three concepts. Cognition refers to how information is processed and learned by the human mind; conation addresses how humans use will and freedom to make choices that result in new behaviours; and affect encompasses issues of temperament, emotions and how humans feel towards information, people, objects, actions and thoughts. However, contemporary psychologists recognize one must consider cognitive, conative and affective explanations in a symbiotic fashion in order to fully understand individual differences. Likewise, SLA researchers are increasingly more willing to examine aptitude, motivation and other sources of individual differences in L2 learning in the context of complex interrelationships among cognition, conation and affect.
Many language teachers and students believe the provision of negative feedback by the teacher in speaking and writing is a staple of good classroom instruction. And, at least logically, negative feedback would be the single most relevant way for L2 learners to figure out what is not possible in the target language. Among SLA researchers, however, there are dissenting voices who object that language is fundamentally learned without recourse to negative feedback information (Schwartz, 1993). Others maintain there is insufficient evidence to show conclusively that negative feedback works (Truscott, 1999). These sceptics discount the empirical evidence accumulated either because they feel it only reflects explicit, metalinguistic learning about the L2, or because they expect negative feedback should work across the board and universally in order to be pronounced useful, sometimes for both reasons. Most cognitive-interactionist researchers, on the other hand, argue that negative feedback is beneficial for learning (Long, 1996; Lyster et al., 1999; Russell and Spada, 2006). How
While the value of language instruction regularly becomes the object of heated debates in scholarly and public policy circles, supporters and sceptics often fail to pay sufficient attention to the fact that the accumulated evidence clearly shows accuracy and rate advantages for instruction. Simply put, instructed learners progress at a faster rate, they are likely to develop more elaborate language repertoires and they typically become more accurate than uninstructed learners.
As Vansteenkiste et al. (2006) explain, self-determination theory construes humans as volitional beings who are growth-oriented, that is, predisposed to lifelong learning and development. Essential in meeting a few basic fundamental human needs is a sense of choice and personal causation in everything we humans do. Thus, human behaviour in this theory is posited to be guided by the drive to self-determine our actions and activities.
In the end, then, the jury is still out on the question of whether learning without attention is possible.
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, both Moody (1988) and Ehrman (1990) also found that their participants were equally divided between extraverted and introverted types. Considering that the norm established for the US population on the MBTI gives an imbalance in favour of extraverts (75 per cent versus only 25 per cent introverts), we can suspect that, quite surprisingly, disproportionate numbers of introverts are attracted to the study of a foreign language.
The authors conclude that once a threshold size of vocabulary knowledge is established in the L2, further vocabulary learning is boosted by a better developed and larger-sized L2 mental lexicon rather than by superior memory capacity.
meritocratic explanations that everyone can learn an L2 well, if they only want it badly enough and try hard enough, do not stand research scrutiny.
Many SLA researchers believe that children learn their first language so well because they have the cognitive and linguistic endowment to learn it entirely implicitly. Conversely, they posit that adolescents and adults will rarely if ever attain complete success in learning an L2 because they try to learn the language via analysis and analogy (that is, explicitly) and in doing so they are using the ‘wrong’ route, as it were (although for good reason, these researchers say, since for adults analysis may be the only route left available for language learning). This is, in a nutshell, the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis first formulated by Bley-Vroman (1990).
At the time, Long agreed with Krashen that learning happens through comprehension, and that the more one comprehends, the more one learns. However, he departed from the strong input orientation of the times by focusing on interaction and proposing that the best kind of comprehensible input learners can hope to obtain is input that has been interactionally modified, in other words, adjusted after receiving some signal that the interlocutor needs some help in order to fully understand the message.
In other words, teachers can only hope to teach successfully what learners are developmentally ready to learn. This idea was formalized in the Teachability Hypothesis, also known as the issue of learner readiness, which Pienemann (1984, 1989) proposed in response to results he obtained in two quasi-experimental studies of German word order (see 6.12 and Table 6.8).
Interactional modifications have the potential to bring about comprehension in a more individualized or learner-contingent fashion, with repetitions and redundancies rather than simplification.
Interestingly, more explicit negotiation of form episodes that involve the use of the L1 or metalanguage appearto be particularly beneficial for learning.
Several key assumptions made by information processing psychologists have been embraced in current SLA research about cognition. First, the human cognitive architecture is made of representation and access. Second, mental processing is dual, comprised of two different kinds of computation: automatic or fluent (unconscious) and voluntary or controlled (conscious). Third, cognitive resources such as attention and memory are limited.
Optimal L2 learning must include opportunities for language use that is slightly beyond what the learner currently can handle in speaking or writing, and production which is meaningful and whose demands exceed the learner's current abilities is the kind of language use most likely to destabilize internal interlanguage representations.
Schachter noted that in Chinese and Japanese relativization happens very differently from English, whereas in Persian and Arabic relative clauses follow patterns that are much closer to English. She concluded that the Chinese and Japanese writers might have consciously or unconsciously avoided relative clauses in their English essays, thereby making few mistakes. Thus, an interesting consequence of avoidance is that it may lead to more accurate production. However, because in such cases learners take fewer risks in the L2, avoidance may also delay their L2 development of the given area being avoided. This shows something that many SLA researchers take for granted and that may surprise many readers at first: making fewer errors is not always a good thing!