Second Language Acquisition

Topic :- Second Language Acquisition

Name :- Chauhan Sejal Arunbhai

Subject :- English Language Teaching-1

Paper :- 12

Roll No :-

M.A. PART-II SEM-III

Year- 2013-15

  Submitted to :-

Smt.S.B.Gardi

Department of English

M.K.Bhavnagar University.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

           As we know that the term Second language acquisition refers to the processes through which someone acquires one or more second or foreign language. SLA researchers look at acquisition in naturalistic contexts and in classroom setting. Researchers are interested in both Product and Process. Here we give trace the development of SLA from its origins in contrastive analysis. This is followed by a selective review of research, focusing on product-oriented studies of stages that learners pass through as they acquire another language, as well as investigations into the processes underlying acquisition. The practical implications of research are then discussed, followed by a review of current and future trends and directions.

               Let’s have look on background. The discipline now known as SLA emerged from comparative studies of similarities and differences between languages. These studies were conducted in the belief that a learner’s first language(L1) has an important influence on the acquisition of a second(L2), resulting in the ‘contrastive analysis’(CA) hypothesis. Proponents of contrastive analysis argued that where L1 and L2 rules are in conflict, errors are likely to occur which are the result of ‘interference’ between L1 and L2. For example, the hypothesis predicted that Spanish L1 learners would tend, when learning English, to place the adjective after the noun as is done in Spanish, rather than before it. Such an error can be explained as ‘negative transfer’ of the L1 rule to the L2. When the rules are similar for both languages; ‘positive transfer’ would occur and language learning would be facilitated. Where a target language feature does not exist in the L1, learning would also be impeded.

               Thus, English L1 learners will encounter difficulty trying to master the use of nominal classifiers in certain Asian languages such as Cantonese, because these do not exist in English. In terms of pedagogy, contrastivists held that learners difficulties in learning an L2 could be predicted on the basis of a systematic comparison of the two languages and that learners from different first language backgrounds would experience different difficulties when attempting to learn a common L2.

               The CA hypothesis was in harmony with the prevailing psychological theory of the time: behaviourism. Behaviourists believed that learning was a process of habit formation Linguistic habits acquired by individuals as their L1 emerged would have a marked influence on their L2 acquisition. It is no coincidence that research questioning the contrastivists position emerged at about the same time as cognitive psychologists began to challenge behaviourism.   

              A major shift in perspective occurred in the 1960s, when linguists and language educators turned their attention from the CA of languages and began studying the specific language learners  used as they attempted to communicate in the target language. In an important publication, Corder made a strong case for the investigation of learners errors as a way of obtaining insights into the processes and strategies underlying SLA. Errors were seen not as evidence of pathology on the part of learners but as a normal and healthy part of the learning process.

              The systematic study of learners errors revealed interesting insights into SLA process. First, learners made errors that were not predicted by the CA hypothesis. Second, the errors that learners made were systematic, rather than random. Third, learners appeared to move through a series of stages as they developed competence in the target language. These successive stages were characterized by particular type of error, and each stage could be seen as a kind of interlanguage or ‘interim language’ in its own right.

              Not surprisingly, the field of SLA has been strongly influence by L1 acquisition SLA researchers have looked to L1 acquisition for insights into ways of investigating the acquisition process as well as the outcomes of the research. Particularly influential was a pioneering study by Brown, who conducted a longitudinal case study of three children acquiring English as an L1. Brown traced the development of 14 grammatical structures discovering that contrary to expectations, there was no relationship between that order in which items were acquired and the frequency with which they were used by the parents.

Product Oriented Research:-

During the early 1970s a series of empirical investigations into learner language were carried out which became known as the ‘morpheme order’ studies. Their principal aim was to determine whether there is a ‘natural’ sequence in the order in which L2 learners acquire the grammar of the target language. Dulay and Burt the principal architects of the morpheme order studies found that, like their L1 counterparts, children acquiring an L2 appeared to follow a predetermined order which could not be accounted for in terms of the frequency with which learners heard the language items. Moreover, children from very different L1 backgrounds acquired a number of morphemes in virtually the same order. However, the order differed from that of the L1 learners investigated by Brown. A replication of the studies with adult learners produced strikingly similar results to those with children.

                   As a result of these and other investigations, it was concluded that in neither child nor adult L2 performance could the majority of errors be attributed to the learners L1s and that learners in fact made many errors in areas of grammar that are comparable in both the L1 and L2, errors which the CA hypothesis predicted would not occur, Dulay and Burt therefore rejected the hypothesis, proposing instead a hypothesis entitled L2 acquisition equals L1 acquisition and indicating that the two hypotheses predict the appearance of different types of errors in L2 learners speech.

                  Briefly the CA hypothesis states that while the child is learning an L2. He or she will tend to use his native language structures in his L2 speech, and where structures in his L1 and his L2 differ he will goof. For example, in Spanish children learning English should tend to say wants Miss Jones for He wants Miss Jones.

               The ‘L2’ acquisition equals L1 acquisition hypothesis holds that children actively organize the L2 speech that they hear and make generalizations about its structure as children learning their L1 do. Therefore the goofs expected in any particular L2 production would be similar to those made by children learning the same language as their L1. For example Jose want Miss Jones would be expected since L1 acquisition studies have shown that children generally omit functors, in this case the –s inflection for third person singular present indicative.

               In the 1980s Stephen Krashen was the best known figure in the SLA field. He formulated a controversial hypothesis to explain the disparity between the order in which grammatical items were taught and the order in which they were acquired, arguing that there are two mental processes operating in SLA: conscious learning and subconscious acquisition conscious learning focuses on grammatical and to identify instances is a very different process, facilitating the acquisition of rules at a subconscious level. According to Krashen, when using the language to communicate meaning the learner must draw on subconscious knowledge. The suggestion of conscious and subconscious processes functioning in language development was not new or radical: however, Krashen’s assertion that these processes were totally separate, i.e that learning could not become acquisition was Krashen went on to argue that the basic mechanism underlying language acquisition was comprehension. According to his comprehensible input hypothesis, when the student understands a message in the language containing a structure his or her current level of competence advances by one step, and that structure is acquired. These hypotheses had a marked influence on practice as outlined below.

Process Oriented Research:-

              Research reviewed above focused on the products or outcomes of acquisition. A growing body of research considers learning processes, exploring the kinds of classroom tasks that appear to facilitate SLA. The bulk of this research focuses on activities or procedures which learners perform in relation to the input data. Given the content of research in the field, this review is necessarily selective.

              In the first of a series of investigations into learner-learner interaction . Long (1981) found that two way tasks stimulated significantly more modified interactions than one way tasks. Similarly, Doughty and Pica found that required information exchange tasks generated significantly more modified interaction than tasks where exchange of information was optional.

             The term ‘modified interaction’ refers to instances during an interaction when the speaker alters the form in which his or her language is encoded to make it more comprehensible. Such modification may be prompted by lack of comprehension on the listeners part. This research into modified interaction was strongly influenced by Krashen’s hypothesis that comprehensible input was a necessary and sufficient condition for SLA, i.e that acquisition would occur when learners understood messages in the target language.

Current and future trends and directions:-

               Current SLA research orientations can be captured by a single word: complexity. Researchers have begun to realize that there are social and interpersonal as well as psychological dimensions to acquisition, that input and output are both important, that form and meaning are ultimately inseparable and that acquisition is an organic rather than linear process.

           In a recent study, Martyn investigated the influence of certain task characteristics on the negotiation of meaning is small group work, looking at the following variable:

1.     Interaction relationship: whether one person holds all of the information required to complete the task whether each participant holds a portion of the information, or whether the information is shared.

2.     Interaction requirement: whether or not the information must be shared.

3.     Goal orientation: whether the task goal is convergent or divergent.

4.     Outcome options: whether there is only a single correct outcome, or whether more than one.

The results seem to indicate that while task variables appear to have an effect on the amount of negotiation for meaning, there appears to be an interaction between task variables, personality factors and interactional dynamic. This ongoing research underlines the complexity of the learning environment and the difficulty of isolating psychological and linguistic factors from social and interpersonal ones.

   A major challenge for curriculum designers, materials writers and classroom practitioners who subscribe to task based teaching is how to develop programmes that integrate tasks with form focused instruction. This is particularly challenging when teaching beginners in foreign language contexts. A number of applied linguists are currently exploring the extent to which one can implement task based teaching with beginner learners, and experiments are under way to establish the appropriate balance and ‘mix’ between tasks which have non-linguistic outcomes and exercises which have linguistic outcomes.

    In searching for metaphors to reflect the complexity of the acquisition process some researchers have argued that the adoption of an ‘organic’ perspective can greatly enrich our understanding of language acquisition and use. Without such a perspective, our understanding of other dimensions of language will be piecemeal and incomplete as will any attempt at understanding and interpreting utterances in isolation from the contexts in which they occur. The organic metaphor sees SLA more like growing a garden than building a wall. From such a perspective, learners do not learn one thing perfectly one item at a time, but learn numerous things simultaneously. The linguistic flowers do not all appear at the same time, nor do they all grow at the same rate. Some even appear to wilt for a time before renewing their growth. Rate and speed of development are determined by a complex interplay of factors related to pedagogical interventions; speech processing constraints: acquisitional processes and the influence of the discoursal environment in which the items occur.

                         In this topic David Nunan describe the emergence of SLA as a discipline from early work in CA, error analysis and interlanguage development. He examine research into SLA in both naturalistic and instructional settings, considering both process and product oriented studies. This topic also looks at the practical implications of current research for syllabus design and methodology, focusing in particular on the implications of SLA research for syllabus design, the input hypothesis and task based language teaching. The final part of the topic suggest that future work will attempt to capture the complexity of the acquisition process by incorporating a wide range of linguistic, social, interpersonal and research process.  



Reference:-
          

The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speaker Of Other Languages/chapter 12/Second Language acquisition/David Nunan