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Describing and Explaining Second Language Acquisition

What is second language acquisition?

Second refers to any language which is learnt subsequent to the mother tongue, inside and outside classroom,
naturally as a result of living in a country where it is spoken or learning it in a classroom. It does not mean only
the second language, but it can refer to the third or even fourth language we have learnt.

L2 acquisition can be defined as the way in which people learn a language other than their mother tongue,
inside or outside a classroom, and SLA as the study of this.

What are the goals of SLA?

How would a researcher find out how a language learner learns an L2?

- asking learners (valuable information but limited)

- collecting samples of learner-language and analyzing them.

These samples are greatly significant to the researcher and teacher. If collected at different points in time, they
may show how learners’ knowledge gradually develops.

Describe: how learner language changes over time. SLA focuses on the formal features of language that
linguists have traditionally concentrated on. (Pronunciation of an L2, the words learners use, how learner build
up their vocabulary, and grammatical structure).

Explain: identifying the internal and external factors that account for why learners acquire an L2 in the way
they do.

 External factors: social milieu, input, instruction, setting, culture and status, context where learning
takes place.
 Internal factors: age, intelligence, personality, aptitude, motivation, learning strategies...etc, that will
account for why learners vary in the rate they learn an L2 and how successful they ultimately are.

It is worth nothing that the L2 learners bring knowledge to the task of learning a second language.

They have already learnt a language, at least one (their mother tongue): they are expected to draw on this while
learning another lge.

General knowledge of the world

Communication strategies: Learners’ strategies may help them make effective use of their L2 knowledge

Knowledge of how language in general works.

Two case studies

A case study of an adult learner

Wes was a thirty-three year-old artist. He was Japanese native speaker. He only had a little knowledge in
English. He went to Hawaii and lived there for about three years. A researcher at University of Hawaii, Richard
Schmidt, studied wes’ language development during those three years. Richard was interested in how Wes’
knowledge of plural-s, regular past tense, copula BE and 3rd person singular developed. Schmidt noted that
Wes had learned to use some lge features with the same level as a native English speaker. However, Richard
suspected that Wes has not really acquired these. For example, Wes did not have the same knowledge of
progressive-ing as a native speaker, rarely use 3rd person-s, never used regular simple past, and continued to
omit-s from plural nouns.

Despite this, at the end of the study, Wes became a good communicator and a skilled conversationalist in
English. In addition, he was able to give talks about his painting and also highly skilled at repairing
communication breakdowns.

A case study of two child learners

J and R were beginners in English at the start of the study. J was a ten-year-old portuguese boy and literate in
his native language. R was an eleven-year-old boy from Pakistan speaking Punjabi as his first language. They
were learning English in a language unit in London. The two learners had little exposure to the TL outside the
classroom. The focus of this study was delivering requests.

When Elise analyzed J’s and R’s requests, he found them rather verbless. They only mention the things they
needed or even only pointed at them. A little later, they began to use imperative verbs like ‘give me...’.And then
they learnt to use ‘can’t have...’. In the end of the study, their ability to use requests had grown considerably but
still limited in a number of respects. Their requests were very direct and simple; they only modified their
requests by adding the word ‘please’. It was really different with English native speaker who usually perform
requests with different addressees to ensure politeness.

Methodological Issues

Language is such a complex phenomenon that researchers have generally preferred to focus on some specific
aspect rather than on the whole of it.

There is another problem in determining whether learners have acquired a particular feature. What is meant by’
acquisition’? How to define it? Does acquisition mean to manifest patterns of use similar to those of native
speakers? Does language knowledge equate lge use? How to determine whether learners have acquired a
feature? How to measure whether acquisition has taken place or not? Learners may manifest target-like use of a
feature of formula without having acquired the ability to use the feature productively.

Issues in the description of learner language

Generally, the researcher’s main objectives are to see whether the learners’ use of L2 changes over time and
what does this change show about the learners’ L2 knowledge’.

Learners made errors in different kinds. Wes failed to use some grammatical features (errors in omission and
overuse), J and R made sociolinguistic errors.

Do learners acquire the language systematically? Is there an order? Are there sequences ( stages in the
development of one lge feature)? For instance, Ellis showed that as concerns requests development, both J and
R followed the same sequence.

Issues in the explanation of learner language

When learners begin learning an L2, they engage in both item learning (learning expressions as unanalyzed
whole) and system learning (learning some kind of rule for any lge feature).

An explanation of L2 acquisition must account for both item learning and system learning and also how the two
interrelate.

The systematic nature of L2 acquisition also requires explanation of:


- Why did wes acquire some lge features before others?

- Why did J and R learn the different ways of making requests in the way they did?

- Why was acquisition incomplete in both case studies? Why did the 3 learners fail to achieve native-like
performance?

Possible explanations

Learners follow a particular developmental pattern because their mental faculties are structured in such a way
that this is the way they have to learn.

Learners needed more time to learn

Unlike children acquiring their mother tongue, L2 learners just stop learning when they are able to satisfy their
communication needs (why learning the full grammar of lge, when one can get the message across)

Learners did not want to belong to the speech community, thus kept a linguistic distance.

To reach native-like competence, the learner must start very young when their brain are open to lge.

Other explanations emphasize the importance of external as opposed to internal factors. Perhaps L2 learners can
only acquire difficult linguistic features if they recieve direct instructions in them.

Do learners acquire some target language (TL) features before others?

How do learners acquire a particular TL linguistic feature?

The existence of developmental patterns can be investigated in different areas of language; linguistic
(phonological, lexical, and grammatical), semantic and functional. This topic will deal more with the
acquisition of grammatical systems.

Method for Investigating Developmental patterns:

- Obligatory occasion analysis (Brown, 1973)


- Target-like use analysis ( Pica, 1983)
- Frequency analysis ( Cazden et al, 1975)
- Cross-sectional data ( Dulay and Burt, 1973 and 1974c)

Developmental Patterns in Second Language Acquisition:

There three aspects of early L2 acquisition:

1- Silent period.
2- Formulaic speech.
3- Structural and semantic significations.

 Silent Period:
- In L2 acquisition, silent period in not obligatory because learners have already acquired one.
- Yet many learners, especially children opt for a silent period.
- Itoh and Hatch (1978), where Takahiro refuses to speak English for the first 3 months.
- Hakuta (1976), where Ugisu also refuses to speak English for the first 3 months.
- Saville-troike (1988), where 6 out of 9 children learners opt for silent period.

Do all Learners go through a silent period?

- Saville-troike (1988): learners, particularly classroom learners, are obliged to speak from the beginning.
- Huang and Hatch (1978): Paul begins to speak English, often by imitating.
- Naiman et al (1978): claim that the learners begin to speak right from the start.
- Gibbons (1985): where survey of 47 Australian revealed that children begin to speak English after 2
weeks of silence.
- Learners only begin to speak English when they start to use it at home with their parents. (Rodriguez
cited by Krashen, 1982)

Why are some learners silent at the beginning of TL learning while others are not?

Differences in social and cognitive orientation (Saville-Troike, 1988):

 Other-directed learners
 Inner-directed learners

Each type of learners approaches the task of learning a language differently.

Does Silent period play a part in language learning?

- The silent period provides an opportunity for the learner to build up competence via listening. (Krashen,
1982)
- Silent period actually provides learners with opportunities to prepare themselves for social use of TL by
means of “private speech”, which they engage in while they are silent, as shown by Saville-troike study.
- It is regarded as a rejection stage (Itoh and Hatch, 1978) since Takahiro seemed to avoid learning
English.
- Gibbons ( 1985) regards it as a period of incomprehension that does little or nothing to promote learning
and if prolonged, it reflects psychological withdrawal.

 Formulaic Speech:
- Formulaic speech consists of expressions which are learnt as unanalyzable wholes and employed on
particular occasions ( Lyons 1968:177)
- It must be distinguished from creative speech.
- Formulaic sequences are entire scripts which the learner can memorize because they are fixed and
predictable ( Ellis, 1984b). they are of two types( Hakuta, 1976; Krashen and Scarcella( 1978):
a- Routines: whole utterances learnt as memorized chunks. E.g. I don’t know.
b- Patterns: utterances that are only partially unanalysed and have one or more open slots. E.g. can I
have…

- Identifying an utterance is being formulaic sequence is problematic because we could not know for sure
whether the learner is using it as a chunk or tapping on an internalised rule to produce it.

- Myles, Hooper and Michell (1998) proposed these criteria for determining whether an utterance is
formulaic or not:

* At least two morphemes in length

* Phonologically coherent
* Unrelated to productive patterns in the learners speech

* Greater complexity in comparison to the learners speech

* Used repeatedly in the same form

* May be inapproperiate

* Situationally dependent

* Community wide in us

- Formulaic speech can be observed in the speech of native speakers.

- Pawley and Syder (1983) argue that achieving native-like control involves not only learning a rule system
that will generate an infinite number of sentences, but also ‘memorized sequences’’ and ‘lexicalized
sentence stems’

- Formulaic expressions embody the social knowledge shared by a speech community

- They are essential in the handling of everyday situations

- They enable the speaker to say the right thing at the right time and in the right place

- They perform a psycholinguistic function in speech production in that they serve as ‘islands of reliability’
that help learners to construct and produce production plans

- For L2 acquisition, formulaic speech has been observed to be common particularly in the early stages,
irrespective of the learners age or learning setting (naturalistic or classroom learners)

Are Formulaic Expressions Important for L2 acquisition?

- Formulas enable them to meet their basic communicative needs in an ESL classroom, where English as the
medium for instruction. (Elis,1984b)

-Formulaic speech occurs when learners are forced to speak before they are ready and if left to their own
devices, they will remain silent (krashen,1982)

- Learners like native speakers learn formulaic expressions because they reduce the learning burden while
maximizing communicative ability

- Formulaic speech serves as the basis for subsequent creative speech as the learner comes to realize that
utterances initially learnt and used as wholes consist of elements which can combine with others in a variety
of rule bound ways.

- Formulaic speech and rule-created speech are unrelated (krashen and Scarcella 1978)

- Formulas serve only short-term production tactics’ and play no role in acquisition (Bohn,1986)

Structural and Semantic Simplification

- In comparison with formulaic speech, the learner’s early CREATIVE utterances are typically truncated,
consisting of just one or two words, with both grammatical functions and content words missing.
Examples:

- Library (= he is in the library) (Hanania and Gradman, 1977)

- Me no blue (= i don’t have a blue crayon) (Ellis, 1984a)

- These utterances indicate that both structural and semantic simplifications are taking place

- Structural simplification is evident in the omission of grammatical functions like auxiliaries, articles and
plural-s or past-ed morphemes.

- Semantic simplification involves the omission of content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives or
adverbs.

- Both simplifications may occur because

* Learners have not yet acquired the necessary linguistic forms

* Learners are unable to access them in the production of specific utterances

- In early stages, a learner may wish to produce: He is hitting me

- This message may be conveyed as:

* Hitting

* He hitting

* Hitting me

* He me

- Which version the learner chooses will reflect

* The linguistic resources available or readily accessible.

* Which constituent will be maximally informative in context.

The Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes: Order and Sequence

- During the 1970’s, some studies (known as the morpheme studies) were carried out to investigate the
order of acquisition of some grammatical morphemes.

- These studies were both cross-sectional and longitudinal.

- The studies employed the Obligatory Occasion Analysis in order to establish the accuracy with which L2
learners performed some grammatical morphemes

-An accuracy order was calculated and equated with acquisition order on the ground that the more
accurately a morpheme is used, the earlier it must have been acquired

- Dulay and Burt (1973; 1974c), Bailey, Madden, and Krashen (1974) and Larsen-freeman (1976b) found
an acquisition order that correlated significantly, irrespective of the learners age and L1.

1- plural-s (books)

2- progressive-ing (john is going)

3- Copula BE (john is here)


4- Auxiliary BE (john is going)

5- Articles (the books)

6- Irregular past tense (john went)

7- Third person-s (john likes books)

8- possessive -s (John’s book)

-One of the problems for the rank orders that Dulayb and Burt observed is that they disguise the difference
in accuracy in use between various morphemes. For instance, a morpheme with a one percent lower
accuracy of usage than another morpheme is given a different ranking in just the same way as a morpheme
that is used 25 percent less accurately would be.

- To overcome this problem, krashen (1977) proposed a grouping of morpheme. He claimed that it was ‘a
natural order supported by the longitudinal and cross-sectional, individual and grouped SL findings. Items
in the boxes higher in the order were regularly found (80-90%) accurately supplied in obligatory contexts
before those in boxes lower in order (krashen 1977:151)

* Natural order for L2 acq

Ing Regular past


Auxiliary Irregular
Plural 3rd person singular
past
Article
copula Possessive -s

- There have been few longitudinal morpheme studies, such as Rosansky (1976), Hakuta (1974), schmidt
(1983)

- These researchers found some discrepancies with the order of acquisition obtained by the cross-sectional
studies. In other words, the acquisition order they obtained did not match the one proposed by Dulay and
Burt.

-The morpheme studies have been subject to criticism:

1- Using accuracy order as a basis for discussing acquisition

2 -The method of scoring morphemes does not take account of misuse in inappropriate contexts

3- The use of rank order statistics hides meaningful differences

4 -The research has been restricted to a small set of morphemes


- The research has lacked theoretical motivation

The Acquisition of Tense and Aspect:

- Research on tense and aspect has been carried out and studies have been reviewed comprehensively by
Bardovi-Harlig (1999-2000) and Zielonka (2005).
- This research is important since it explains:
 How learners acquire meanings realized by tense and aspectual systems.
 The emergence of verbal morphology.
- Accordingly, two groups of studies emerged:
1- Meaning-based Studies.
2- Form-oriented studies.

Meaning-Based Studies:

They have focused mainly on how learners express temporality at different stages of acquisition. Researchers
distinguished three broad stages in learners expression of past time.

First Stage: learners do not possess yet linguistic leans for expressing past time, hence rely on pragmatic means
like:

- Scaffolding
- Implicit reference by drawing on context
- Contrasting events
- Chronological order

No explicit reference to pastness.

Second Stage/ Lexical Stage:

- Reference to pastness is made explicit by means of expressions like adverbs.


- Verbs are not marked morphologically for past and are invariant. Either in their base-form (go) or some
idiosyncratic form (going, goed)

Third Stage:

- Morphological markers of pastness appear; they are used non-systematically (learners sometimes use
them; other times continue relying on pragmatic and lexical means).

 Over time, past tense morphology stabilizes and is accompanied by a decrease in the use of adverbs.
 This sequence of development holds true for other temporal meanings like the past perfect…etc
(they rely initially on pragmatic and lexical means before using morphological markers).

Form-Oriented Studies:

- These studies mainly investigated the emergence of verbal morphology.


- They provided evidence of a consistent order of emergence as follow:
1- 3rd person –s and present tense copula.
2- Irregular past tense forms and verb –ing.
3- Present perfect forms.
4- Regular past tense forms.
5- Future with ‘shall’ and ‘will’.
6- Past perfect forms.
- Bardovi-harlig (2000) identified four general principles in the acquisition of tense and aspect:
1- Acquisition is slow and gradual.
2- Form precedes function.
3- Irregular morphology precedes regular morphology.
4- When learners are acquiring a compound tense (present progressive, past perfect…etc), they begin
with using a verb with a suffix (playing) and only subsequently produce verbs with auxiliaries (are
playing).

The Acquisition of Syntactic Structures:


There are three sets of syntactic structures to support the evidence of the existence of developmental patterns in
SLA:

1- The acquisition of negatives in English and German.


2- The acquisition of relative clauses in English and Swedish.
3- The acquisition of German word order rules.
 The Acquisition of Negatives in English and German:
- Negation is an example of a transitional structure which involves a series of forms/structures which
learners use on route to mastering TL forms.
The interim forms are indicative of developmental stages that the learner passes through.

Stag Description Example


e
1 External negation (‘no’ or ‘not’ is placed at the No you are playing here.
beginning of the utterance).
2 Internal negation (the negator ‘no’, ‘not’ or ‘don’t’ is Mariana not coming today.
placed between the subject and the main verb).
3 Negative attachment to modal verbs. I can’t play that one.
4 Negative attachment to auxiliary verb as in target She didn’t believe me.
language. He didn’t said it.

 The Acquisition of Relative Clauses:


- As concerns relative clauses, many researchers investigated how learners develop them and tackle the
substantial learning burden of relative clauses.
- Schuman (1980) identified three stages:

Stage Description Examples


1 Learners omitting relative pronouns. I got a friend speaks Spanish.
2 Learners use only personal pronouns. I got a friend he speaks Spanish.
3 Learners use relative pronouns properly. I got a friend who speaks Spanish.
A General Pattern of L2 Grammatical Development:

Many researchers have found evidence of a general pattern of L2 grammatical development summarized in
table 3.5, which actually does allow for some variation, for example; not all learners begin with SVO pattern
initially. It varies depending on their L1.

The Acquisition of Vocabulary:

- There has been a growing interest in the study of L2 vocabulary acquisition during the 1990s. However,
there are still very few descriptive studies devoted to patterns of vocabulary development because
probably there is no agreed terminal stage for knowledge of a word. Therefore, it is not surprising that
there is no agreement to how to characterize lexical development.
- The study of a learner’s vocabulary development involves a consideration of:
1- Quantitative changes in vocabulary size overtime.
2- Qualitative changes in the learner’s knowledge of individual words
- Jiang (2000) proposed a model about how potentially L2 vocabulary develops. The learner processes
lexical items in three stages:
 First Stage: the learner stores the word inly with its formal information. Strong links between L2
word and L1 translation equivalent.
 Second stage: access to the L2 item meaning goes by the L1 translation equivalent.
 Third stage: The learner reaches this stage only when the L2 word entry includes the semantic,
syntactic, and morphological information.
The Acquisition of Phonology:

- Few descriptive studies have been carried out recently to account for how learners develop sounds of
L2.
- Closed syllables are found to be more difficult to learn than open syllables.
- Learners resort to simplification strategies when faced with articulating closed syllables, namely
deletion, epenthesis and substitution.
- Phonological development is not linear but U-shaped.

The L2=L1 Hypothesis:

The identity hypothesis received attention since it raised many issues.

 Whether the LAD is still available to L2 learners.


 To what extent developmental patterns are the same or different.
- The similarities in learner’s language in L1 and L2 hypothesis are most pronounced in the early stages
of development.
- There are differences as well: all L1 learners pass through a silent period/ L2 learners, especially adults
do not.
- There is evidence of the use of formula and of structural and semantic simplification in both types of
acquisition, but L2 learners make greater use of formulas than children acquiring their L1.
- The morpheme order of acquisition is not the same in the two types of acquisition.
- The process by which individual morphemes are acquired displays both similarities and differences;
both L1 and L2 learners omit pronouns and they both overgeneralize individual pronouns. Yet, L1
learners substitute their own names in place of the first person singular.
- The similarities are strongest in syntactical structures especially as concerns the acquisition of negatives.
- Differences between L1 and L2 acquisition of vocabulary can be expected knowing that L2 learners are
already equipped with a developed conceptual system to begin the acquisition of word forms whereas
L1 learners are faced with a dual task of developing a lexical repertoire and developing a conceptual
system.
- Similarities are also evident in the acquisition of phonology despite that L2 learners are known for
language transfer; as concerns closed syllable development, the sequence is known to be the same for
L1 and L2 learners.
- L2 learners seem to tackle the problem of learning a language in similar ways to L1 learners. (see table
3.7)
- Given the mixed results from comparative studies of L1 and L2 acquisition, the evidence we have
suggested that the hypothesis is partially supported.

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