Understanding Second Language Acquisition (2nd ed) Read online

  This book could not have been written without support and guidance from a number of people. In particular, I would like to thank my editor, Cristina Whitecross (also the editor of the first edition), for constantly reminding me of the need to be clear and frugal with the research I elected to address. If readers find the book accessible then much of the credit goes to her. I am also grateful to my fellow academics who gave their time to comment on the various chapters and point out my errors of omission and commission. These kind people were: Nick Ellis, Anne Burns, Peter Skehan, Elaine Tarone, Judit Kormos, Fred Eckman, Jean-Marc Dewaele, Alison Mackey, Robert DeKeyser, David Block, Patsy Lightbown, and Pauline Foster. Of course, any remaining faults in the book are of my own doing. Finally, I am grateful to Luiza Sauer who spent many hours checking the bibliographical entries.

  1

  Second language acquisition research: an overview

  Introduction

  In this book, I will make a distinction between ‘second language acquisition’ (henceforth ‘L2 acquisition’) and the field in which this is studied, which I will refer to as ‘SLA’. Readers should recognize, however, that this distinction is not uniformly adhered to by other researchers, who sometimes use ‘SLA’ to refer to ‘L2 acquisition’. It is useful, however, to make a clear distinction between the object of study and the discipline that has investigated it. The purpose of the book is to outline what SLA has discovered about L2 acquisition.

  L2 acquisition is a complex process, in many ways much more complex than first language (L1) acquisition as the factors involved are more numerous. For a start, as L2 acquisition takes place after L1 acquisition, it is influenced by the first language. Also, whereas first language acquisition is almost invariably accomplished in the first few years of a child’s life, L2 acquisition can take place at any age following the onset of first language acquisition through into old ageNOTE 1. Many L2 learners are cognitively mature and thus can bring to bear learning strategies not available to the L1 learner. Also, the contexts of L2 acquisition are much more varied than those of first language acquisition. For many L2 learners, the only context available is the classroom.

  SLA is a relatively new academic discipline. While there has been an interest in how learners acquire a second language for a long time, the systematic study of L2 acquisition did not really begin until the 1960s. Since then, the discipline has grown exponentially, spawning numerous studies and many theories. A useful way of introducing SLA, therefore, is through a brief history of its development. This is the main purpose of this chapter. First, though, I will define exactly what is meant by ‘L2 acquisition’.

  Defining ‘second language acquisition’

  What is ‘language’?

  A distinction is often made between competence and performance. For Chomsky (1965), ‘competence’ is the mental representation of the grammatical rules that comprise a speaker-hearer’s mental grammar while ‘performance’ involves the use of language for comprehension and production. For some SLA researchers, the goal is to describe and explain the L2 learner’s competence—especially grammatical competence. However, there is no direct window into competence. Competence can only be inferred by inspecting how learners use the second language. In effect, then, all that researchers can do is to investigate some kind of performance. Performance, however, involves much more than grammar. Recognition of this has increasingly led researchers to investigate both traditional areas of language (i.e. pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar) and the use of language for social purposes in connected discourse.

  What is a ‘second’ language?

  Some learners learn more than one ‘second’ language. In fact, in many communities it is normal for a person to learn to speak several languages. It might make sense therefore to also talk about ‘third’, ‘fourth’, or ‘fifth’ language acquisition and there are studies of learners who have learned a ‘third’ language (for example, Cenoz and Jessner 2000). Despite these problems, SLA has stuck with ‘second language (L2) acquisition’ as an all-inclusive term for learning any language after the first, although recently there have been moves to reframe it as the study of bi/multilingualism in all its manifestationsNOTE 2 (Ortega 2012).

  It is common to make a distinction between ‘second’ and ‘foreign’ language acquisition. This involves what is essentially a contextual difference. ‘Second language acquisition’ refers to the learning of another language in a context in which the language is used as a means of wider communication—for example, the learning of English in the United States or the United Kingdom. The assumption is that learners will ‘pick up’ the language as a result of the everyday communicative situations they experience. ‘Foreign language acquisition’ refers to the learning that typically takes place in a classroom through instruction where there are no or only limited opportunities to use the second language in daily life. However, ‘L2 acquisition’ has come to be used to refer to the learning that takes place in both contexts. There is a good reason for this: while the contextual difference is very real, we cannot take it for granted that the process of acquiring a second language is different in these different contexts.

  What is ‘acquisition’?

  ‘Acquisition’ is sometimes contrasted with ‘learning’ on the assumption that these involve different processes (Krashen 1981). Acquisition refers to the incidental process where learners ‘pick up’ a language without making any conscious effort to master it; whereas learning involves intentional effort to study and learn a language. On the face of it, this looks very similar to the ‘second’ versus ‘foreign’ language acquisition distinction: acquisition takes place through communicating in the L2 in a second language context whilst learning takes place through instruction in foreign language contexts. However, this is a false correlation. Both acquisition and learning can take place in both contexts although there may be a bias towards the former in the second language contexts and towards the latter in foreign contexts. In accordance with general usage in SLA, I will use ‘L2 acquisition/learning’ interchangeably as cover terms for both naturalistic ‘acquisition’ and instructed ‘learning’. However, it is important to consider whether acquisition and learning are in fact different and—if they are—in what ways.

  Investigating L2 acquisition

  Irrespective of whether we are talking about acquisition or learning, we need to consider how we can tell whether a learner has ‘acquired’ or ‘learned’ some L2 feature. This is also quite a complex issue. For example, can we say that learners have acquired/learned a feature because they can comprehend its meaning, or do they also need to be able to produce it? Many researchers focus on learners’ ability to produce an L2 feature; however, it is also possible to consider acquisition/learning in terms of learners’ ability to comprehend a feature. Is it possible to distinguish whether a feature has been ‘acquired’ or ‘learned’? Do ‘acquisition’ and ‘learning’ result in different types of L2 knowledge? Again, we will find that it may be necessary to distinguish implicit knowledge (i.e. acquired) and explicit knowledge (i.e. learned) because these involve different capabilities for the use of a second language. However, irrespective of whether we are interested in receptive/productive abilities or implicit/explicit L2 knowledge, in order to demonstrate that acquisition (or learning) has taken place, it is necessary to show that some development in the learner’s knowledge system has occurred. SLA is the study of the change that takes place in the learners’ L2 knowledge over time and of what brings about this change. In this respect, it contrasts with other linguistic disciplines such as discourse analysis which are concerned only with the use of language. However, as we will see, there is a close connection between the ‘use’ and the ‘acquisition’ of second language.

  Summing up

  In this book I will use ‘SLA’ to refer to the field of study (i.e. body of research and theory that has investigated L2 acquisition). The term ‘L2 acquisition’ will be used as a general cover term for the acquisition or learning
of any language other than a learner’s first language that can take place in both second and foreign language contextsNOTE 3. I will also need to distinguish between the kind of knowledge—implicit and explicit—that learners acquire from time to time.

  A brief history of SLA

  In many respects, SLA is a parasitic discipline. It draws on different models of language taken from linguistics. It exploits concepts and methodologies for investigating L2 acquisition drawn from a variety of disciplinary fields—psychology and sociology in particular. The development of SLA, therefore, reflects these different influences and the impact they have had on SLA at different times. Early work was heavily influenced by research on first language acquisition. The attempt to explain how acquisition arose out of social interaction led researchers to draw on discourse analysis. The need to explain how learners processed the second language input they were exposed to led SLA researchers to borrow theoretical constructs from cognitive psychology. As researchers switched their attention to the social aspects of L2 acquisition, they began to draw on theories and methodologies from sociology. The inputs from these different disciplines have helped to make SLA a rich and exciting field of study, but they also create difficulties for a newcomer to this field. One of the purposes of this brief history is to help readers with such difficulties by providing them with a general picture.

  Order and sequence in L2 acquisition

  Early work in SLA was informed by the findings and methodology of research into first language acquisition. Brown (1973) reported a longitudinal study of three children’s acquisition of a group of English morphemes (for example, plural -s, past tense -ed, and the articles ‘a’ and ‘the’). He showed that the children achieved mastery of these features in more or less the same fixed order. Other studies (for example, Klima and Bellugi 1966) showed that children acquired syntactical structures such as English negation in a sequence of stages. These findings motivated SLA researchers to investigate whether a similar order of acquisition and sequence of acquisition occurred in L2 acquisition. A number of studies involving both child and adult second language learners (for example, Dulay and Burt 1973; Cancino, Rosansky, and Schumann 1978) provided evidence that similar—although not identical—orders and sequences occurred in naturalistic L2 acquisition. For example, L2 learners typically acquired plural -s (as in ‘boys’) before third-person -s (as in ‘comes’). Also, all learners manifested an early stage in the acquisition of negatives by placing ‘no’ before the verb (for example, ‘no coming today’) as do children acquiring English as their first language.

  These studies led to questioning of a widely held belief at that time, namely that learning involved overcoming the influence of the first language in order to form correct second language ‘habits’. It was difficult to reconcile such a view of learning with evidence that showed that all learners, irrespective of their first language, followed a similar order and sequence when learning the grammar of a second language. This led Corder (1967) to propose that ‘at least some of the strategies adopted by the learner of a second language are substantially the same as those by which a first language is acquired’ (p. 164). Corder suggested that second language learners, like first language learners have a ‘built-in syllabus’ that directs when the grammar of a second language is acquired. Selinker (1972) subsequently gave the name that has become the standard term for referring to the mental grammar that a learner constructs and reconstructs—interlanguage.

  The analogy with first language acquisition, however, only worked so far. There was one obvious difference. All normal children are successful in acquiring their mother tongue. There may be differences in the rate of acquisition and also in children’s ability to make use of their first language, but they all succeed in acquiring the grammar of their first language. In contrast, most L2 learners do not achieve full grammatical competence. Selinker (1972) coined the term fossilization to refer to the fact that learners stop learning even though their interlanguage does not fully conform to the target language system. However, as we will see later, the extent to which fossilization actually occurs is controversial.

  The research investigating the order and sequence of L2 acquisition can be thought of as the starting point for SLA. Numerous studies appeared in the 1960s and 1970s and continue up to today although they are no longer as common as they once were. Whereas the early work was essentially descriptive in nature—i.e. it involved collecting and analysing samples of learner language—later work has been more theoretically driven, aimed at investigating specific hypotheses regarding why one grammatical feature is acquired earlier than another (see, for example, Pienemann 1998).

  More recently, however, the existence of a fixed order and sequence of acquisition has been challenged by some researchers (for example, Tarone and Liu 1995), who claim that what learners acquire and the order they acquire it in depends not on their so-called built-in syllabus, but on the social context in which they are learning the second language. This is a point I will return to later in this chapter.

  The early influence of L1 acquisition research in SLA is also evident in the attention that L2 researchers paid to formulaic sequences. A formulaic sequence is a ready-made chunk of language that is accessed as a whole rather than generated by combining its individual elements. We will see later that formulaic sequences are not just important for language use, but also play a role in language acquisition. Learners gradually identify the type of elements that comprise a sequence. For example, they discover that words like ‘book’, ‘pencil’, and ‘ruler’ can all be used to complete the ‘Can I have a ____?’ chunk and thus come to recognize that these words all belong to the same grammatical category.

  The research that has investigated the order and sequence of acquisition and formulaic sequences is considered in Chapter 4.

  Variability in learner language

  At any stage of development, learners will manifest variability in their use of the second language. Sometimes they will make errors and at other times they will use the target language form. In part, this can be explained by the fact that learners will sometimes draw on well-formed formulaic chunks (for example, ‘I don’t like’) and at other times construct utterances on the basis of their current interlanguage rules (for example, ‘I no like’). Variability also occurs because learners do not abandon old forms when they acquire new ones. For example, learners initially produce questions without inversion:

  Where the book is?

  and then later begin to use subject-verb inversion:

  Where is the book?

  However, learners do not instantly switch from the earlier to the later construction. Rather, they alternate between the two constructions and only gradually abandon the non-target form.

  Researchers such as Tarone (1983) and R. Ellis (1985) sought explanations for this variability. Tarone claimed that, by and large, variability is systematic. She argued that learners are responsive to the situational context and make use of their linguistic resources accordingly. In situations where they do not need to attend carefully to their choice of L2 forms, they employ a vernacular style (i.e. the style of speech associated with every-day, informal use of language) while in those contexts that call for close attention to speech, they make use of their careful style (i.e. the style of speech associated with formal situations). In particular, learners are responsive to their addressee. For example, a learner might say ‘Where the book is?’ when addressing another learner of equal status but say ‘Where is the book?’ when directing the question at a teacher. Another source of systematic variability is the linguistic context. For example, learners might use the target language third-person -s form when the verb follows a pronoun (for example, ‘She lives in London’) but use the uninflected interlanguage form when the verb follows a noun (for example, ‘My mother live in London’).

  R. Ellis (1985) argued that not all variability is systematic in the way Tarone (1983) described. He proposed that when a new linguistic form first enters t
he learner’s interlanguage, it is likely to be used interchangeably with an old form: in other words, for a while learners alternate freely between ‘Where … is?’ and ‘Where is …?’ Later on, however, they seek to use their linguistic resources systematically in accordance with the social context.

  The importance of variability in understanding L2 acquisition is reflected in Widdowson’s (1979) comment: ‘… change is only the temporal consequence of current variation’ (p. 196). This is evident in a number of ways. Free variation gives way to systematic variation. Forms that are initially only part of the learner’s careful style, over time, enter the vernacular style. Forms that figure initially only in easy linguistic contexts will gradually become available for use in more difficult linguistic contexts. The study of variability in learner language has continued over the years, drawing on increasingly sophisticated sociolinguistic models (for example, Preston 1996) and theories that emphasize the dynamic nature of second language systems (for example, de Bot, Lowie, and Verspoor 2007).

  Variability in learner language is examined in Chapter 5.

  Rethinking the role of the first language

  For a long time, there was a general assumption that the difficulties facing the L2 learner were largely due to ‘interference’ from the first language. It was thought that learning a second language involved overcoming the effects of negative language transfer. Where the L1 and the L2 were similar, positive transfer assisted learning, but where the two languages differed there would be negative transfer and learning would be impeded. This was a view reinforced by proposals for language teaching at this time, which encouraged teachers to focus on the areas of difficulty created by negative transfer through intensive drilling to ensure correct L2 ‘habits’. This view of L2 learning and teaching was challenged by the research showing that learners follow a similar order and sequence of acquisition irrespective of their first language.