Second Language Acquisition: A Historical Perspective - Prof. Escutia López, Apuntes de Psicolingüística

¡Descarga Second Language Acquisition: A Historical Perspective - Prof. Escutia López y más Apuntes en PDF de Psicolingüística solo en Docsity!

RECENT HISTORY OF

Second Language Acquisition

Behaviorism

• (^) In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the techniques of language teaching were based on a behaviorist view of language.
• (^) Language under this view is essentially a system of habits; learning proceeds by producing a response to a stimulus and receiving either positive or negative reinforcement (e.g., positive if your intended meaning was understood). If you receive enough positive reinforcement for a certain response it will become a habit.

Contrastive Analysis

• (^) If language is a set of habits and if L

habits can interfere with TL habits, then the

proper focus of teaching should be on

where the L1 and TL differ, since these are

going to be the places which cause the most

trouble for learners. This is often referred to

as the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis.

Contrastive Analysis

• (^) Takes language to be a set of habits and learning to be the establishment of new habits.
• (^) Locates the major source of errors in the first language (habits).
• (^) We should be able to account for errors by considering differences between L1 and TL.
• (^) Predicts greater differences lead to more errors.
• (^) Differences must be taught, similarities will be implicitly transferred from the L1.
• (^) Difficulty/ease of learning a particular TL is determined by the differences between L1 and TL.

*Behaviorism

• (^) The rules are very abstract and complex,

and they are underdetermined by the data

children hear—yet speakers growing up in

the same speech community end up with a

highly uniform set of internalized rules.

• (^) Children don’t make the mistakes for which

they could receive negative reinforcement in

the first place.

*Contrastive Analysis

• (^) Second language learners do a lot of the same things (e.g., overregularization of forms like He comed).
• (^) Many errors that second language learners make cannot be traced to influence of their L1.
• (^) “Transfer of habits” doesn’t seem to be consistent across languages. Zobl (1980) showed that French learners of English failed to show evidence of a predicted error, but English learners of French did.

*Contrastive Analysis

• (^) Contrastive Analysis certainly doesn’t predict subjective (psycholinguistic?) difficulty; a second language learner may very easily produce an erroneous form, or struggle and produce a correct form.
• (^) It is actually not at all straightforward to enumerate the “differences” between languages (hence, it is hard to predict where problems would arise, under the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis).

Error Analysis

• (^) One of the next steps was to look seriously

at the kind of errors learners were making.

• (^) Since Contrastive Analysis turned out not to

be a productive pedagogical tool, the idea

behind Error Analysis was to look at errors

that the students are making to determine

the “source” of the error.

• (^) Error ≠ mistake

Error Analysis

• (^) One of the conclusions reached in error analysis studies was that the majority of errors did not come from interference caused by the learner’s native language, but were rather “interlanguageinternal” errors.
• (^) Error analysis can be considered a step along the way to the hypothesis that learners have an interlanguage—a grammatical system that is nevertheless not targetlike.

Interlanguage

• (^) If the learner has an internal grammar (not

the grammatical system of the target

language, but a system “on the way” to the

TL), then we can view it as developing, and

we can ask the question of whether it shows

stages of development.

Stages of acquisition

• (^) Also, kids learning English seem to go through consistent stages as well. Brown (1973) found that kids learn morphological inflections in a consistent order: - (^) Present progressive ( ing) - (^) Prepositions (in, on) - (^) Plural (s ) - (^) Past irregular - (^) Possessive (’s) - (^) Articles (a, the) - (^) Past regular (ed ) - (^) 3rd singular regular (s ) - (^) 3rd singular irregular

Does L2A progress in uniform

stages as well?

• (^) One of the first investigations of this looked at 60 children whose L1 was Spanish and 55 whose L was Chinese, all learning English as an L2 (Dulay and Burt 1974).
• (^) They found that that the Chinese and Spanish groups showed a similar order of acquisition of morphemes, basically the same as the order Brown found for L1A of English.

Does L2A progress in uniform

stages as well?

• (^) Several studies were done, all with strengths

and shortcomings, but the bottom line seems

to be that there is a largely L1invariant

order of acquisition of these morphemes in

L2A.

• (^) This effect seems to appear across test types

(indicating that it isn’t an artifact of the test

itself).

Sequence of L2a (Cook 2007)

Plural s Girls go. Progressive ing (^) Girls going. Copula forms of be (^) Girls are here. Auxiliary forms ofbe Girls are going. Definite and indefinite articles the and a The girls go. Irregular past tense (^) The girls went. Third person s The girl goes. Possessive 's The girl's book.