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- Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2002
Examination Thesis from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2 (B), University of Cologne (English Seminar), language: English, abstract: “How do we learn language ?” is both a very interesting and a very complex question. It has fascinated people for centuries to find an answer to that question, but so far only competing theories have come up. In 1965, Noam Chomsky invented the theory of a Universal Grammar underlying the structures of all languages and that babies were born with innate knowledge of this Universal Grammar. The idea has revolutionised language acquisition research. But only in the 1970s did researchers start to look at the acquisition of second languages as well as the first language acquisition. Since then, studies, theories and new research fields have sprung up at an amazing rate. In this essay, I will try to give an account on what second language acquisition research has found out so far and in what way these findings could probably be applied to improve the way pupils learn English in Germany. It will be necessary to differentiate between naturalistic and instructed language learning. Naturalistic language learning takes place if people are not explicitly taught the foreign language, but rather learn it by trying to communicate in it. Most studies relating to naturalistic language acquisition observe immigrants’ children who do not yet go to school. Instructed language learning takes place in environments in which the learner is explicitly taught grammar and vocabulary of the foreign language, as in a classroom.
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ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE AND
NATURALISTIC LANGUAGE LEARNING
für die Lehrämter für die Sekundarstufe II und Sekundarstufe I, dem Staatlichen Prüfungsamt für Erste Staatsprüfungen für Lehrämter
Institut / Seminar: Englisches Seminar der Universität zu Köln
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1 Introduction
“How do we learn language ?” is both a very interesting and a very complex question. It has fascinated people for centuries to find an answer to that question, but so far only competing theories have come up. In 1965, Noam Chomsky invented the theory of a Universal Grammar underlying the structures of all languages and that babies were born with innate knowledge of this Universal Grammar. The idea has revolutionised language acquisition research. But only in the 1970s did researchers start to look at the acquisition of second languages as well as the first language acquisition. Since then, studies, theories and new research fields have sprung up at an amazing rate.
In this essay, I will try to give an account on what second language acquisition research has found out so far and in what way these findings could probably be applied to improve the way pupils learn English in Germany. It will be necessary to differentiate between naturalistic and instructed language learning. Naturalistic language learning takes place if people are not explicitly taught the foreign language, but rather learn it by trying to communicate in it. Most studies relating to naturalistic language acquisition observe immigrants’ children who do not yet go to school. Instructed language learning takes place in environments in which the learner is explicitly taught grammar and vocabulary of the foreign language, as in a classroom.
To make second language acquisition in general understandable, chapter 2 will first take a look at the processes taking place in first language (L1) acquisition. Afterwards, it will be discussed whether the same processes take place in second language (L2) acquisition.
Everybody will agree that while L1 is a universal process (i.e. all children learn a language) and always endows children with full competence (i.e. they are all able to communicate fluently in that language without a foreign accent or any other inhibitions), L2 acquisition is more often than not a voluntary activity and usually L2 learners do not attain full competence. The reasons for this are to be found in the radically different language acquisition environments. An L2 may be learnt at school or ‘naturalistically’, i.e., without getting the language explained explicitly. While babies must acquire their language, pupils might not be especially moti- vated to learn a foreign language and might reject it.
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These variables and many more have a great influence on the outcome of L2 acquisition, as chapters 6 and 7 will show. Chapter 6 will mainly deal with what formal instruction does to L2 acquisition, and chapter 7 illustrate the influences of the individual learner on it.
But before that, it will need to be established whether or not L1 and L2 acquisition have anything in common at all. Chapter 3 will consider that. Facts put fo rward in this essay mostly remain theoretically hypothesised facts, supported by a huge body of evidence. It must nevertheless be mentioned that second language acquisition research experiences considerable problems in the collection and interpretation of data in its studies. Most of the data can be interpreted in more than one way, and thus every proposition proved by empirical study must still be taken with a grain of salt. I will briefly address research problems in chapter 8.
Chapter 9 will then consider in which way if any second language acquisition research can be practically applied for English teaching in Germany. I will take a short look at the current situation in this country and then propose a recommendation of how optimal second language teaching in Germany might work. It will become apparent during the analysis that I have mostly refrained from explaining explicitly naturalistic second language acquisition. A sufficiently clear picture ought to be formed in juxtaposing the effects of formal instruction against it. An explicit analysis would not only exceed the scope of this essay, but it would also mean repeating the points made in the analysis of instructed language learning.
2 L1 Acquisition - An overview
L1 Acquisition - the study of first language acquisition - looks at how children learn to speak their mother tongue. This i s an especially fascinating field of enquiry, as all children, regardless of where they live, their general cognitive capability, or their social circumstances, acquire their mother tongue completely. Moreover, L1 acquisition is not a voluntary undertaking, as the mother tongue must be learnt (cf. Pinker 1994; Felix 1982).
There are basically two major schools of thought in L1 acquisition, theempiristicand thenativistic.The empiristic school, whose main defendants were, for exa m- ple, Skinner, Osgood, and Hull, proposes that language learning was one of many
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manifestations of a general learning ability or the adaptation of an orga nism’s behaviour. The nativistic position, which is often connected with names like Chomsky, McNeill, or Lenneberg, proposes a special, innate,language devicein the biogenetic structure of a human being, which enables children to acquire their mother tongue in a unique way. Since it was formed, the nativistic position has massed a huge body of evidence to support it and has been accepted by more and more linguists. In this chapter, I will attempt to present a short overview of L1 acquisition, according to the nativistic position.
First language acquisition basically begins with the child’s birth. However, the baby will at first neither be able to speak nor to listen to language in a systematic way. It takes some training of the auditory system first to be able to distinguish the sounds of language. The same is true for the oral production system - babies are not able to produce distinct phonemes immediately after birth. They do have, on the other hand, the ability to produce any sound of any natural language in the world. It takes roughly six months for babies to turn from universal phoneticians to language-specified. (cf. Pinker 1994). Before starting to speak, babies us ually go though a ‘silent period’ before ababble period.During this period they start making apparently uncontrolled noise, but in reality during this period they gain sufficient control over their voice-producing system that they are able to pronounce the sounds of their language correctly. An amazing fact about this period is that deaf children go through it in the same way that non-pathologic children do. Pinker (1994) even found out that deaf children may ‘babble’ with their hands in order to acquire a sign language. Moreover, as Felix (1982) states, deaf parents do not have an influence on the phonetic development of their child. Therefore, the ‘babble phase’ is independent of stimuli.
Only after the babble phase do researchers talk about L1 acquisition. Felix puts the time when L1 acquisition starts between the 18thand the 26thmonth of age. At that time, children start to produce words. At first, they start with grammarless one-word utterances only, but they may also produce language chunks like “What is that?” which they have heard frequently and the meaning of which is understood by them. According to Pinker (1994), the one-word-stage lasts from two months to one year. The words produced by children are usually words adhering to thehere and nowprinciple, that is, names for persons or objects the child can
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see and perhaps even touch. This has mainly to do with the cognitive state of deve lopment of the child; he cannot conceptualise abstract thoughts of objects yet. The two-word-stage is the next big step for the child in L1 acquisition. During this period, children must start using grammar to make their utterances meaningful. Lexically speaking, children still mostly learn words and names for objects that are ‘here and now’, but the lexicon rapidly expands. Pinker (1994) found out that the words they learn are almost all word- for-word translatable into all languages. For him, the most important feature of the two-word-stage is, however, the grammaticality of the children’s utterances. The underlying word orderagent ? action ? recipient ? object ? locationwas found to be true for more than 95% of all the children’s utterances. The children enunciate those words they find semant ically most ‘unstable’, that is, the content of which they think cannot be guessed from context or extralingual devices such as mimes or gestures. At the age of about three years, which is usually the time when the two-wordstage is over (Pinker 1994), children rapidly expand both the ir lexicon and their grammar. Lexically speaking, they are now able to acquire words that do not adhere to the here and now principle, as their state of their general cognitive abilities has developed further. At this point, lexical learning has reached its peak in learning rate and will continue at that rate until the children are about six years old. By that time, their lexicon will, on average, include 13,000 words (Pinker 1994: 150). That means that for more than three years children will have learnt one new word every waking hour.
In addition to a rapidly expanding lexicon, children must also acquire the morphology, the syntax, and the pragmatics of their mother tongue. The first semantic rules children follow can be observed during the two-word-stage, but they start acquiring morphologic rules only after. As this is a fairly easy process to observe, many language acquisition studies have observed the changes in the children’s mo rphologic system. What the researchers found out is one of the main pillars of the nativistic position: children make errors that they cannot have heard from their parents. For example, they may use plural forms like ‘sheeps’ and ‘mouses’ which they will not have heard any native speaker say. In fact, those mistakes happen because as children acquire rules, such as theplural -srule in English, they over- generalise the use of the rule, applying it to any noun in their lexicon. The same
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phenomenon tends to be observable with any other rules the children acquire, and thus Ellis follows de Villiers and de Villiers in their assessment:
Thus, the acquisition of forms such as ‘went’ follows a Ushaped pattern of development, with children first using it correctly (for example, ‘went’) and then incorrectly (for example, ‘goed’) before they finally once again produce the correct form (‘went’). (de Villiers and de Villiers (1973) in Ellis (1994 : 77))
Peltzer-Karpf and Zangl (1998) also illustrate this phenomenon, describing the different states of rule-acquisition:
Table 2.1 The states of Rule-acquisition (Peltzer-Karpf and Zangl 1998: 7)They state that during the Initial state and the Quasi stable state structures are used quite reliably, but that the utterances that do conform with the target- language norm are usually language chunks, i.e. unanalysed bits of language they may have heard in native speaker’s speech. The Turbulent state and the Intermittent state are mainly marked by many errors occurring in the children’s speech, which is caused by the instability of the learner’s rule system. In other words, children hypothesise rules in those states, trying to confirm them against the input they hear. If not quite random trial and error, the process is very similar to trial and error. I will later in this chapter explain the processes taking place in these states in more detail. The Partially ordered state, the Ordered state and the Coherent state, finally, are marked by a reduction in the learner’s errors, and a reduction in overgeneralisation. By then, the children will have found what is an acceptable rule system, and they gradually learn to use it and to apply it correctly. Simultaneously, they are able to identify exceptions to the rules (e.g. ‘went’) and to use exceptions cor- rectly and coherently.
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2.1 Chomsky’s Universal Grammar
This in itself does not automatically lead to a nativistic position, but in combination with the fact that learners do not typically receivenegative evidence,i.e. correction, it makes a good argument for the nativistic position. If there were no special ‘language device’ to help children recognise that ‘goed’ or ‘sheeps’ are wrong, how could they so uniformly arrive at the target- language (TL) rules? To solve problems like, this, Chomsky invented the notion of aUniversal Grammarin the 1960s. Universal Grammar (UG) is defined as a set of principles and parameters which enable human beings to acquire a language. If there existed a principle saying ‘There can only be one plural form of a morpheme’, the child would automatically by hearing ‘children’ know that ‘childs’ is wrong. There is, of course, much more evidence pointing to the existence of a language device, and thus to UG. There is, for example, thepoverty of stimulusargument. As Krosse (1992) points out, the linguistic competence of the L1 learner far exceeds the language he has been exposed to. This argument proposes UG, because it proves the creativity of child language despite the lack of any rule explanation. The process of rule-acquisition, therefore, must be subconscious and unive rsal. Pinker (1994) also found out that rule-application is natural.1Another example of the principles proposed by UG researchers is thesubsetprinciple. According to Krosse (1992), children automatically assume the most restrictive grammar or rule to be the appropriate one if they are not exposed to positive evidence, i.e. input including a less restrictive grammar. In other words, the rules children create and test are rather like ‘To form a plural noun, add an-sat the end of the word’ than like ‘To form a plural, add an -s to the end of the word or do not add anything to it’. While the second variation of the rule would account for more words, and be more evident in the children’s input as they hear phrases like ‘two sheep’, they rather hypothesise the first rule to be the appropriate one. This principle is enormously important. If children thought the second variation of the above rule to be true, they could never deduce from input alone that ‘sheeps’ is wrong. A grammar including a rule like the second variation is called asuperset
1 He tested children’s ability to recognise compounds as regular or irregular. He proposed that while all children would accept ‘mice-eater’ as the correct form, none accepted ‘rats-eater’, despite the fact that none of them may ever have been told that ‘rats-eater’ was wrong or never have heard ‘rat-eater’ before. Therefore, the input the children have heard would not be sufficient to judge ‘rats-eater’ ungrammatical, and there is no other explanation than UG for the test results.
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grammar, always leaving the subset grammar a smaller part of the superset grammar.
