TOPICS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION

 

Note: Items listed below are coded for either individual (I) work, group/pair (G) work, or whole-class (C) discussion, as suggestions to the instructor on how to incorporate the topics and questions into a class session.

1. (G) In the first paragraph of this chapter, second language learning is described as a complex, long-term effort that requires much of the learner. In small groups of three to five, share your own experiences in learning, or attempting to learn, a foreign language. Describe your own (a) commitment, (b) involvement, and (c) effort to learn. This discussion should introduce you to a variety of patterns of learning.
2. (C) Look at the two definitions of language, one from an encyclopedia and the other from Pinker's book (page 5). Why are there differences between these two definitions? What assumptions or biases do they reflect on the part of the lexicographer? How do those definitions represent "condensed theories"?
3. (I/G) Write your own "twenty-five-words-or-less" definitions of language, learning, and teaching. What would you add to or delete from the definitions given in this chapter? Share your definitions with another classmate or in a small group. Compare differences and similarities.
4. (G) Consider the eight subfields of linguistics listed on page 6, and, assigning one subfield to a pair or small group, discuss briefly the type of approach to second language teaching that might emerge from emphasizing the exclusive importance of your particular subfield. Report your thoughts to the whole class.
5. (C) What did Twaddell (1935: 57) mean when he said, "The scientific method is quite simply the convention that mind does not exist"? What are the advantages and disadvantages of attending only to "publicly observable responses" in studying human behavior? Don't limit yourself only to language teaching in considering the ramifications of behavioristic principles.
6. (C) Looking back at the three schools of thought described in this chapter, try to come up with some examples of activities in the language classroom that would match the three perspectives.
7. (C) Considering the productive relationship between theory and practice, think of some examples (from any field of study) that show that theory and practice are interactive. Next, think of some specific types of activities typical of a foreign language class you have been in (choral drills, translation, reading aloud, using a vocabulary word in a sentence, etc.). What kind of theoretical assumptions underlie these activities? How might the success of the activity possibly alter the theory behind it?
8. (G) Richards and Rodgers (1986: 5) said the Grammar Translation Method "is a method for which there is no theory." Why did they make that statement? Do you agree with them? Share in a group any experiences you have had with Grammar Translation in your foreign language classes.

SUGGESTED READINGS

 

Mitchell, Rosamond and Myles, Florence. 1998. Second Language Learning

Theories. New York: Oxford University Press.

     Skehan, Peter. 1998. A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. New

York: Oxford University Press.

     Williams, Marion and Burden, Robert L. 1997. Psychology for Language

Teachers: A Social Constructivist Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

A number of references were made in this chapter to trends in research on applied linguistics and SLA. These three informative books offer further perspectives on the three major schools of thought described here, and are written in a user-friendly style. 

     Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, published by Cambridge University Press.

Comprehensive and current information on various subfields of interest within what is broadly termed "applied linguistics" is available through this annually published journal. 

Thomas Kuhn. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

This classic work describes the waxing and waning of scientific trends through history. Lt helps one to understand SLA research trends in a context of other scientific disciplines. 

Brown, H. Douglas. 2000. Teaching by Principles:An Interactive Approach

to Language Pedagogy. Second Edition. White Plains, NY: Pearson

Education.

     Richard-Amato, Patricia A. 1996. Making It Happen: Interaction in the

Second Language Classroom, From Theory to Practice. White Plains, NY:

Pearson Education.

     Richards, Jack and Rodgers, Theodore. 1986. Approaches and Methods in

Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

These three books offer a historical overview and critical analysis of language teaching methods in a context of theoretical foundations that underlie pedagogical practices.

LANGUAGE LEARNING EXPERIENCE: JOURNAL ENTRY 1

 

In each of the ten chapters in this book, a brief set of journal-writing guidelines will be offered. Here, you are strongly encouraged to commit yourself to a process of weekly journal entries that chronicle a previous or concurrent foreign language learning experience. In so doing, you will be better able to connect the issues that you read about in this book with a real-life, personal experience.

     Remember, a journal is meant to be "freely" written, without much concern for beautiful prose, rhetorical eloquence, or even grammaticality. It is your diary in which you can spontaneously record feelings, thoughts, reactions, and questions. The prompts that are offered here are not meant to be exhaustive, so feel free to expand on them considerably. The one rule of thumb to follow in writing your journal is: connect your own experiences learning a foreign language with issues and models and studies that are presented in the chapters of the book. Your experiences then become vivid examples of what might otherwise remain somewhat abstract theories.

     If you decide to focus your writing on a previous experience learning a foreign language, you will need to "age regress" yourself to the time that you were learning the language. If at all possible, choose a language you learned (or tried to learn!) as an adult, that is, after the age of twelve or so. Then, describe what you were feeling and thinking and doing then.

     If your journal centers on a concurrent experience, so much the better, because your memory of the ongoing events will be more vivid. The journal-writing process may even prompt you to adopt certain strategies for more successful learning.

Guidelines for Entry 1

 

• As you start(ed) your foreign language class, what is your overall emotional feeling? Are you overwhelmed? challenged? unmotivated? Is the course too easy?
• How do you feel about your classmates? the class spirit or mood? Is the class upbeat and motivating, or boring and tedious? Analyze why you have this perception. What is causing it? Is it your own attitude, or the teacher's style, or the makeup of the class?
• Describe activities that you did in the early days of the class that illustrate (a) a behavioristic perspective on second language acquisition, (b) a cognitive perspective, and (c) a constructivist perspective.
• Describe your teacher's teaching style. Is it effective? Why or why not? Does your teacher seem to have an approach to language teaching that is consistent with what you've read so far?

CHAPTER 2

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

 

The marvelous capacity for acquiring competence in one's native language within the first few years of life has been a subject of interest for many centuries. "Modern" research on child language acquisition dates back to the latter part of the eighteenth century, when the German philosopher Dietrich Tiedemann recorded his observations of the psychological and linguistic development of his young son. For a century and a half, few if any significant advances were made in the study of child language; for the most part research was limited to diarylike recordings of observed speech with some attempts to classify word types. Not until the second half of the twentieth century did researchers begin to analyze child language systematically and to try to discover the nature of the psycholinguistic process that enables every human being to gain fluent control of an exceedingly complex system of communication. In a matter of a few decades, some giant strides were taken, especially in the generative and cognitive models of language, in describing the acquisition of particular languages, and in probing universal aspects of acquisition.

     This wave of research in child language acquisition led language teachers and teacher trainers to study some of the general findings of such research with a view to drawing analogies between first and second language acquisition, and even to justifying certain teaching methods and techniques on the basis of first language learning principles. On the surface, it is entirely reasonable to make the analogy. After all, all children, given a normal developmental environment, acquire their native languages fluently and efficiently; moreover, they acquire them "naturally," without special instruction, although not without significant effort and attention to language. The direct comparisons must be treated with caution, however. There are dozens of salient differences between first and second language learning; the most obvious difference, in the case of adult second language learning, is the tremendous cognitive and affective contrast between adults and children. A detailed examination of these differences is made in Chapter 3.

     This chapter is designed to outline issues in first language learning as a foundation on which you can build an understanding of principles of second language learning. A coherent grasp of the nature of first language learning is an invaluable aid, if not an essential component, in the construction of a theory of second language acquisition.This chapter provides an overview of various theoretical positions—positions that can be related to the paradigms discussed in Chapter 1 —in first language acquisition, and a discussion of some key issues that are particularly significant for an understanding of second language learning.

THEORIES OF FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

 

Everyone at some time has witnessed the remarkable ability of children to communicate. As small babies, children babble and coo and cry and vocally or nonvocally send an extraordinary number of messages and receive even more messages. As they reach the end of their first year, children make specific attempts to imitate words and speech sounds they hear around them, and about this time they utter their first "words." By about 18 months of age, these words have multiplied considerably and are beginning to appear in two-word and three-word "sentences"—commonly referred to as "telegraphic" utterances—such as "allgone milk," "bye-bye Daddy," "gimme toy," and so forth. The production tempo now begins to increase as more and more words are spoken every day and more and more combinations of two- and three-word sentences are uttered. By about age three, children can comprehend an incredible quantity of linguistic input; their speech capacity mushrooms as they become the generators of nonstop chattering and incessant conversation, language thereby becoming a mixed blessing for those around them! This fluency continues into school age as children internalize increasingly complex structures, expand their vocabulary, and sharpen communicative skills. At school age, children not only learn what to say but what not to say as they learn the social functions of their language.

     How can we explain this fantastic journey from that first anguished cry at birth to adult competence in a language? From the first word to tens of thousands? From telegraphese at eighteen months to the compound-complex, cognitively precise, socioculturally appropriate sentences just a few short years later? These are the sorts of questions that theories of language acquisition attempt to answer.

     In principle, one could adopt one of two polarized positions in the study of first language acquisition. Using the schools of thought referred to in the previous chapter, an extreme behavioristic position would claim that children come into the world with a tabula rasa, a clean slate bearing no preconceived notions about the world or about language, and that these children are then shaped by their environment and slowly conditioned through various schedules of reinforcement. At the other constructivist extreme is the position that makes not only the rationalist/cognitivist claim that children come into this world with very specific innate knowledge, predispositions, and biological timetables, but that children learn to function in a language chiefly through interaction and discourse.

     These positions represent opposites on a continuum, with many possible positions in between.Three such points are elucidated in this chapter. The first (behavioristic) position is set in contrast to the second (nativist) and third (functional) positions.

Behavioristic Approaches

 

Language is a fundamental part of total human behavior, and behaviorists examined it as such and sought to formulate consistent theories of first language acquisition. The behavioristic approach focused on the immediately perceptible aspects of linguistic behavior—the publicly observable responses—and the relationships or associations between those responses and events in the world surrounding them. A behaviorist might consider effective language behavior to be the production of correct responses to stimuli. If a particular response is reinforced, it then becomes habitual, or conditioned. Thus children produce linguistic responses that are reinforced. This is true of their comprehension as well as production responses, although to consider comprehension is to wander just a bit out of the publicly observable realm. One learns to comprehend an utterance by responding appropriately to it and by being reinforced for that response.

     One of the best-known attempts to construct a behavioristic model of linguistic behavior was embodied in B.F. Skinner's classic, Verbal Behavior (1957). Skinner was commonly known for his experiments with animal behavior, but he also gained recognition for his contributions to education through teaching machines and programmed learning (Skinner 1968). Skinner's theory of verbal behavior was an extension of his general theory of learning by operant conditioning. Operant conditioning refers to conditioning in which the organism (in this case, a human being) emits a response, or operant (a sentence or utterance), without necessarily observable stimuli; that operant is maintained (learned) by reinforcement (for example, a positive verbal or nonverbal response from another person). If a child says "want milk" and a parent gives the child some milk, the operant is reinforced and, over repeated instances, is conditioned. According to Skinner, verbal behavior, like other behavior, is controlled by its consequences. When consequences are rewarding, behavior is maintained and is increased in strength and perhaps frequency. When consequences are punishing, or when there is a total lack of reinforcement, the behavior is weakened and eventually extinguished.

     Skinner's theories attracted a number of critics, not the least among them Noam Chomsky (1959), who penned a highly critical review of Verbal Behavior. Some years later, however, Kenneth MacCorquodale (1970) published a reply to Chomsky's review in which he eloquently defended Skinner's points of view. And so the battle raged on. Today virtually no one would agree that Skinner's model of verbal behavior adequately accounts for the capacity to acquire language, for language development itself, for the abstract nature of language, or for a theory of meaning. A theory based on conditioning and reinforcement is hard-pressed to explain the fact that every sentence you speak or write—with a few trivial exceptions—is novel, never before uttered either by you or by anyone else! These novel utterances are nevertheless created by the speaker and processed by the hearer.

     In an attempt to broaden the base of behavioristic theory, some psychologists proposed modified theoretical positions. One of these positions was mediation theory, in which meaning was accounted for by the claim that the linguistic stimulus (a word or sentence) elicits a "mediating" response that is self-stimulating. Charles Osgood (1953, 1957) called this self-stimulation a "representational mediation process," a process that is really covert and invisible, acting within the learner. It is interesting that mediation theory thus attempted to account for abstraction by a notion that reeked of "mentalism"—a cardinal sin for dyed-in-the-wool behaviorists! In fact, in some ways mediation theory was really a rational/cognitive theory masquerading as behavioristic.

     Mediation theories still left many questions about language unanswered. The abstract nature of language and the relationship between meaning and utterance were unresolved. All sentences have deep structures—the level of underlying meaning that is only manifested overtly by surface structures. These deep structures are intricately interwoven in a person's total cognitive and affective experience. Such depths of language were scarcely plumbed by mediational theory.

     Yet another attempt to account for first language acquisition within a behavioristic framework was made by Jenkins and Palermo (1964). While admitting (p. 143) that their conjectures were "speculative" and "premature," the authors attempted to synthesize notions of generative linguistics and mediational approaches to child language. They claimed that the child may acquire frames of a linear pattern of sentence elements and learn the stimulus-response equivalences that can be substituted within each frame; imitation was an important, if not essential, aspect of establishing stimulus-response associations. But this theory, too, failed to account for the abstract nature of language, for the child's creativity, and for the interactive nature of language acquisition.

     It would appear that the rigor of behavioristic psychology, with its emphasis on empirical observation and the scientific method, only began to explain the miracle of language acquisition. It left untouched genetic and interactionist domains that could be explored only by approaches that probed more deeply. 
 

The Nativist Approach

 

Nativist approaches to the study of child language asked some of those deeper questions. The term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of language around us, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of language.

     Innateness hypotheses gained support from several sides. Eric Lenneberg (1967) proposed that language is a "species-specific" behavior and that certain modes of perception, categorizing abilities, and other language-related mechanisms are biologically determined. Chomsky (1965) similarly claimed the existence of innate properties of language to explain the child's mastery of a native language in such a short time despite the highly abstract nature of the rules of language. This innate knowledge, according to Chomsky, is embodied in a "little black box" of sorts, a language acquisition device (LAD). McNeill (1966) described LAD as consisting of four innate linguistic properties: 

1. the ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment,
2. the ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can later be refined,
3. knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds are not, and
4. the ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic system so as to construct the simplest possible system out of the available linguistic input.

 

    McNeill and other Chomskyan disciples composed eloquent arguments for the appropriateness of the LAD proposition, especially in contrast to behavioristic, stimulus-response (S-R) theory, which was so limited in accounting for the generativity of child language. Aspects of meaning, abstractness, and creativity were accounted for more adequately. Even though it was readily recognized that the LAD was not literally a cluster of brain cells that could be isolated and neurologically located, such inquiry on the rationalistic side of the linguistic-psychological continuum stimulated a great deal of fruitful research.