Chapter Ten
Bilingualism & second language acquisition
Outline
Introduction
Growing up bilingual
Theories of second language acquisition
Foreign-language Educators' Contributions
- Child Language Researchers' Contributions
- Linguists' Approaches to Second Language Acquisition
- Psycholinguists' Approaches to Second Language Processing
- Sociocultural Approaches to Second Language Learning
Summary
Key Concepts From the Book
I. Although the majority of Americans speak only English, most people in the world are bilingual to some extent. The reasons for bilingualism are many and varied. Most people who use more than one language on a daily basis use different languages for different situations. (Page 453-454)
II. Identifying someone as bilingual is often taken to mean "perfectly" bilingual, but this is a faulty concept. Very few bilinguals use both their languages equally for the same sorts of task. (Page 454)
III. The term second language acquisition refers to cases in which a person who already speaks one language is introduced to a second language, either through submersion, immersion or in a formal foreign language classroom. If two languages are learned simultaneously from birth, this is referred to as native bilingualism. (Page 454-455)
IV. Much of the research on second language acquisition has been motivated by practical questions, such as how to improve foreign language teaching and learning, and how to improve the academic achievement of children who start school unable to speak English. Other researchers have focused on questions about the organization of more than one language in the brain, attempting to discover if language is localized the same way in the brains of bilinguals and monolinguals. (Page 455-456)
V. Children whose mothers and fathers speak different languages typically grow up bilingual if their parents speak to them consistently in both languages. Bilinguals often produce utterances that contain elements of both languages (code switches). In some bilingual communities, code switching for certain items becomes the norm, and identifies speakers as members of that community. (Page 457-458)
VI. Children who grow up with two languages often display precocious metalinguistic skills since they learn very early on that names for things and ways of expressing ideas are arbitrary and different in different languages. Growing up in a bilingual household does not appear to contribute to or cause language problems or delays. (Page 457-458)
VII. Native bilinguals need to keep speaking both languages if they are to maintain proficiency, since children as well as adults tend to lose languages they don't use often (language attrition). Language attrition occurs even faster in children than in adults. Once bilingual children in a monolingual community start attending school and making friends, they may even refuse to speak the less useful language. (Page 458)
VIII. Five groups of researchers have contributed to our understanding of second language acquisition. These are:
A. foreign language educators worried about student progress
B. child language researchers interested in similarities with first language acquisition
C. linguists interested in testing notions of language universals
D. psycholinguists interested in language processing issues
E. sociolinguists interested in the use of language in social settings (Page 458-459)
IX. The best methods of foreign language teaching have been discussed at least since the time of the Roman Empire. Current research on second language teaching has focused on students in foreign language classes. These students typically have noticeable accents, make many errors in grammar, morphology and word choice, and may progress quite slowly. (Page 459-460)
X. Popular methods of teaching foreign language alternate between grammar/translation methods (instruction is in the student's native language, with an emphasis on reading and relatively little conversation) and direct methods (instruction is in the second language and teachers avoid stating formal rules). Today, most foreign language teaching involves a mixture of the two methods. (Page 460)
XI. Contrastive analysis (analyzing two languages to see where they are different) is used to predict in which areas speakers of one language will have difficulty learning the second language because of interference errors (caused by negative transfer) and in which areas they will find the second language easy to learn (due to positive transfer). (Page 460)
XII. Research based on foreign language teaching has alerted us to the difficulty of perfecting second language learning and to the likelihood of fossilization of non-native features in the speech of learners. Researchers have identified many specific areas where native speakers of one language will have difficulty mastering a second language. (Pages 460-461)
XIII. One of the difficulties facing foreign language teachers is that there are enormous personal differences in the speed and ultimate attainment of individuals in a language class. Carroll (1981) devised a test of foreign language aptitude (Carroll's Modern Language Aptitude Test) that identified four factors that predict success in foreign language learning:
A. associative memory
B. sound-symbol association
C. inductive ability
D. grammatical sensitivity (Page 461)
XIV. Motivation also plays an important role in second language acquisition. Integrative motivation (the desire to identify with the culture of the language being learned) and instrumental motivation (the desire to learn the language as a means to and end, such as getting a better job) are both powerful helpers to people who are learning a second language. (Page 461-462)
XV. Research on child language acquisition has contributed to the study of SL acquisition, with particular focus on the similarities and differences between learning a first and a second language. Children learning a first language typically make errors that are considered a normal (and even necessary) part of language learning. The concept that errors are a sign of progress has more recently been applied to second language acquisition. (Page 462)
XVI. Child-language based researchers explore whether or not second language acquisition is a simple recapitulation of first language learning. Is there an innate language acquisition capacity (the Language Acquisition Device or LAD), and if so, how does it relate to the learner's environment (the language acquisition social support system or LASS)? (Pages 462-463)
XVII. Children moved to a second language setting without explicit instruction tend to make some of the same developmental errors as children learning a first language, and will, like very young children, make overgeneralization errors based upon the features of the target language. (Page 463)
XVIII. Second language learners in an untutored situation learn the target language in essentially the same order as first language learners of that language. Speakers from different language backgrounds show similar orders of acquisition and similar errors, which suggests that the target language exerts more influence over acquisition than habits brought over from the native language. Second language learners use identifiable strategies of acquisition that mimic those of first language learners. (Page 463-464)
XIX. Strategies of SL acquisition mimic those of first language learners. Both types of learner uses imitated chunks or modular patterns as a first strategy for communicating. Then they move on to analyzing syntactic structures. Both learners also gradually increase the length of their utterances. (Page 464)
XX. The quantity of input to second language learners is important in determining the speed of SL acquisition. People learning in a classroom setting who seek out opportunities to converse with a native speaker learn faster than those who do not. (Page 464)
XXI. Research has shown that students who are allowed to make typical overgeneralization errors and are corrected by their teachers make better and longer lasting progress than students who are pretaught the rule that would preempt the error. (Page 464)
XXII. Linguists' approaches to SL acquisition focus on how errors and abilities reveal principles of Universal Grammar. Linguists believe that at every stage of SL acquisition, learners are operating with an organized system of knowledge known as an interlanguage grammar. (Page 465)
XXIII. Because many linguists believe that the LAD becomes inaccessible after a critical period, they argue that SL acquisition is necessarily very different from first language acquisition. However, most linguists believe that Universal Grammar is at least partly accessible to the adult SL learner, even if mediated by the first language in ways that make it relatively inaccessible. (Page 465)
XXIV. Linguists differentiate between the universal principles of UG and the parameters which may be more or less irreversibly set in early childhood. Hyams and others have argued that certain parameters such as the parameter to allow pro-drop may be easier to switch one way than the other: Native speakers of Spanish often have persistent difficulties with always remembering to supply a subject pronoun in English, whereas native English speakers have no such difficulty with dropping the subject pronoun in Spanish. (Page 465-466)
XXV. Psycholinguists' approaches to second language learning view SL acquisition as a special sort of information processing in which language learners must learn to parse an auditory stimulus and connect that parsed stimulus to a semantic representation. (Page 466)
XXVI. The fact that skilled SL learners do much better than novice SL learners when learning a novel artificial language supports the hypothesis that SL acquisition is essentially an information processing skill. (Page 466)
XXVII. The competition model of sentence processing has been frequently applied to SL acquisition research. According to this model, sentence interpretation is governed by accumulated knowledge that certain cues probably indicate certain semantic roles. In SL acquisition, cue strengths are carried over into the early learning period. According to this view, the processing tendencies one imports from one's native language can impede SL acquisition. (Page 467)
XXVIII. Psycholinguistic processing approaches break down the distinction between comprehension and learning and claim that learning a second language is the same as learning a first language except that one starts with more information. Within a psycholinguistic perspective, there are processing costs for being bilingual, such as a slightly depressed reading speed and increased lexical retrieval time because of the greater amount of information to be dealt with.(Page 467-468)
XXIX. Sociocultural approaches focus on the societal context of bilingualism. Sociocultural researchers point out that language use is closely tied to personal identity and cultural identification and maintain that these issues may actively interfere with second language learning. (Page 468-469)
XXX. These approaches also recognize the social nature of language and reject the idea of identifying better or worse varieties of language proficiency in favor of communicative effectiveness and social appropriateness. Sociocultural approaches explain the phenomena of subtractive bilingualism and additive bilingualism in terms of social context. These approaches make clear that learning a second language means joining a second culture. (Pages 470-471)
