MICHAEL A. SHARWOOD SMITHMAY 18 T H , 2013 1 2 . 0 0 - 1 3 . 3 0 .

Current trends in L2 research

Najnowsze tendencje w badaniach nad nabywaniem jêzyka obcego/drugiego

Lecture Overview

1.What is “SLA”?2.The Main Questions.3.Differing Points of View

It’s NOT about Teaching!!

SLA (or L2A) is about how people acquire two (or more) languages at any age and under any circumstances

Simultaneous L2A

Young children fully acquiring more than one language in the home or in the community or both.

A ‘heritage’ language

Young children fully acquiring one language spoken widely in the community and...

partially acquiring another language at home (heritage language) up to near-native levels

Sequential L2A

Children acquiring another language in the community after gaining native levels in their first

For example, when the family moves to another country and the children are between 4 and 18

Sequential L2A

Children acquiring another language (at primary or secondary school) OR adults after gaining native levels in their first

Sometimes called ‘foreign language acquisition’ (FLA) or ‘instructed SLA’

Summarising...

L2A is about learners at any age and in any kind of learning situation.

It is not about instruction/language planning

Logically...

Instruction/language planning methodology should be informed by research on the relevant type of L2A.

In reality,...

it is often is not informed by the latest SLA research

Sometimes it is not informed by any SLA research at all!

]

The Basics of Language Acquisition

]

Early L1/2 Acqisition

]

What is actually happening during LA?

Language is a mental system, that humans in a given situation are able somehow to construct in their heads.

Basic Characteristics of Child Language Acquisition

The Miracle

Children master a very complex mental system..

before they can read and writebefore they can analyse what they are doingSpontaneously, without serious thought.Without their grammar being corrected.

(Parents know this isn’t needed!)

Stages in First Language (L1) Learning

Between five and seven months, babies begin to play with sounds and their vocal noises begin to sound like consonants and vowels.

Between seven and eight months they begin to babble in real syllables.

Around their first birthday, they begin to understand and produce words.

By four they have become little native speakers.

What remains is a process of literacy (language enrichment)

Basic Characteristics of sequential ‘SECOND’ Language Acquisition

Two fundamental points of view

L2A is fundamentally different from L1A Selinker [1972]; later: Bley-Vroman, Tsimpli

L2A is fundamentally the same as L1A Dulay, Burt [1973], Krashen [1976]; later: White,

Schwartz

Interlanguage Theory (

LARRY SELINKER

His paper ‘Interlanguage’ came out in 1972

IL is: an emerging L2 system.How do we recognise it?By the systematic behaviour of L2

learners

LARRY SELINKER

IMPORTANT:Interlanguage is not the same as ‘errors’.

INTERLANGUAGE (IL) is everything that is systematic whether or not it conforms to native speaker norms.

IL is by definition a NON-NATIVE SYSTEM.

LARRY SELINKER

Aspects of learner performance that are incidental, not revealing any system, are not part of interlanguage.

INTERLANGUAGE (IL) is everything that is systematic whether or not it conforms to native speaker norms.

LARRY SELINKER claimed that..

An L2 learner’s mind was not the same as the one that learned L1.

And the evidence for this? Only 5% gain anything like native like abilty

in L2. The end of Lenneberg's critical period for L1

acquisition also signals a critical period for any other, later learned language.

After this our mind/brain is no longer the same!

Analyse L2 production! What processes explain systematic features of IL?

IL PROCESSES: FOSSILISATION. Features not changing?

Despite repeated exposure and practice some or all of the system remains IL. More input no longer leads to intake!

LANGUAGE TRANSFER: Some IL rules are ones that derive from L1

OVERGENERALISATION: Some IL rules are regularisations of rules derived from L2

LARRY SELINKER

also: TRANSFER OF TRAINING. Unintended

effects of teacher focus: overuse of certain ‘difficult’ structures

STRATEGIES OF COMMUNICATION: simplification: dropping articles, only simple vocabulary, emphatic style

STRATEGIES OF LEARNING: Rote memorisation

IL1 IL2NATIVE

SPEAKER SYSTEM

IL5IL4IL3

IL as an emerging L2 systemINEVITABLE

FOSSILISATIONAT SOME STAGE

IL1 IL2NATIVE

SPEAKER SYSTEM

IL5IL3

An emerging L2 system

IL4

INEVITABLE FOSSILISATIONAT SOME STAGE

NATIVESPEAKER SYSTEM

An emerging L2 system

IL1 IL2 IL5IL3 IL4

Central IL processes result in recurring

patterns:• X% carried over from L1 (LT)

• X% as in L2• X% non-native, based on L2 (OG)

• X% caused by teaching (TofT)• Plus

• X% for easy communication (CS)• X% from attempts to learn (LS)

NATIVESPEAKER SYSTEM

Example 1

IL1 IL2 IL5IL3 IL4

Central IL processes result in recurring

patterns:• 40% carried over from L1 (LT)

• 10% as in L2• 45% non-native, based on L2

(OG)• 2% caused by teaching (TofT)

• Plus• 2% for easy communication (CS)• 1% from attempts to learn (LS)

NATIVESPEAKER SYSTEM

Example 2

IL1 IL2 IL5IL3 IL4

Central IL processes result in recurring

patterns:• 20% carried over from L1 (LT)

• 35% as in L2• 35% non-native, based on L2

(OG)• 2% caused by teaching (TofT)

• Plus• 3% for easy communication (CS)• 0% from attempts to learn (LS)

Creative Construction: early challenges to Selinker’s theory

There seems to be information in the outside world.

Somehow it has come inside the learner’s heads (minds)

First, ideas that many SLA researchers still share.

i

Crazy and less crazy statements that we make about ‘learning’ “I can’t get it into my head’ “She tried to hammer her point home” “Nothing seemed to penetrate his thick skull”

Growing, Developing, Learning

Language and other

‘facts’ODPORNY NA WIEDZĘ

A better way of looking at learning is in terms of

GROWTH or DEVELOPMENTTake the analogy of a plant.If it has access to nutrients in the soil and is

exposed to sunshine (warmth) and water, it ‘grows’

The sun, water or what nutrients there are in the earth do not determne how the plant will grow (how many leaves, what colour flowers etc.)

Growing, Developing, Learning

how many leaves, what colour flowers etc(determined inside!)

If language is not something that enters our heads and stays and decides what is inside then:

How does language ‘grow’ inside the learner?

So we need to have better idea of what, in LANGUAGE learning is the equivalent of the soil nutrient, sun and the water etc.

Language?

The learner is exposed to language information available in the outside world.

Watching how language grows INSIDE the learner:

it is plain to see that learners must need that information (for language to grow inside them)

Not all that information has an impact on the growth of the language

The arguments are about why that is so.

Conclusion SO FAR..

Selinker claims that SECOND language learning mechanism cannot do the job as the now absent FIRST language mechanisms.

That’s why L2 grammars ‘fossilise’.Grammatical growth almost always must

stop before native like ability emerges

DISAGREEMENT

Another school of thought claims that FIRST language learning mechanisms do not disappear and are ALSO used in SECOND language learning.

Grammatical growth may stop but it doesn’t have to. It does not stop because it can’t go on growing!

DISAGREEMENT

Burt and Dulay experimented on L2 learners and concluded that L2 grammatical growth more or less followed the same pattern as L1 growth.

Grammars grow following some inbuilt sequence!

IL1IL2

IL3IL5

IL4 Native!!!

12

43

65

7‘8’

Native!!!

Interlanguage Theory:

They took the radical line and claimed that, L2 acquisition was driven by the same processes as L1 acquisition.

this they called CREATIVE CONSTRUCTIONThe language is built anew in the

learner’s mind.Recreated from the L2 inputNot reconstructed from the L1.

RECREATED NOT RECONSTRUCTED

The learner REcreates the L2 from the beginning

subconsciously without the need for correctionThey even told teachers not to teach

syntax: Dulay, H. C., & Burt, M. K. (1973). Should we teach children

syntax? Language Learning, 23, 245-258

Dulay and Burt denied the validity of the ‘Critical Period for L2’ and hence also the basis for Selinker's theory.

Their evidence was drawn from immigrants in California (Spanish and Chinese speaking)

They were interested whether the sequence of learning English revealed by L1 studies could be replicated with L2 learners irrespective of their L1 background!

Shortcut: order of difficulty predicts order of actual acquisition.

Rather than painstakingly follow through individual learners (like Roger Brown’s Adam, Eve and Sarah) over a period of time they opted for a cross-sectional approach:

You take a groups of learners at one time and look at the percentage of errors with specially selected structures .

BURT & DULAY

The reasoning was that the order of error-causing structures should also reflect the order in which those structures would actually be acquired so that, in the experimental results, the form that always caused fewer errors relative to the others, would be fully acquired earlier..and so on.

BURT & DULAY

Missing contractible copula ‘s :

She’s here He’s my brother

always less frequent than:

Missing possessive ‘s

Mary’s carJohn’s Ipad.

Some research into L1 acquisition suggested that this was a safe assumption.

BURT & DULAY

How did they decide that structure was acquired?

Answer: they opted for figure like 90% correct in contexts where that form would be expected in native speech.

As soon as a form was not supplied in just 10% of those contexts, it was regarded as ‘officially’ “acquired”.

Note: It is assumed here that even natives do not score 100% all the time!

BURT & DULAY’s 90% CRITERION

Which structures did they decide to investigate?

They chose structures that had already been investigated in child language(L1), i.e., grammatical morphemes

You could guarantee these would turn up very frequently in spontaneous everyday speech

Examples: the, a(n), ‘s’ plural, 3rd person ‘s’, irregular past tense

BURT & DULAY

WHAT DID THEY FIND?

BURT & DULAY

They found an interesting similarity between the L1 and L2 English orders

Not identical but similar.

More to the point, all learners showed the same order of difficulty and were thus assumed also to be acquiring things in the same order

BURT, DULAY

01

01

01

01

01

01

01

01

Fixed morpheme orders (90%)

• catS

• they ARE runnING

• she’S a bad girl

• she’S in the house

• THE house, A house

• ran, went, saw

• she walkS, he runS

• Jim’S cat, Mary’S dog.

90

90

81

66

58

33

12

05

Error Rates<90% = ‘acquired”

01

01

01

01

01

01

01

01

Fixed morpheme orders (90%)

• catS

• they ARE runnING

• she’S a bad girl

• she’S in the house

• THE house, A house

• ran, went, saw

• she walkS, he runS

• Jim’S cat, Mary’S dog.

90

90

90

90

90

90

90

90

Error Rates<90% = ‘acquired”

Other fixed orders

1. Intonation questions2. Wh word added in front

3. Subj-verb inversion with do

1. Neg place finally (or in front)

2. Neg placed before verb

3. Neg placed before aux verb

4. Neg place after (MODAL) verb

5. Neg place after verb (DO)

• You know my friend?

• Why you come here?

• Why do you come here

• I like milk, no• I not like milk

• I not must see him

• I must not see him

• I do not like milk

'Interference' or 'developmental‘ errors?

They associated transfer explanations with (despised) behaviourism so..

What was Dulay and Burt's reaction to 'errors' than looked as though they were caused by L1 Interference? Example ‘I no can come' (from Spanish

BURT, DULAY

THEY SAID 2 THINGS:

1. Errors can often seem like L1-based but turn out to be equally explainable as 'developmental' because children learning L1 English produce the same construction

2. The same orders revealed by our experiments with learners with different language backgrounds suggest that we first look for developmental explanations where possible.

BURT, DULAY

THEIR CONCLUSION: Grammatical interference was much less

important than previously thought!Some L1 like errors were not interferenceOthers were simply performance

strategies and did not reflect the learner system but ambitioud ways to communicate when the current L2 system fails.

BURT, DULAY

Conscious learning of grammar had no

impact on the growth of the ‘acquired’ L2 system

It can however affect performance under certain circumstances.

KRASHEN’S CONTRIBITION

CorrectionFrom

‘outside’

Timing when you test

OUTPUT

Explicit knowledge about grammar

‘Natural’ SpontaneousSpeech or Writing

OUTPUT

CONSCIOUS Monitorthinking , analysing..

0

‘Corrected’Speech

& Writing

Test people NOW and you get a measure of ONLY their

acquired knowledge

WAIT & test people NOW

and you may get a measure of :a mixture

(acquired plus learned

knowledge)

COMPARE

100% subconsciousL2 Grammar

ACQUIRED SO FAR

Milliseconds

(1) The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis.adults have two distinctive ways of

developing competences in second languages .. acquisition, that is by using language for real communication ... learning .. "knowing about" language‘

KRASHEN’S FIVE HYPOTHESES

(2) The Monitor Hypothesis'conscious learning ... can only be used

as a Monitor or an editor‘ (This expresses a development of the idea behind the original

Monitor Model)

Acquired grammar

Output 2(mixed and

possibly more correct)

subconscious

?

SLOW LIMITED

CONSCIOUS MONITOR

Now not 1 but 3 limitations:1. TIME NEEDED but also:2. SIMPLE RULES ONLY3. WILLINGNESS TO

MONITOR (individual learners vary here)

CONSCIOUS

Output 1(‘pure’)

Monitor use: NOW three conditions not one.

(4) The Input Hypothesis.'humans acquire language in only one

way - by understanding messages or by receiving "comprehensible input

(5) The Affective Filter Hypothesis. a mental block, caused by affective

factors ... that prevents input from reaching the language acquisition device'

ORGANIZER

?

Emotional block

Reduced sensitivity to input

Affective Filter

input

The Creative Construction one explanation for ‘apparent’ fossilisation.

L2 inputSpeech/Writing

Later Developments in SLA

TWO AREAS OF FOCUS

1. The properties of learner systems at given points in time (T1,T2,T3)

2. Processing: the relationship between knowledge and how knowledge is processed on-line

Vast increase in linguistic sophistication

The same fundamental questions could be asked:

1) Must older L2 learners develop L2 grammatical knowledge without access to the limitations and help supplied by UG?

2) Do older L2 learners still have some/complete access to UG?

Predictions

IF older L2 learners develop L2 grammatical knowledge without access to UG, then:

1) the L2 systems they develop using general problem solving mechanisms may well have properties are not possible in natural languages.

2) they will need grammatical correction.3) their L2 grammar will never become

native.

Predictions

IF older L2 learners still have some/complete access to UG, then:

1) the L2 systems they develop will have only properties are possible in natural languages.

2) they will not need grammatical correction but will be even be able to acquaire subtle aspects of the L2 they have no conscious knowledge of.

3) their L2 grammar may become native given sufficient and adequate exposure to the language.

THE ‘UG’ GROUP

The properties of learner systems at given points in

time (T1,T2,T3)

•L2 PROCESSING DURING PRODUCTION•L2PROCESSING DURING COMPREHENSION•L2 PROCESSING DURING ACQUISITION

Processing: the relationship between knowledge and how knowledge is processed on-

line

L2 Processing during production

Manfred Pieneman

0

Up to this point, L2 performance had been used to support two different positions

Selinker says it shows L2 learners possess their own systems and these systems (ILs) remain non-native. LAD not working so:

L1A not =L2ABurt, Dulay & Krashen say that evidence

of fixed orders show that LAD is still working so:

L1A=L2A (essentially at least)

Explaining L2 Performance

B, D & K’s explanation? No explanation yet. Mysterious

operations of the L1/L2 Organiser (LAD).

There are fixed stages. Source of evidence? Development of grammatical

morphemes

Explaining Stages of Acquisition

1. Moving from easily processed structures to less easily processed structures.

2. Some constructions follow a fixed order.

3. Some do not.

Explaining Stages of Acquisition

Pienemann’s explanation?

Source of evidence? Development of syntax (word

order & lawful combinations of words)

Explaining Stages of Acquisition

Pienemann’s first explanation was called:

The MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODEL

Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann (1981)

The major result from the ZISA research was the well known developmental sequence in the L2 acquisition of German word order

LARGE quantity of data (cf. BDK’s)

ZISA project (Zweitspracherwerb italienischer, portugiesischer und spanischer Arbeiter)

 German word order is quite strict especially with regard to VERB order:

The finite verb must come second in main clauses/simple sentences (‘Often saw I John’)

Complex verb forms (‘have seen John’) separate and the non-finite form goes to the end (‘have John seen’) .

ZISA project (Zweitspracherwerb italienischer, portugiesischer und spanischer Arbeiter)

I see stars. [Also OK in English]

Often see I stars. [NOT OK in English]

Stars see I often. [NOT OK in English]

German main clauses/simple sentences[literal translations into English used as examples]

V2

Verb second

translations into English

 Complex verb forms separate and the non-finite form goes to the end.

*I have stars seen*Often have I stars seen*Stars I have often seen

Verb final position (in main clauses/simple sentences)

NON-finiteFormFINAL

POSITION

 Another example with modal auxiliary can:

*I can stars see*Often can I stars see*Stars I can often see

main clauses/simple sentences

NON-FINITE

Verb Formin

FINAL POSITION

Subclauses in complex sentences

Learners only use simple sentences at the beginning. Later on, after first copying in subordinate clauses the order they have already acquired, L2 learners are finally able to go and apply Verb Final position to ALL verbs in subordinate clauses :

1. (I said) that I stars saw2. (I said) that I stars seen have

Stage 1: Canonical Word Order (SVO)

Stage 2: Adverb pre/postposing (A SVO A)

Stage 3: Verb Separation (SVOv)

Verb 2nd (AVSO, OVS..)Verb final (in subclauses) (---,SOvV)

German Basic Word Order stages summarised00

1. SVO

2. SVO KEPT [NO SUBJECT VERB INVERSION when adverb optionally added]

3. NON-FINITE VERBS NOW GO TO THE END

4. VERB GOES TO OBLIG. VERB 2nd POSITION FORCING SUBJ. AND VERB TO INVERT

5. FINITE VERBS GO TO THE END OF A SUBCLAUSE (AFTER ANY NON-FINITE VERB)

German Word Order: Examples (adapted)

KINDER SPIELEN MIM BALL ‘Children play with (the) ball)

DA KINDER SPIELEN‘THERE children play’

ALLE KINDER MUSS DIE PAUSE MACHEN ‘All children MUST the break HAVE’

DAN HAT SIE WIEDER DIE KNOCH GEBRINGT ‘Then HAVE THEY again the bone bringed’

ER ZAGTE DASS ER NACH HAUSE KOMT‘He said that HE to house COMES’

12m

Pienemann then asked:

Is everything in the L2 grammar acquired in a fixed order?

ANSWER: NO

Developmental Features

Some aspects of grammar develop in a fixed order according to their current processability.

Here, learners differ in their speed (rate) of learning grammatical features but follow the same order

These features are called “developmental features”

Individuals CANNOT follow different paths in acquiring these features: the order cannot be influenced in any way

Variational features

Some aspects of grammar vary according to learning situation sand the individual

grammatical features may IN PRINCIPLE be acquired in any order

these are called “variational features’ (like? prepositions, different types of article, adverb)

Individuals may follow different paths in acquiring these features.

Subects Italian & Spanish migrant workers learning L2 German

Much larger body of data (compare with creative construction data)

Major traditional area of syntax (compare with the morpheme order)

More comparisons with DBK research

Description vs Explanation

The developmental (fixed) sequence is actually provided with an “explanation” (compare with Creative Construction model)

‘Explanation’ is different from ‘description’!!

P.’s explanation has to do with EASE OF PROCESSING

Easily processed constructions acquired first

Processability: the general idea

Canonical Word Order (SVO) is the most “processable” order of elements

Processability: the general idea

Placing things at the beginning and end is next

“preserving the canonical order”

Processability: the general idea

Then comes moving things from inside to outside and vice versa

“disrupting the canonical order”

Processability: the general idea as first conceived

Switching things round inside the sentence is the least processable

“disrupting the canonical order”

• Pienemann later introduced a new criterion for acquisition called the EMERGENCE criterion.

‘EMERGENCE’

Important: A New Definition of ‘Acquisition’!

when the the new feature “emerges” this for acquisition

implies only a few spontaneous occurrences of the new features (4 or 5x)

this contrasts sharply with the Brown L1/ D,B & K 90% criterion of acquisition

emergence criterion

We now have two alternative definitions of ‘acquired’!

“Acquired” implies a particular construction/form:

A) ‘regularly appears in learner production’ (BDK)

ORB) has spontaneously appeared a few times

in learner production(Pienemann)

He turned to TWO sources to expand his model

Levelt’s speech production modelLexical Functional GrammarRESULT: an considerable enrichment of his

model AND A NEW NAME:PROCESSABILITY THEORY

Developments in P’S theory

• Teaching cannot force a new developmental stage to appear.

• Compare this to Krashen’s approach to grammar teaching

Just don’t teach grammar!)

Teachability Hypothesis

PT is a theory of second language acquisition centered on the premise that the ability to produce speech in a second language is limited by the one-by-one acquisition of five speech processing procedures, all of which are the same procedures by which a mature speaker generates grammatical utterances.

The main claim of PT is that learnability is restricted by computational constraints of the language processor: as such, learning a language requires the gradual acquisition of language-specific processing procedures based on Levelt’s (1989) speaking model (Pienemann, 2005, p. 2).

The main claim of PT

This view of language performance is complimented by a theory of grammar; PT is based on Lexical-functional grammar [LFG] (Kaplan & Bresnan, 1982) a model of grammar that reflects many of the psycholinguistic principles prominent in Levelt’s (1989) theory of production.

The main claim of PT

Stages of Acquisition Predicted by Processability Theory.

Processability Theory predicts a universal order of acquisition of five processing procedures illustrated by five stages.

Stages of Acquisition

First, at Stage 1, learners are limited to producing lemma, i.e. words or formulaic expressions. No exchange of information is possible, and thus no feature matching, or unification..

Stage 1

At Stage 2, category procedure, the ability to assign a category to the lemma, develops. An example of a category is the feature ‘plurality’; in Spanish, for example, the plural -s would emerge here as the learner becomes able to add ‘s’ to lemmas to indicate plurality.

Stage 2

In terms of syntax, at Stage 2, learners begin to produce strings based on canonical word order, which involves a prototypical mapping of the most prominent thematic role, i.e. agent, to the initial position in c-structure, i.e. subject (The Unmarked Alignment Hypothesis; Pienemann, Di Biase, and Kawaguchi, 2005, p.229).

This is possible because it is assumed that learners are able to define categories such as ‘verb’ and ‘subject’, but mapping is restricted by the inability to unify features.

Stage 2

At Stage 3, phrasal procedure emerges, which involves the ability to merge features as well as the ability to determine “positions” in terms of phrases instead of just words (Pienemann, 2005, p.27). At this point, in terms of morphology, features such as plurality can be matched across other elements within the same constituent, i.e. noun phrase agreement.

Stage 3

At Stage 4, s-procedure develops: that is, at this stage, the function of the phrase is determined through appointment rules and sent to s-procedure, where the information is stored as the sentence is developed.

Through s-procedure, information can be exchanged across constituent boundaries, and more target-like word order phenomena are found based on language-specific syntactic rules.

Stage 4

In terms of morphology, inter-phrasal information can be exchanged, which involves the exchange of information across constituent boundaries, e.g. subject-verb agreement in English.

Stage 4

At the final stage, Stage 5, s-procedure is able to call ‘S’ as a procedure, which means that subordinate clauses can be formed.

Stage 5

Conclusion

PIENEMANN’S EXPERIMENTATION AND THEORISING PROVIDE AN INTERESTING ALTERNATIVE TO

THE OTHER PROPOSALSPROCESSABILITY AND

TEACHABILITY ARE THE MAIN IDEAS

AT THE VERY LEAST, AN EXPLANATION IS PROVIDED FOR

FIXED ORDERS OF DEVELOPMENT IN PRODUCTION

L2 Processing during comprehension

Bill VanPatten

0

Input processing (VanPatten)

How learners make connections between form in the input and meaning

His theory is based on processing so….

Is this like Pienemann?

Input processing (VanPatten)

No. This is about

input processingIt is not about learner

production (output)

Input processing (VanPatten)

VanPatten’s approach is all about what learners NOTICE in the input

What do they PAY ATTENTION TO as they are trying to understand L2 utterances?

Assumption:

Input processing capacity of L2 learners is limited

Only certain features will receive attention during input processing.

When learners process input, they filter the input

Everyone agrees that input is reduced and modified into a new entity called ‘intake’

What becomes INTAKE?

For example:

• The Primacy of Content Words Principle

• The Lexical Preference Principle

• The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle

• The Meaning-before-Nonmeaning Principle)

• The Availability of Resources Principle

• The Sentence Location Principle

It suggests that there are biases and constraints in input processing behaviour

Because of working memory constraints and because they are paying attention to meaning-bearing prosodic cues are only able to:

process input for meaning before they can process it for form.

This he calls the Primacy of Meaning

Principle

Primacy of Meaning Principle

The Primacy of Meaning Principle comprises of sub-principles:

The Primacy of Content Words Principle

going to, chicken, the, kitchen, who, nasty, beauty, when, well, as, and, have (as in ‘I have finished’), have (as in ‘I have three chairs’), her

1. Content Words are in white, below)

The Primacy of Content Words

going to, chicken, the, kitchen, who, nasty, beauty, when, well, as, and, have (as in ‘I have finished’), have (as in ‘I have three chairs’), her

Learners will tend to rely on lexical items, not grammatical form, to get meaning when both encode the same semantic information.

I will go tomorrow (future time) Two houses (plurality)John avoids Halina (third person singular)

The Lexical Preference Principle

Learners will tend to rely on lexical items, not grammatical forms, to get meaning when both encode the same semantic information.

The Lexical Preference Principle

I will go tomorrow (future time) Two houses (plurality)John avoids Halina (third person singular)

Question: When will you go?Answer? I ..... go tomorrow

Question: What does John do?Answer? He avoid.. Halina

Consequence?

Learners are more likely to process nonredundant meaningful grammatical form before they process redundant

meaningful grammatical forms My cat sleeps ten hours everyday

The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle

Learners are more likely to process nonredundant meaningful grammatical form before they process redundant

meaningful forms My cat sleep ten hour everyday

The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle

The Availability of Resources Principle

Learners tend to process items in sentence initial position before those in final position and those in medial position

The Sentence Location Principle

1 3 3 2

Learners tend to interpret the first noun as the Agent/Subject.

Example: learners of L2 Polish will first tends to interpret Kota przystraszyl pies as:

The cat frightened the dog.

They do not at first pay attention to the morphology of kot signallin OBJECT status!

The First Noun Principle

He turned to TWO sources to expand his model

Levelt’s speech production modelLexical Functional GrammarRESULT: an considerable enrichment of his

model AND A NEW NAME:PROCESSABILITY THEORY

Developments in P’S theory

VanPatten summarised

VANPATTEN’S EXPERIMENTATION AND THEORISING PROVIDE AN INTERESTING ALTERNATIVE TO

THE OTHER PROPOSALSHE PROVIDES NO NEW

EXPLANATIONS FOR FIXED ORDERS OF DEVELOPMENT BUT

RATHER PRINCIPLES TO EXPLAIN HOW L2 FORMS IN THE INPUT GET

NOTICED

Implications for teaching

UG groupPienemannVanPatten

• UG researchers had no special interest in pedagogical implications.• It was clear to them that if L2 learners maintained access to UG, they need to acquire the L2 ‘naturally’ as suggested by Dulay, Burt and Krashen

• If they have no access and if pushed to talk about pedagogy, they might say that, then traditional teaching methods should be applied.

UG group and teaching.

• Teaching cannot force a new developmental stage to appear.

• Compare this to Krashen’s approach to grammar teaching

Just don’t teach grammar!)

Pienemann’s Teachability Hypothesis

Teachability Hypothesis

•Variational features can be taught•Developmental features cannot be taught

• “An L2 structure can be learnt from instruction only if the learner's IL is close to the point when this structure is acquired in the natural setting" (Pienemann 1984:201) [my italics].

Teachability Hypothesis

•QuestionS:1. What does ‘close to the point

when this structure is acquired in the natural setting’ mean?

2. How do you know when that point has arrived?

• The feature must emerge independently in the learner’s spontaneous production (a few times)

• Practising a developmental feature in class once it has emerged can help the learner to get through to the next stage faster.

Teachers must wait until it appears.

Pienemann’s Teachability Hypothesis

• Focus on processing L2 INPUT and not on producing L2 utterances.

• It’s all about noticing.

VanPatten’s Processing Instruction (PI) approach

• Techniques can be applied to help learners process input.

• These techniques must exploit the leaner’s instinctive preference for extracting meaning (and related strategies)

• They must make certain forms and syntactic structures easier to notice and process.

VanPatten’s Processing Instruction (PI) approach

• Learner’s follow First Noun Principle• Many languages allow first noun to be an OBJECT.

• English learners of Spanish will initially not notice object markers and process the first noun as a subject/agent.

• An exercise might take the following form:

Just one example

Picture showing

Juan calling Maria

Picture showing Maria

calling John

Question: match the following sentence to the right picture:

A Maria la llama Juan

A B

Object

marker

Object

marker

Many, many other developments in L2 theory

Different approachesDifferent areas of the languageDifferent aspects of L2 systems (properties/processing/transition)

New techniques (eye-tracking, brain-imaging)

CONCLUSION

From a new field of research which branched from the applied linguistics of language teaching

SLA has become a fully-fledged independent area of theoretical and experimental research

The End