Supporting Second Language Learning
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second_language.docx4.5 First and Second Language Learning Compared With simultaneous bilinguals, both languages are acquired in the same way. There are, as we have seen, cognitive differences that exist in bilingual children because of bilingualism, but the processes they use in acquiring their two languages are the same—the same as each other and the same as those used by monolinguals. In succes- sive bilinguals, however, there may be differences, and most of these are associated with the age of the learner. The age of the learner is highly relevant for the following reasons:
• The experience of learning a first language means that second language learn- ers know more about what language is about and how it is structured. They are experienced in finding patterns in what they hear. Older children might experi- ence some temporary interference from the first language, but generally, the experienced learner is more efficient than the inexperienced and cognitively less well-developed first language learner. • Babies are born with more acute hearing than adults (Pearson, 2008, p. 103). Over time, their hearing acuity attenuates to adult levels. Superior hearing is part of the reason why younger children are better able to discriminate between indi- vidual language sounds and why they are superior mimics of the sound system. Second language learners will acquire the pronunciation of the new language faster and more accurately than children who begin after the onset of puberty. • Babies go through a babbling stage during which they practice the sounds of their language without either the pressure or the ability to produce perfectly formed words. Older learners do not have this practice period, and their hearing will be less acute than infants. Nevertheless, their improved cognitive processing abilities will compensate. • The “input” is different. For school-aged children, the first exposure to a new language may be at school. The language of the school differs in content and in purpose from the language of the home, and the older the learner, the greater the difference. • The older the learner, the more experience he or she has in learning. Even after the first language is essentially established, children continue to learn, and all prior experience in learning is potentially beneficial. For educators, the issue is how best to take advantage of it.
CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 First and Second Language Learning Compared
At the heart of the issue of age is the critical period hypothesis (see Chapter 3). Is there a critical period for language learning, as some believe? Popular wisdom that holds that where language learning is concerned, younger is better, would appear to be true. But is it? For a first language, yes, it does appear that there is an “expire” date on the brain’s abil- ity to acquire language. But the preponderance of bilinguals in the world, many of whom learned the two languages sequentially, is a compelling argument against a critical period for second language learning.
The Critical Period and Second Language Learning Toddlers appear to acquire their language—one, two, or more—with relative ease and seemingly without effort. Older learners, however, appear to struggle, and even when they become highly proficient, many do not acquire a perfect, native-like accent. Oth- ers stumble and falter and never manage to learn much of the second language at all. At first blush, it might seem that we can simply call upon the critical period hypothesis to explain why children under the age of 5 are so adept at learning another language, chil- dren before the age of puberty require more assistance but can become extremely profi- cient, and adults often struggle. But the fact that many adults do learn one or more new languages later in life suggests that the matter is far more complicated. Language teachers and researchers alike increasingly suspect “that whatever enables the child to acquire the mother tongue might not be lost forever, rather that it could be hidden somewhere among or underneath our other cognitive faculties” (Meisel, 2011, p. 1). If this is the case, then several questions arise:
• Why are some learners better able to access this capacity than others? • What is the role of language instruction, and what kind of instruction will stimu- late this capacity? • What other “cognitive faculties” are involved in language learning? • How is the language acquisition capacity influenced by these other cognitive faculties?
Because we cannot answer any of these questions with any certainty, formulating a coher- ent and adequate theory of second language acquisition is even more complicated than formulating one for first language. Although the environments may vary widely, with first language acquisition, we are talking about learners who are all the same age. The theoretical issue is to explain how and under what conditions the innate language capac- ity is activated. Second language learners, in contrast, are more diverse, impacted by the following:
• Age. We saw that some children effectively acquire two first languages, some are early simultaneous bilinguals, and some add a language much later. Many language learners are adults, so age and all the attendant life experience it brings with it is a major factor. • Reasons for learning. Children acquire their first language or their second lan- guage, when it is the language of their community, with relative ease. But people have different reasons for learning another language, and these can impact not only the speed of their learning but what they ultimately learn. • Place. Children surrounded by a new language in school pick it up easily. Learning a “foreign” language, however, in a classroom setting when the language of the
CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 First and Second Language Learning Compared
community is a different one—as it would be for an English speaker learning Finnish in Cleveland, for example—brings with it another set of issues, all of which will impact the learner’s success. • Method of instruction. As learners get older and have more experience of formal instruction, they respond differently to the ways they are taught. Some may be resistant to unfamiliar methods, and this, too, will affect their language learning.
When it comes to second language learning, young children do appear to have certain advantages. First, they have less to learn at a time when their brains are working hardest. Pearson (2008) notes that young children’s brains “are working twice as hard as adults’. The level of glucose they use rises until age two and then stays twice as high as adults’ until around age nine” (p. 102). The younger the child, the less there is to learn to reach age- appropriate proficiency. As an example, on average, a 4-year-old child has a productive vocabulary of around 800 words (Beauchat, Blamey, & Walpole, 2010, p. 18) and a much larger receptive vocabulary. While it has taken her four years to acquire those words, older students can learn that many words in a matter of weeks. But the goal of a 10-year-old lan- guage learner is not to sound like a 4-year-old. Second, the younger learner is less skilled in avoidance and less prone to worry about failure. Older learners, particularly adults, are very good at finding ways to avoid using an unfamiliar language, partly out of concern that they will get it wrong. Young children are less skilled at avoidance and are more likely to jump right in and use the new language, although there is often a silent period at the beginning of the process. Given the added advantage of the more-recent first language experience, younger learners would seem to have an advantage. It would be a mistake to conclude, however, that the ability to learn a new language is lost with age. Indeed, as we have seen, there are cer- tain advantages to age, the chief one of which is that experienced learners are better at learning. What is important for educators is to create the educational envi- ronments that are most likely to lead to success.
So are there any theoretical underpinnings on which we can base our approach to teaching a second language to young chil- dren? The answer is a qualified yes. Remembering that theories are not facts but represent an attempt to account for all the facts that we have about lan- guage acquisition, let us look at the main contenders.
There are different challenges that come with teaching older language learners. These high school Spanish students will be more skilled at avoidance than younger learners.
Associated Press
CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 First and Second Language Learning Compared
Theoretical Perspectives on Bilingualism Let us begin with a short history lesson. Before the 1960s, researchers assumed that first and second language acquisition were completely distinct processes. That assumption was not based on any empirical data, and researchers studying the two kinds of acquisition paid little attention to what those in the other camp were doing. It simply hadn’t occurred to them that there might be some similarities. Until the 1960s, both linguistics and psy- chology were disciplines whose research agendas were largely grounded in behaviorist learning theory, as described in Chapter 3.
Only after the constraints and restrictions of behaviourist psychology had been shaken off could the language sciences begin to understand lan- guage learning as a mental activity happening in the cognitive system of the individual. Chomsky’s (1959) famous and influential review of Skin- ner’s (1957) book “Verbal Behavior” is a milestone to the “cognitive turn.” (Meisel, 2011, p. 3)
The term cognitive turn refers to the shift in thinking that occurred as researchers began to view language as a cognitive event and the study of language acquisition as involving the study of the mind rather than behavior per se. This change in focus had a tremendous and liberating impact on the study of first language acquisition and, eventually, on second language acqui- sition, which was slower to shake the influences of behaviorist thinking. Meisel observes that behaviorism lingered in SLA because for many years, research had been dominated by for- eign language learning in classroom settings as opposed to second language learning in more natural settings. Most foreign language teachers were using techniques based in behavior- ism, and so there was little counter-evidence on which to build a new theory,
From a behaviorist perspective, the task of SLA would be to replace one set of habits (i.e., the first language) with a new set of habits, the language to be learned. The first language was seen as relevant only because it interfered with the second. Instructional techniques, thus, were designed as drills to instill the new forms and eradicate any imperfect ones that might be created. Learners were given passages of text to memorize to perfection, and relatively little attention was paid to meaning. Generations of learners learned sentences for which they would never have any use. Generations of learners completed majors in foreign languages without gaining fluency or conversational competence.
Following Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (see Chapter 3), researchers began to place more emphasis on cognition, and eventually SLA researchers began to look at their data from the perspective that the human mind might well use the same processes that had been effective in learning the first language in learning the second. Once they began to view language data from that perspective, the central question that they asked was different, and a new set of issues emerged, making the matter of theory construction a great deal more difficult. The central question that has guided SLA research for the past four decades has been what kinds of knowledge the second language learner brings to the task and whether and to what degree he has access to that same innate capacity (called a language acquisition device, or LAD, by Chomsky) as the young child. Instead of focusing exclusively on differences between first and second language learning, researchers, start- ing in the 1970s, began to look at similarities. One of the most influential series of studies showed that the order in which second language learners acquired English grammatical
CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 First and Second Language Learning Compared
Morpheme Acquisition Order in Second Language Learners As early as 1967, Pit Corder suggested that the errors that second language learners make bear a strik- ing resemblance to those made by children learning their first language. Over the next several years, researchers began to formulate hypotheses based on this notion. In the early 1970s, researchers began to work from the hypothesis that the first and second language acquisition processes were essentially the same. These researchers went on to propose the creative con- struction hypothesis, that learners do not merely imitate what they have heard but actively construct their own rules, based on internal knowledge. They postulated that if children were learning a second language in the way that behaviorists claimed, then most of the errors they made could be predicted on the basis of their first language (i.e., interference errors). On the other hand, if they were using innate mechanisms, their errors would more closely resemble those made by first language learners. The researchers studied the errors in the speech of 145 Spanish-speaking children between 5 and 8 years of age, using a measure designed to elicit particular grammatical morphemes such as past tense, plural, present progressive, and so forth. They found that only 3% of the children’s errors could be pre- dicted based on Spanish, 12% were unique to the child, and an overwhelming 85% were developmen- tal, meaning that they were the same ones English-speaking children make. A year later, they replicated the study with 250 Chinese- and Spanish-speaking children of the same age, and this time they were able to establish an acquisition order for each of the two language groups and for the combined group. They concluded that the order of acquisition was virtually identical for the Chinese- and the Spanish-speaking children. Following is the order they found: 1. pronoun case 2. articles 3. present progressive 4. copula 5. plural -s 6. auxiliary 7. past regular 8. past irregular 9. long plural (e.g., -es as in breezes rather than -s as in cats) 10. possessive 11. third person regular Nine of these were the same ones studied by Brown and by DeVilliers and DeVilliers (See Learning Grammatical Morphemes in Chapter 3). While the order was not exactly the same for the first language speakers and the second language speakers, what is compelling about these data is that second lan- guage learners seem to follow the same order, and that order is independent of their first language. These results and others using similar methods led Steven Krashen (1977, 1981) to formulate a natural order hypothesis, stating that second language learners acquire certain language structures in a predict- able order.
morphemes closely resembled the order in which first language children acquired them (See Morpheme Acquisition Order in Second Language Learners.).
CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 First and Second Language Learning Compared
