Читать книгу Introducing Second Language Acquisition - Kirsten M. Hummel - Страница 31

As well as the significant differences associated with L1 and L2 acquisition, there are also a number of commonalities. One immediately obvious parallel in both L1 and L2 acquisition is that the learner needs to be exposed to the target language. For the young infant, although the precise quantity of exposure time or language data has not been determined, it is clear that he or she must have some exposure. The few documented cases of deplorable instances of unfortunate children who have been deprived of normal language exposure (such as “Genie,” whose case will be discussed in Chapter 8), reveal that they do not learn to speak like their peers. The need for exposure is also a necessary condition for L2 learners who must be exposed to the target language in order to ultimately learn that language. Again, the precise amount of language exposure necessary to allow L2 proficiency is difficult to establish. Although proficiency outcomes are often quite different in L1 and L2 situations, it is clear that exposure to target language input is vital in both cases.

Another point of similarity is that in both processes, whether it is the young child learning to produce her first words and phrases, or the learner of an L2, there appears to be a considerable amount of repetition. The young child naming important objects in her environment will repeat these often: “milk” when thirsty, or “da” to indicate the family dog. The following CHILDES transcript excerpt (Brown, 1973; MacWhinney, 2000) from a dialogue between a mother and her daughter, aged 21 months, illustrates considerable repetition of words as the child (Eve) attempts to satisfy her urge for more cocoa:

CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System)

Online corpus that has grown to include numerous Internet‐accessible transcripts of dialogues between children and adults and older children.

Mother:

“It's almost time for lunch.”

Eve:

“More cocoa.”

Mother:

“No, tomorrow for breakfast.”

Eve:

“More cocoa.”

Eve:

“More cocoa.”

Eve:

“More cocoa.”

Mother:

“What are you doing out there?”

Eve:

“Eve more cocoa.”

Mother:

“I found another crayon, Eve.”

(Exercises at the end of the chapter provide an opportunity to use the CHILDES database.)

In a similar (albeit most likely less insistent) way, the second language learner trying to practice the new language with a conversational partner who speaks that language might be heard to repeat familiar words and phrases: for example, the French learner may repeat “C'est bien” and “Oui, c'est ça,” words and phrases that have been learned during classroom exchanges or from social encounters.

A related similarity is the way in which both L1 and L2 learners use prefabricated language units as formulaic sequences or expressions (or “routines”). Although it is true that children are very creative in their language production, it is also the case that they can be heard to repeat short phrases before using each of the words in isolation, as in saying “I don't know” before using “don't” or “know” in isolation or in other phrase contexts. Similarly, an L2 learner of French might be heard saying “Je ne sais pas” (I don't know) or “Comment ça va?” (“How are you?”) that contain the verbs “savoir” (to know) or “aller” (to go), but this is before the learner is able to use these verbs productively in other sentences.

formulaic sequences (or expressions)

Phrases that learners learn and use as a whole unit, without analyzing into individual units (e.g. “How are you?” used as a single unit).

Another way in which these two language acquirers act similarly is that both young children and older L2 learners tend to understand much more than they can produce. A two‐year‐old can reveal his understanding of a fairly complex utterance “Go put your teddy bear on the blanket” when he ambles off to carry out his mother's instruction, while unable to string more than two words together in his own speech. By the same token, an adult may understand the French traffic instruction “Vous pouvez stationner votre voiture derrière le panneau qui se trouve sur le côté droit de la rue” (“You can park your car behind the sign that is on the right side of the street”) despite having little or no ability to produce a sentence with similar grammatical complexity.

There is considerable evidence that both L1 and L2 learners proceed in a systematic manner, characterized by periods of restructuring of their developing systems. As pointed out in the L1 acquisition discussion and illustrated by the “U‐shaped curve” figure, it has been observed that children learning English as their native language may first use irregular past tense forms correctly, such as “went” and “came,” but later, no doubt influenced by their exposure to the more regular past tense form ending in “–ed,” as in “walked” and “talked,” they extrapolate this rule to the irregular forms and produce “goed” and “comed.” Finally, at a later stage, they return to the correct irregular forms as in “went” and “came.” There is evidence that L2 learners similarly restructure their interlanguage system over time (Lightbown 1983).

For both types of language learners, typical errors occur that indicate that learners are attempting to increase their mastery by relying on information they already know, or overgeneralization. A young child may say “mouses” for “mice,” thereby applying the regular plural suffix “–s” (cf. “houses,” “toys,” etc.) on a noun constituting an exception to the rule. Similarly, the adult L2 learner may overgeneralize parts of the grammar as when a beginning learner of Spanish says “Tiene hambre” (“He or she is hungry”), using the form “tiene,” normally used for third person singular forms instead of the correct “Tengo hambre” form used only for first person singular (“I'm hungry”). These examples of overgeneralization are further illustrations that there is much that is systematic in both L1 and L2 learning. In both instances, individuals appear to be learning in a structured, organized fashion: they develop a rule system that governs their utterances, and these rules can change as their linguistic system develops. Learners extrapolate their newly encountered grammatical rules to contexts which do not follow the rules, as in the “mouses” and “tiene” examples cited above.

overgeneralization

The use of a rule or structure in contexts in which it is not appropriate; for example, “I hurted my arm.”

Further, young children begin by listening and speaking and only learn literacy‐related skills such as reading and writing (or descriptive grammar, as illustrated in the cartoon) once they reach school age. In fact, in some societies, literacy skills are never developed by a substantial proportion of the population, or only to a limited extent. Yet all children without significant cognitive disabilities learn to carry on fluent conversations in the language of their environment. In parallel, to a large extent it remains common for L2 learners to begin in a similar fashion, by engaging in listening and speaking skills before mastering reading and writing skills, although, as pointed out in the previous section, L2 learners can and do opt to use their literacy skills to learn the language. Traditionally, many teaching approaches reinforced this sequence, to the extent that some L2 methods almost banished written material from beginning language classrooms in the mid‐twentieth century.

Cartoon 2.3 Marty Bucella/CartoonStock.com.