Introducing Second Language Acquisition. Kirsten M. Hummel
(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.
2.6 summing up
This chapter has pointed out considerable evidence that innate structures offer a reasonable explanation for the rapidity of development and universality of stages that characterize L1 acquisition. Babbling occurs early on, and at approximately the first year mark, the child's first recognizable word may appear. At around the 50‐word vocabulary mark, children appear to begin to string two words together, and vocabulary and grammatical development accelerates thereafter. Children's grammatical development has been measured in terms of MLU, calculated in terms of morphemes per utterance. Brown (1973) found that children differ in rate of MLU development, although they acquire forms in a similar order. It has also been established that children tend to make typical errors, including overgeneralizing rules, as in using “mouses” instead of “mice.” They also may go through a period in which word meanings are overextended (“dog” for all four‐footed animals) and/or underextended (“dog” only for the family pet).
There are considerable differences in learning a first language as an infant and learning a second language after a first language has been acquired. Many of the differences are related to age and cognitive developmental factors. Others are related to the very fact that for L2 acquisition one language is already available to enable