Michael A. Sharwood Smith May 18th,

Michael A. Sharwood Smith May 18th, 2013 12.00-13.30.
Current trends in L2 research Najnowsze tendencje w badaniach nad nabywaniem jêzyka obcego/drugiego Michael A. Sharwood Smith May 18th,

Differing Points of View
Lecture Overview What is “SLA”? The Main Questions. Differing Points of View

What is “SLA”?

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
] The Basics of Language Acquisition

] Early L1/2 Acqisition

What is actually happening during LA?
] 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 write before they can analyse what they are doing Spontaneously, 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

Interlanguage is not the same as ‘errors’.
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

IL as an emerging L2 system
INEVITABLE FOSSILISATION AT SOME STAGE NATIVE SPEAKER SYSTEM IL5 IL4 IL3 IL2 IL1

INEVITABLE FOSSILISATION
An emerging L2 system INEVITABLE FOSSILISATION AT SOME STAGE NATIVE SPEAKER SYSTEM IL5 IL4 IL3 IL2 IL1

An emerging L2 system 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) NATIVE SPEAKER SYSTEM IL5 IL4 IL3 IL2 IL1

Example 1 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) NATIVE SPEAKER SYSTEM IL5 IL4 IL3 IL2 IL1

Example 2 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) NATIVE SPEAKER SYSTEM IL5 IL4 IL3 IL2 IL1

Creative Construction: early challenges to Selinker’s theory

First, ideas that many SLA researchers still share.
There seems to be information in the outside world. Somehow it has come inside the learner’s heads (minds) i

Growing, Developing, Learning
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” Language and other ‘facts’ ODPORNY NA WIEDZĘ

Growing, Developing, Learning
A better way of looking at learning is in terms of GROWTH or DEVELOPMENT Take 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.)

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?

Conclusion SO FAR.. 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.

DISAGREEMENT 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!

Grammars grow following some inbuilt sequence!
Native!!! IL2 IL4 Interlanguage Theory: IL3 IL1 IL5 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! ‘8’ Native!!! 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

RECREATED NOT RECONSTRUCTED
They took the radical line and claimed that, L2 acquisition was driven by the same processes as L1 acquisition. this they called CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION The language is built anew in the learner’s mind. Recreated from the L2 input Not reconstructed from the L1.

The learner REcreates the L2 from the beginning subconsciously
without the need for correction They even told teachers not to teach syntax: Dulay, H. C., & Burt, M. K. (1973). Should we teach children syntax? Language Learning, 23,

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!

BURT & DULAY 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 .

Missing contractible copula ‘s :
BURT & DULAY Missing contractible copula ‘s : She’s here He’s my brother always less frequent than: 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. Missing possessive ‘s Mary’s car John’s Ipad.

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

BURT & DULAY’s 90% CRITERION
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 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

Fixed morpheme orders (90%)
Error Rates <90% = ‘acquired” 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. 01 90 01 90 01 81 01 66 01 58 01 33 01 12 01 05

Fixed morpheme orders (90%)
Error Rates <90% = ‘acquired” 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. 01 90 01 90 01 90 01 90 01 90 01 90 01 90 01 90

Other fixed orders You know my friend? Intonation questions
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 Intonation questions Wh word added in front Subj-verb inversion with do Neg place finally (or in front) Neg placed before verb Neg placed before aux verb Neg place after (MODAL) verb Neg place after verb (DO)

BURT, DULAY '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: 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 The same orders revealed by our experiments with learners with different language backgrounds suggest that we first look for developmental explanations where possible.

THEIR CONCLUSION: BURT, DULAY
Grammatical interference was much less important than previously thought! Some L1 like errors were not interference Others were simply performance strategies and did not reflect the learner system but ambitioud ways to communicate when the current L2 system fails.

KRASHEN’S CONTRIBITION
Conscious learning of grammar had no impact on the growth of the ‘acquired’ L2 system It can however affect performance under certain circumstances.

Timing when you test Explicit knowledge about grammar
CONSCIOUS Monitor thinking , analysing.. Explicit knowledge about grammar Timing when you test 100% subconscious L2 Grammar ACQUIRED SO FAR OUTPUT ‘Natural’ Spontaneous Speech or Writing OUTPUT Correction From ‘outside’ ‘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) Milliseconds C O M P A R E

KRASHEN’S FIVE HYPOTHESES
(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‘

(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)

Monitor use: NOW three conditions not one.
Now not 1 but 3 limitations: TIME NEEDED but also: SIMPLE RULES ONLY WILLINGNESS TO MONITOR (individual learners vary here) SLOW LIMITED CONSCIOUS MONITOR ? Acquired grammar Output 1 (‘pure’) Output 2 (mixed and possibly more correct) CONSCIOUS subconscious

(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'

The Creative Construction
one explanation for ‘apparent’ fossilisation. Emotional block Affective Filter ? Reduced sensitivity to input O R G A N I Z E input L2 input Speech/Writing

Later Developments in SLA

The properties of learner systems at given points in time (T1,T2,T3)
TWO AREAS OF FOCUS The properties of learner systems at given points in time (T1,T2,T3) 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 properties of learner systems at given points in time (T1,T2,T3)
The ‘UG’ group

Processing: the relationship between knowledge and how knowledge is processed on-line
L2 Processing during production L2Processing during comprehension L2 processing during acquIsition

L2 Processing during production
Manfred Pieneman

Explaining L2 Performance
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 =L2A Burt, Dulay & Krashen say that evidence of fixed orders show that LAD is still working so: L1A=L2A (essentially at least)

Explaining Stages of Acquisition
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

Pienemann’s explanation? Moving from easily processed structures to less easily processed structures. Some constructions follow a fixed order. Some do not.

Source of evidence? Development of syntax (word order & lawful combinations of words)

The MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODEL
Pienemann’s first explanation was called: The MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODEL

LARGE quantity of data (cf. BDK’s)
ZISA project (Zweitspracherwerb italienischer, portugiesischer und spanischer Arbeiter) 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’) .

translations into English
German main clauses/simple sentences [literal translations into English used as examples] Verb second I see stars [Also OK in English] Often see I stars [NOT OK in English] Stars see I often. [NOT OK in English] V2 translations into English

Verb final position (in main clauses/simple sentences)
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 NON-finite Form FINAL POSITION

main clauses/simple sentences
Another example with modal auxiliary can: *I can stars see *Often can I stars see *Stars I can often see NON-FINITE Verb Form in 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 saw 2. (I said) that I stars seen have

German Basic Word Order stages summarised 00
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 Word Order: Examples (adapted)
SVO SVO KEPT [NO SUBJECT VERB INVERSION when adverb optionally added] NON-FINITE VERBS NOW GO TO THE END VERB GOES TO OBLIG. VERB 2nd POSITION FORCING SUBJ. AND VERB TO INVERT FINITE VERBS GO TO THE END OF A SUBCLAUSE (AFTER ANY NON-FINITE VERB) 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: ANSWER: NO
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.

More comparisons with DBK research
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)

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

Placing things at the beginning and end is next “preserving the canonical order”

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”

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

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) OR B) has spontaneously appeared a few times in learner production (Pienemann)

Developments in P’S theory
He turned to TWO sources to expand his model Levelt’s speech production model Lexical Functional Grammar RESULT: an considerable enrichment of his model AND A NEW NAME: PROCESSABILITY THEORY

Teachability Hypothesis
Teaching cannot force a new developmental stage to appear. Compare this to Krashen’s approach to grammar teaching Just don’t teach grammar!)

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 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.

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

Stage 1 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 2 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 3 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 4 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 5 At the final stage, Stage 5, s-procedure is able to call ‘S’ as a procedure, which means that subordinate clauses can be formed.

Processability and teachability are the main ideas
Conclusion Pienemann’s experimentation and theorising provide an interesting alternative to the other proposals Processability 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

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?

No. This is about input processing It is not about learner production (output)

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?

Input processing capacity of L2 learners is limited
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
What becomes INTAKE? When learners process input, they filter the input Everyone agrees that input is reduced and modified into a new entity called ‘intake’

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

Primacy of Meaning Principle
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

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

The Primacy of Content Words
Content Words are in white, below) 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

The Lexical Preference Principle
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. 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?

The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle
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 Availability of Resources Principle

The Sentence Location Principle
Learners tend to process items in sentence initial position before those in final position and those in medial position 1 3 3 2

The First Noun Principle
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!

Developments in P’S theory
He turned to TWO sources to expand his model Levelt’s speech production model Lexical Functional Grammar RESULT: an considerable enrichment of his model AND A NEW NAME: PROCESSABILITY THEORY

VanPatten summarised VanPatten’s experimentation and theorising provide an interesting alternative to the other proposals He 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 group Pienemann VanPatten

UG researchers had no special interest in pedagogical implications.
UG group and teaching. 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.

Pienemann’s Teachability Hypothesis
Teaching cannot force a new developmental stage to appear. Compare this to Krashen’s approach to grammar teaching Just don’t teach grammar!)

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].

QuestionS: What does ‘close to the point when this structure is acquired in the natural setting’ mean? How do you know when that point has arrived?

Pienemann’s Teachability Hypothesis
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.

VanPatten’s Processing Instruction (PI) approach
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.

Learner’s follow First Noun Principle
Just one example 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:

A Maria la llama Juan Picture showing Juan calling Maria
Picture showing Maria calling John A B Question: match the following sentence to the right picture: A Maria la llama Juan Object marker Object marker

Many, many other developments in L2 theory
Different approaches Different areas of the language Different 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

Michael A. Sharwood Smith May 18th,

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