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Course 2: The Language Learning Process

The language learning process

Nature and nurture

Modularity

Systematicity

Creativity

Fossilization

The Process of Language Learning

Nature or Nurture?

B.F Skinner: the mechanisms were those envisaged by general behaviourist

learning theory essentially, copying and memorizing behaviours

encountered in the surrounding environment. From this point of view,

children could learn language primarily by imitating the speech of their

caretakers.

Chomsky: human language is too complex to be learnt in its entirty, from the

performance data actually available to the child; we must therefore have

some innate predisposition to expect natural languages to be organized in

particular ways and not others. Chomsky doubts children could discover from

scratch, in the speech they bear around them. Instead, he argues that there

must be some innate core of abstract knowledge about language form, which

pre-specifies a framework for all natural human languages (Universal

Grammar).

Q: Which one is nurture and which is the nature?

Two positions on how learning takes place have appeared in the literature (Gass,

2007:1): they are commonly referred to as nature and nurture: The first refers to

the possibility that learners (whether child first language learners or adult second

language learners) come to the learning situation with innate knowledge about

language; the second position claims that language development is inspired and

conditioned by the environment, that is, the interactions in which learners engage.

1. Modularity

Should we see the mind as a single, flexible organism, with one general set of

procedures for learning and storing different kinds of knowledge and skills?

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Is it more helpfully understood as a bundle of modules, with distinctive mechanisms

relevant to different types of knowledge.

If such innate mechanisms indeed exist, there are four logical possibilities:

a. They continue to operate during SLL, and make key aspects of SLL possible,

in the same way that they make first-language learning possible.

b. After the acquisitions of the first language in early childhood, these

mechanisms cease to be operable, and second language most be learnt by

other means.

c. The mechanisms themselves are no longer operable, but the first language

provides a model of a natural language and how it works, which can be

copied in some way when learning a second language.

d. Distinctive learning mechanisms for language remain available, but only in

part, and must be supplemented by other means.

2. Systematicity

Errors and mistakes (made by students) are patterned, ad although some regular

errors are caused by the influence of the first language, this is by no means true of

all of them. Instead, there is a deal of evidence that learners work their way through

a number of developmental stages, from apparently primitive and deviant versions

of the second language, to progressively more elaborate and target-like versions.

1) No you are playing here

2) Mariana not coming today

3) I cant play that one

So, learners development follows a common route, even of the speed (or rate) at

which learners actually travel along this common route may be very different.

3. Creativity

Learners surface utterances can be linked to underlying rule systems, even if there

seem primitive and deviant compared with the target language system. It logically

follows that learners can produce original utterances, that is, that their rule system

can generate utterances appropriate to a given context, which the learner has

never heard before.

Work in corpus linguistics has led to the increasing recognition that formulas and

routines play an important part in everyday language use by native speakers; when

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we talk, every day first-language utterances are a complex mix of creativity and

prefabrication.

4. Fossilization

Adult learners ever come to blend indistinguishably with the community of target

language native speakers most remain noticeably different in their pronunciation,

and many continue to make grammar mistakes and to search for words, even when

well-motivated to learn, after years to study, residence or work in contact with the

target language.

While some learners go on learning, and arrive very close to the target language

norm, others seem to cease to make any visible progress, no matter how many

language classes they attend, or how actively they continue to use their second

language for communicative purposes. Fossilization happens when a learners

second language system seems to freeze or become stuck, at some more or less

deviant stage. There are two explanations offered:

1) Psycholinguistics: the language specific learning mechanisms available to the

young child simply cease to work for older learners, at least partly, and no

amount of study and effort can recreate them.

2) Sociolinguisitics: older second language learners do not have the social

opportunities, or the motivation , to identify completely with the native

speaker community, but may instead value their distinctive identity as learns

or as members of an identifiable minority group.

Example:

This person had resided in Britain for 42 years and yet kept saying The man which I

saw ...; He said it

when I first met him 41 years ago, and last month he was still saying it

(Han and Odlin, 2006:5)

Source:

Gass, Susan M. 2007. Input and Interaction. The Handbook of Second Language

Acquisitio. Available at: http://www.blackwellreference.com

Han,ZhaoHong and T. Odlin. 2006. Studies of Fossilization in Second Language

Acquisition. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Mitcell, R. and Florene Myles.2004. Second Language Learning Theories. London:

Hodder Arnold.

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