supplementaryreadingunit11.doc

Unit ElevenText OneDirection: The following text is about cognitive, social, and linguistic development in first language acquisition. Read the passage and see if you agree with the author about the difference between L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition. (W. Klein. Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986:4-6)First language acquisition is intimately bound up with the childs cognitive and social development. To use the antique terms: the “wordless” infants develop into the zoon logon echon and a zoon politikon: The child becomes a “carrier of both word and concept” and a “social creature”. This makes for a number of essential differences between first and second language acquisition, which will be illustrated by a series of examples. (i)Cognitive developmentIn languages like English, French, or German, particularly every sentence carries some tense marking effected by a finite verb. Correct tense marking presupposes that the learner has acquired temporal concepts such as present, past, future and the like. This in itself is an intricate and laborious process; many children tend to confuse “yesterday” and “tomorrow” right into their early school years. Even if four-year-olds are found to form grammatically correct sentences, we cannot be certain -short of misunderstandings and communicative failuresthat their use of, say, the past tense is that of the adult language. Two important conclusions can be drawn from this. First, the production of grammatically well-formed utterances does not imply that the speaker has mastered the language; he may endow these utterances with quite different meaning. Secondly, a speaker must have acquired the cognitive categories which underlie the various expressive means of natural languagescategories such as time, space, modality, causality, etc. Whereas this condition is usually met in secondly language acquisition, it is not necessarily so in first language acquisition. Now consider another, less obvious but particularly instructive example. An essential feature of any natural language is its context-dependency: A clear illustration is offered by the existence of deictic terms. Whereas terms such as Napoleon, in Brighton, and before the First World War carry a relatively stable meaning, deictic terms such as I, here, and now may refer to totally different things or circumstances, depending on who is speaking, where the speaker is, when the speaking is taking place, etc. The implementation of deixis varies from language to language. For example, place is indicated in English by two terms, here-there, and in German by three, hier-da-dort. What is identical however is the underlying principle of change of reference in relation to speaker, place, time, and several other phenomena. It is not an easy task for the child to master this principle of “deictic shift”. But once acquired, the concept is available for ones whole life; when learning a second language the subject need not learn the underlying mechanisms of contextuality anew; he merely has to learn the particular words referring to the “particular speaker”, the “particular place of speaking”, etc. To summarize, there are crucial elements of language mastery that are interrelated with the childs development; these are mastered in the course of first language learning, and are then available for SLA. This is not to say that there is absolutely no need to develop some new concepts in order to master a second language; in fact, there is usually a need to modify and readjust some existing cognitive concepts, and this may prove a particularly exacting task for the learner. For example, a native speaker of English or German has had no need to develop the category of “aspect” in the same way that a native speaker of Russian has had to acquire it; when learning Russian as a second language, however, the English or German native speaker is obliged to develop the category in an appropriate fashion. All in all, the cognitive prerequisites of language mastery are more readily available in second language acquisition than in first language acquisition, and this makes first and second language acquisition different in at least one important aspect. (ii) Social developmentLearning the first language is but one part of the young childs overall development into a fully-fledged member of society. Language enables the child to express feelings, ideas, wishes in a socially accepted manner; the child learns that it is not advisable to speak ones mind at all times, in any way, or to anyone; he comes to realize that words serve to make friends as much as foes and that it is not always possible to tell the truth. Language is the medium through which the child acquires the cultural, moral, religious, and other values of society. In the drive to acquire language a child is guided by the principle: “Becomewith small differenceslike others”. Or else, “Acquire a social identity and within its framework, develop your personal identity”. All this does not apply to most types of SLA. The social identity of the second language learner is more or less fixed. In fact, the desire to preserve ones identity may become a major obstacle in mastering a second language. The apparent facility with which children learn a second language is often attributed to biological factors, but an alternative explanation might be that, unlike adults, children have no need to fear the loss of their social identity. Leaving the matter for further consideration, we may conclude at this point that first language acquisition is closely linked with the childs social development; and hence, to the evolution of a social identity; this does not apply to second language acquisition to the same extent. Text TwoDirection: The following text is about the linguistic aspect of contrastive analysis. Read the passage and try to criticize CA. (R. Ellis. Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1999:25-27)A comparison of two languages can be carried out using any of several different models of grammar. Initially the model used was that of structualist linguists (e.g. Bloomfield 1933;Fries 1952). This emphasized the importance of detailed “scientific description” of languages based on a description of the different categories that make up the patterns of a language. These categories were defined in formal terms and they were established inductively. The differences among languages were emphasized:The differences (among languages) are great enough to prevent our setting up any system of classification that would fit all languages. (Bloomfield, 1933)It is clear that Contrastive Analysis and structuralist linguistics made strange bedfellows. How can an effective comparison be executed if languages do not have any categories in common?This problem was ignored, however, in the spate of contrastive studies that were carried out in the United States (e.g. Stockwell and Bowen 1965); Stockwell, Bowen and Martin 1965). These studied compared languages from within the same language family (e.g. English and Spanish), so the problem of identifying a set of categories which were common to both languages was not acute. However, although for practical purposes the problem of establishing the linguistic basis for comparison could be overlooked, the theoretical problem remained. Ideally Contrastive Analysis needs to be based on universal categories (i.e. categories that can be found in all natural languages), which differ in the way they are linguistically realized from one language to another. Chomskys (1965) theory of grammar proposed just such a model and as such offered s sounder theoretical basis for contrastive analysis (see van Buren 1974 for a full discussion of this point). However, most of the contrastive studies carried out have been based on surface structure characteristics, such as those described by the structuralists. The procedure followed was (1) description (i.e. a formal description of the two languages is made); (2) selection (i.e. certain items, which may be entire subsystems such as the auxiliary system or areas known through error analysis to present difficulty, are selected for comparison; (3) comparison (i.e. the identification of areas of difference and similarity); and (4) prediction (i.e. identifying which areas are likely to cause errors). In (3), comparison, the simplest procedure was to identify which aspects of the two languages were similar and which were different. However, contrastive analysis soon realized that there were degrees of similarity and difference. Here are some of the possibilities that a comparison might reveal:(1)No difference between a feature of the first and second languagee.g. The contracted form “Jai” in French is mirrored by the contracted form “Ive” in English. (2) “Convergent phenomena” (i.e. two items in the first language become coalesced into one in the L2)e.g. Where the L2 is English, German “kennen” and “wissen” coalesce into “know”.(3) An item in the first language is absent in the target languagee.g. In German, subordinate clauses require a different word order from main clauses, whereas in English the word order is the same in both clause types. (4) An item in the first language has a different distribution from the equivalent item in the target languagee.g. In many African languages occurs word-initially, but in English it only occurs word-medially or finally (e.g. singer or thing).(5) No similarity between first language feature and target language feature e.g. In Spanish, negation is preverbal (“No se”), whereas in English it is postverbal (“I dont know”). In addition, English negation involves the use of the auxiliary system, whereas Spanish negation does not. (6) “Divergent phenomena” (i.e. one item in the first language becomes two items in the target language)e.g. Where the L2 is French, English “the” diverges into “le” and “la”.It is one thing to develop categories, such as (1) to (6) above, for classifying the ways in which two languages differ. It is quite another, however, to relate these linguistic differences to learning difficulty. Differences can be identified linguistically, but difficulty involves psychological considerations. Stockwell, Bowen and Martin (1965) and Prator (1967) have proposed that linguistic differences can be arranged in a “hierarchy of difficulty”. Prator, for example, suggests that (1) to (6) above are ordered from zero to greatest difficulty. This claim is not based, however, either on a psycholinguistic theory which explains why some differences create more learning difficulty than others, or on empirical research. It is based only on the conviction that the degree of linguistic difference corresponds to the degree of learning difficulty. Most contrastive analyses have compared phonological systems, probably as a recognition of the role that the L1 plays in “foreign” accents. However, the Contrastive Structure Series (Stockwell, Bowen and Martin) provided full-fledged studies of the contrastive syntax of the major European languages and English, while the 1970s saw a number of studies in Europe (see James 1980:205 for a list). As Sridhar (1981) notes, there have been relatively few studies of vocabulary, while Lados (1957) suggestion that contrastive studies of cultures should be carried out has not been taken up. There are several problems concerning the linguistic aspect of Contrastive Analysis. O