Social Variation
Research in language variation has shifted to sociolinguistics for over past 40 years. This field is concerned with the interrelationship between the language of a group and its social characteristics. Regional dialectology and sociolinguistics are mutually exclusive and fields of study. On the contrary, researchers in regional dialectology often include social logical information about their informants such as, age and education. Likewise, sociolinguistics must often take into account regional influences on the social dialects they are studying. Nevertheless, we can draw a few generalizations about why research in language variation toward sociolinguistics.
Several trends developed in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s that shifted attention to social variation. First, since regional dialectologist had been collecting information about social variables such as age and education, it was a natural step for linguist to become interested in social variables for their own sake. Second, linguistics found it impossible to deal with language variation without acknowledging the fact that listeners often make social judgments based on characteristic of a speaker’s dialect. Thus arose in interest in standard and non standard dialects. It's no simple matter to define the differences between a standard and non standard variety of a language. Usually standard dialect draws no negative attention to it self. However nonstandard dialect draws negative attention to itself. Third, the interest in nonstandard dialects in the 1960s and 1970s led quiet naturally is interest in what is now called African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Research on non standard dialects in general and on AAVE in particular has been especially relevant to practical problems in public education.
A final reason for the increased interest in social dialects is that, while regional dialects are characterized largely by lexical variation ; social dialects are more likely to reflect grammatical variation – variation of phonology, morphology, and system. On this case grammatical variation tends to be more systematic and predictable.
Senin, 14 Juni 2010
social variation
Social Variation
Research in language variation has shifted to sociolinguistics for over past 40 years. This field is concerned with the interrelationship between the language of a group and its social characteristics. Regional dialectology and sociolinguistics are mutually exclusive and fields of study. On the contrary, researchers in regional dialectology often include social logical information about their informants such as, age and education. Likewise, sociolinguistics must often take into account regional influences on the social dialects they are studying. Nevertheless, we can draw a few generalizations about why research in language variation toward sociolinguistics.
Several trends developed in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s that shifted attention to social variation. First, since regional dialectologist had been collecting information about social variables such as age and education, it was a natural step for linguist to become interested in social variables for their own sake. Second, linguistics found it impossible to deal with language variation without acknowledging the fact that listeners often make social judgments based on characteristic of a speaker’s dialect. Thus arose in interest in standard and non standard dialects. It's no simple matter to define the differences between a standard and non standard variety of a language. Usually standard dialect draws no negative attention to it self. However nonstandard dialect draws negative attention to itself. Third, the interest in nonstandard dialects in the 1960s and 1970s led quiet naturally is interest in what is now called African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Research on non standard dialects in general and on AAVE in particular has been especially relevant to practical problems in public education.
A final reason for the increased interest in social dialects is that, while regional dialects are characterized largely by lexical variation ; social dialects are more likely to reflect grammatical variation – variation of phonology, morphology, and system. On this case grammatical variation tends to be more systematic and predictable.
Research in language variation has shifted to sociolinguistics for over past 40 years. This field is concerned with the interrelationship between the language of a group and its social characteristics. Regional dialectology and sociolinguistics are mutually exclusive and fields of study. On the contrary, researchers in regional dialectology often include social logical information about their informants such as, age and education. Likewise, sociolinguistics must often take into account regional influences on the social dialects they are studying. Nevertheless, we can draw a few generalizations about why research in language variation toward sociolinguistics.
Several trends developed in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s that shifted attention to social variation. First, since regional dialectologist had been collecting information about social variables such as age and education, it was a natural step for linguist to become interested in social variables for their own sake. Second, linguistics found it impossible to deal with language variation without acknowledging the fact that listeners often make social judgments based on characteristic of a speaker’s dialect. Thus arose in interest in standard and non standard dialects. It's no simple matter to define the differences between a standard and non standard variety of a language. Usually standard dialect draws no negative attention to it self. However nonstandard dialect draws negative attention to itself. Third, the interest in nonstandard dialects in the 1960s and 1970s led quiet naturally is interest in what is now called African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Research on non standard dialects in general and on AAVE in particular has been especially relevant to practical problems in public education.
A final reason for the increased interest in social dialects is that, while regional dialects are characterized largely by lexical variation ; social dialects are more likely to reflect grammatical variation – variation of phonology, morphology, and system. On this case grammatical variation tends to be more systematic and predictable.
social variation
Social Variation
Research in language variation has shifted to sociolinguistics for over past 40 years. This field is concerned with the interrelationship between the language of a group and its social characteristics. Regional dialectology and sociolinguistics are mutually exclusive and fields of study. On the contrary, researchers in regional dialectology often include social logical information about their informants such as, age and education. Likewise, sociolinguistics must often take into account regional influences on the social dialects they are studying. Nevertheless, we can draw a few generalizations about why research in language variation toward sociolinguistics.
Several trends developed in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s that shifted attention to social variation. First, since regional dialectologist had been collecting information about social variables such as age and education, it was a natural step for linguist to become interested in social variables for their own sake. Second, linguistics found it impossible to deal with language variation without acknowledging the fact that listeners often make social judgments based on characteristic of a speaker’s dialect. Thus arose in interest in standard and non standard dialects. It's no simple matter to define the differences between a standard and non standard variety of a language. Usually standard dialect draws no negative attention to it self. However nonstandard dialect draws negative attention to itself. Third, the interest in nonstandard dialects in the 1960s and 1970s led quiet naturally is interest in what is now called African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Research on non standard dialects in general and on AAVE in particular has been especially relevant to practical problems in public education.
A final reason for the increased interest in social dialects is that, while regional dialects are characterized largely by lexical variation ; social dialects are more likely to reflect grammatical variation – variation of phonology, morphology, and system. On this case grammatical variation tends to be more systematic and predictable.
Research in language variation has shifted to sociolinguistics for over past 40 years. This field is concerned with the interrelationship between the language of a group and its social characteristics. Regional dialectology and sociolinguistics are mutually exclusive and fields of study. On the contrary, researchers in regional dialectology often include social logical information about their informants such as, age and education. Likewise, sociolinguistics must often take into account regional influences on the social dialects they are studying. Nevertheless, we can draw a few generalizations about why research in language variation toward sociolinguistics.
Several trends developed in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s that shifted attention to social variation. First, since regional dialectologist had been collecting information about social variables such as age and education, it was a natural step for linguist to become interested in social variables for their own sake. Second, linguistics found it impossible to deal with language variation without acknowledging the fact that listeners often make social judgments based on characteristic of a speaker’s dialect. Thus arose in interest in standard and non standard dialects. It's no simple matter to define the differences between a standard and non standard variety of a language. Usually standard dialect draws no negative attention to it self. However nonstandard dialect draws negative attention to itself. Third, the interest in nonstandard dialects in the 1960s and 1970s led quiet naturally is interest in what is now called African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Research on non standard dialects in general and on AAVE in particular has been especially relevant to practical problems in public education.
A final reason for the increased interest in social dialects is that, while regional dialects are characterized largely by lexical variation ; social dialects are more likely to reflect grammatical variation – variation of phonology, morphology, and system. On this case grammatical variation tends to be more systematic and predictable.
second language learning-introduction to linguistic
Knowing more than one language
• People can acquire a second language under many different circumstances. You may have learned it when you began middle school or collage. Other people live in communities in which more than one language is spoken and may acquire two languages simultaneously.
• The term second language acquisition, or L2 acquisition, generally refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language.
• Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneously acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy.
• The younger you are, the easier it seems to be learning a language. Young children who are exposed to more than one language before the age of puberty seem to acquire all the languages equally well.
Theories of bilingual development
The mixed utterances raise an interesting question about grammars of bilingual children. Does the bilingual child start out with only one grammar that is eventually differentiated, or does she construct a separate grammar for each language right from the start?
• The unitary system hypothesis says that the child usually construct only one lexicon and one grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual child may know the Spanish word for milk is “leche”, but not the English word.
• The separate system hypothesis says that the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language. The language mixing of bilingual children isn’t due to confusion, but is rather the result of two grammars operating simultaneously.
For example French-English bilingual children may say:
A house pink (a pink house)
Two monolinguals in one head
Although we must study many bilingual children to reach any firm conclusions, the evidence accumulated so far seems to support the idea that bilingual children construct multiple grammars at the outset. Moreover, it seems that bilingual children develop their grammars along the same lines as monolingual children. They go through babbling stage, a holophrastic stage, a telegraphic stage, and so on. During the telegraphic stage, they show the same characteristics in each of their languages as the monolingual children.
• For example, monolingual English –speaking children omit verb endings in sentences such as “Eve play there” and German-speaking children use infinitives as in “Thorstn das haben” (Thorstn that to have).
• Remarkably, two year old German-Italian bilinguals use infinitives when speaking German but not when they speak Italian. Result such as these have led some researchers to suggest that the bilingual child is like “two monolinguals in one head”
The role of input
What rule does input play in helping the child to separate the two languages?
• One input condition that is thought to promote bilingual development is une personne- une langue (one person-one language).
In this condition, each person, say Mom and Dad speaks only one language to the child. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to keep them separate. Whether this affects bilingual development in some important way hasn’t been established. In practice this “ideal” input situation may be difficult to attain.
How much input does a child need in each language to become “native” in both?
• The answer isn’t straight forward. It seems intuitively clear that if a child hears 12 hours of English a day and only 2 hours of Spanish, he will probably develop English h much more quickly and completely than Spanish.
• In reality bilingual children are raised vary circumstances. Some may have more or less equal exposure to the two languages. For practical purposes, the rule of thumb is that the child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the twp languages to achieve native proficiency in both.
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
Does being bilingual make you more or less intelligent, more or less creative, and so on?
• Early studies before1960s shows that bilingual children did worse than monolingual children on IQ and other cognitive and educational tests.
• The results of recent research indicate that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving. Also bilingual children seem to have better metalinguistic awareness.
• Whether children enjoy some cognitive or educational benefit from being bilingual seems to depend a great deal on extralinguistic factors such as the social and economic positions of the child’s group, the educational situation, and the relative “prestige” of the two languages. Studies shows that positive effects generally involve children reared in societies where both languages are valued, and whose parents were interested and supportive of their bilingual development.
Second language acquisition.
Many people are introduced to a second language (L2) after they are “native” in first language.
Is L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition?
There are some reasons why the L2 and L1 acquisition are different:
• Learning second language usually requires conscious attention.
• Adult second language learners (L2ers) do not often achieve nativelike grammatical competence in the L2, especially with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they make syntactic or morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language.
• Many L2ers “fossilize” mistakes, so that even if they use the L2 regularly and are constantly exposed to input un it, they fail to develop full grammatical competence.
• Adults vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented, others are hopeless. Success may depend on arrange factors, including age, talent, motivation, and etc.
But, in certain important respect, however, L2 acquisition is like L1 acquisition. Like L1, L2ers go through some stages to construct grammars.
• These grammars reflect their competence in the L2 at each stage and so their language at any particular point, though not nativelike, is rule-governed and not haphazard.
• The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called interlanguage grammar.
• Unlike children, L2ers often do not reach target. In this case, L1ers have specifically linguistic principles of UG to help them, but adult do not.
• In conclusion, although L2ers may fall short of L1ers in terms of their final grammar, they may acquire rules in the some way as L1ers.
Native language influence in L2 acquisition
• L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are clearly different is that adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language.
• L2ers, especially at the beginning stage of acquiring their L2,seem to rely on their L1 grammar to some extent. This is shown by the kinds of errors L2ers make, which often involve the transfer of grammatical rules from their L1.
• This is most obvious in phonology. L2ers generally speak with an accent because they may transfer the phonemes, phonological rules, or syllable structures of their first language to their second language.
For example:
Japanese speaker, who doesn’t distinguish between write [rajt] and right [lajt]. Because the r/l distinction isn’t phonemic in Japanese.
• Native language influence may show up in more subtle ways. For example, people whose L1 is German, acquire English yes/no question that is very close to the English aux movement rule, while in Japanese there is no syntactic movement in question formation.
The creative component of L2 acquisition
• There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. Many language particular parts of the L1 grammar do not transfer. Items that a speaker considers irregular, infrequent, or semantically difficult are not likely to transfer to the L2.
Example:
1. It is awkward to carry this suitcase.
2. This suitcase is awkward to carry.
In (1) the NP “this suitcase” is in logical direct object position, while in (2) it has been moved to the subject position away from the verb that selects it.
• It is clear, however, that although construction of the L2 grammar is influenced by the L1 grammar, there are also develop mental principles, possibly universal, that operate in L2 acquisition.
A critical period for L2 acquisition?
• Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when exposed to a second language, the more likely she is to achieve nativelike competence.
So, does this mean that there is a critical period for L2 acquisition??
• Many researchers hesitate to make such a strong claim. Although age is an important factor in achieving nativelike L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire a second language as an adult. Indeed, many teenage and adult L2 learners become quite proficient, and few highly talented. Ones even manage to pass for native speaker.
• It is more appropriate to say that there is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities with age and that there are “sensitive period” for the nativelike mastery of certain aspects of the L2. The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest. To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2 generally require exposure during childhood.
Second Language Teaching Methods
• Grammar-translation method: The student memories words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from English to L2 and vice versa.
• The direct method: abandons memorization and translation; the native language is never used in the classroom, and the structure of the L2 language or how it differs from the native language is not disused.
• Audio-lingual method: language is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement.
Most individual methods have serious limitations: probably a combination of many methods is required.
• People can acquire a second language under many different circumstances. You may have learned it when you began middle school or collage. Other people live in communities in which more than one language is spoken and may acquire two languages simultaneously.
• The term second language acquisition, or L2 acquisition, generally refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language.
• Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneously acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy.
• The younger you are, the easier it seems to be learning a language. Young children who are exposed to more than one language before the age of puberty seem to acquire all the languages equally well.
Theories of bilingual development
The mixed utterances raise an interesting question about grammars of bilingual children. Does the bilingual child start out with only one grammar that is eventually differentiated, or does she construct a separate grammar for each language right from the start?
• The unitary system hypothesis says that the child usually construct only one lexicon and one grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual child may know the Spanish word for milk is “leche”, but not the English word.
• The separate system hypothesis says that the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language. The language mixing of bilingual children isn’t due to confusion, but is rather the result of two grammars operating simultaneously.
For example French-English bilingual children may say:
A house pink (a pink house)
Two monolinguals in one head
Although we must study many bilingual children to reach any firm conclusions, the evidence accumulated so far seems to support the idea that bilingual children construct multiple grammars at the outset. Moreover, it seems that bilingual children develop their grammars along the same lines as monolingual children. They go through babbling stage, a holophrastic stage, a telegraphic stage, and so on. During the telegraphic stage, they show the same characteristics in each of their languages as the monolingual children.
• For example, monolingual English –speaking children omit verb endings in sentences such as “Eve play there” and German-speaking children use infinitives as in “Thorstn das haben” (Thorstn that to have).
• Remarkably, two year old German-Italian bilinguals use infinitives when speaking German but not when they speak Italian. Result such as these have led some researchers to suggest that the bilingual child is like “two monolinguals in one head”
The role of input
What rule does input play in helping the child to separate the two languages?
• One input condition that is thought to promote bilingual development is une personne- une langue (one person-one language).
In this condition, each person, say Mom and Dad speaks only one language to the child. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to keep them separate. Whether this affects bilingual development in some important way hasn’t been established. In practice this “ideal” input situation may be difficult to attain.
How much input does a child need in each language to become “native” in both?
• The answer isn’t straight forward. It seems intuitively clear that if a child hears 12 hours of English a day and only 2 hours of Spanish, he will probably develop English h much more quickly and completely than Spanish.
• In reality bilingual children are raised vary circumstances. Some may have more or less equal exposure to the two languages. For practical purposes, the rule of thumb is that the child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the twp languages to achieve native proficiency in both.
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
Does being bilingual make you more or less intelligent, more or less creative, and so on?
• Early studies before1960s shows that bilingual children did worse than monolingual children on IQ and other cognitive and educational tests.
• The results of recent research indicate that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving. Also bilingual children seem to have better metalinguistic awareness.
• Whether children enjoy some cognitive or educational benefit from being bilingual seems to depend a great deal on extralinguistic factors such as the social and economic positions of the child’s group, the educational situation, and the relative “prestige” of the two languages. Studies shows that positive effects generally involve children reared in societies where both languages are valued, and whose parents were interested and supportive of their bilingual development.
Second language acquisition.
Many people are introduced to a second language (L2) after they are “native” in first language.
Is L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition?
There are some reasons why the L2 and L1 acquisition are different:
• Learning second language usually requires conscious attention.
• Adult second language learners (L2ers) do not often achieve nativelike grammatical competence in the L2, especially with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they make syntactic or morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language.
• Many L2ers “fossilize” mistakes, so that even if they use the L2 regularly and are constantly exposed to input un it, they fail to develop full grammatical competence.
• Adults vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented, others are hopeless. Success may depend on arrange factors, including age, talent, motivation, and etc.
But, in certain important respect, however, L2 acquisition is like L1 acquisition. Like L1, L2ers go through some stages to construct grammars.
• These grammars reflect their competence in the L2 at each stage and so their language at any particular point, though not nativelike, is rule-governed and not haphazard.
• The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called interlanguage grammar.
• Unlike children, L2ers often do not reach target. In this case, L1ers have specifically linguistic principles of UG to help them, but adult do not.
• In conclusion, although L2ers may fall short of L1ers in terms of their final grammar, they may acquire rules in the some way as L1ers.
Native language influence in L2 acquisition
• L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are clearly different is that adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language.
• L2ers, especially at the beginning stage of acquiring their L2,seem to rely on their L1 grammar to some extent. This is shown by the kinds of errors L2ers make, which often involve the transfer of grammatical rules from their L1.
• This is most obvious in phonology. L2ers generally speak with an accent because they may transfer the phonemes, phonological rules, or syllable structures of their first language to their second language.
For example:
Japanese speaker, who doesn’t distinguish between write [rajt] and right [lajt]. Because the r/l distinction isn’t phonemic in Japanese.
• Native language influence may show up in more subtle ways. For example, people whose L1 is German, acquire English yes/no question that is very close to the English aux movement rule, while in Japanese there is no syntactic movement in question formation.
The creative component of L2 acquisition
• There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. Many language particular parts of the L1 grammar do not transfer. Items that a speaker considers irregular, infrequent, or semantically difficult are not likely to transfer to the L2.
Example:
1. It is awkward to carry this suitcase.
2. This suitcase is awkward to carry.
In (1) the NP “this suitcase” is in logical direct object position, while in (2) it has been moved to the subject position away from the verb that selects it.
• It is clear, however, that although construction of the L2 grammar is influenced by the L1 grammar, there are also develop mental principles, possibly universal, that operate in L2 acquisition.
A critical period for L2 acquisition?
• Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when exposed to a second language, the more likely she is to achieve nativelike competence.
So, does this mean that there is a critical period for L2 acquisition??
• Many researchers hesitate to make such a strong claim. Although age is an important factor in achieving nativelike L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire a second language as an adult. Indeed, many teenage and adult L2 learners become quite proficient, and few highly talented. Ones even manage to pass for native speaker.
• It is more appropriate to say that there is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities with age and that there are “sensitive period” for the nativelike mastery of certain aspects of the L2. The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest. To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2 generally require exposure during childhood.
Second Language Teaching Methods
• Grammar-translation method: The student memories words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from English to L2 and vice versa.
• The direct method: abandons memorization and translation; the native language is never used in the classroom, and the structure of the L2 language or how it differs from the native language is not disused.
• Audio-lingual method: language is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement.
Most individual methods have serious limitations: probably a combination of many methods is required.
second language learning-introduction to linguistic
Knowing more than one language
• People can acquire a second language under many different circumstances. You may have learned it when you began middle school or collage. Other people live in communities in which more than one language is spoken and may acquire two languages simultaneously.
• The term second language acquisition, or L2 acquisition, generally refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language.
• Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneously acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy.
• The younger you are, the easier it seems to be learning a language. Young children who are exposed to more than one language before the age of puberty seem to acquire all the languages equally well.
Theories of bilingual development
The mixed utterances raise an interesting question about grammars of bilingual children. Does the bilingual child start out with only one grammar that is eventually differentiated, or does she construct a separate grammar for each language right from the start?
• The unitary system hypothesis says that the child usually construct only one lexicon and one grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual child may know the Spanish word for milk is “leche”, but not the English word.
• The separate system hypothesis says that the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language. The language mixing of bilingual children isn’t due to confusion, but is rather the result of two grammars operating simultaneously.
For example French-English bilingual children may say:
A house pink (a pink house)
Two monolinguals in one head
Although we must study many bilingual children to reach any firm conclusions, the evidence accumulated so far seems to support the idea that bilingual children construct multiple grammars at the outset. Moreover, it seems that bilingual children develop their grammars along the same lines as monolingual children. They go through babbling stage, a holophrastic stage, a telegraphic stage, and so on. During the telegraphic stage, they show the same characteristics in each of their languages as the monolingual children.
• For example, monolingual English –speaking children omit verb endings in sentences such as “Eve play there” and German-speaking children use infinitives as in “Thorstn das haben” (Thorstn that to have).
• Remarkably, two year old German-Italian bilinguals use infinitives when speaking German but not when they speak Italian. Result such as these have led some researchers to suggest that the bilingual child is like “two monolinguals in one head”
The role of input
What rule does input play in helping the child to separate the two languages?
• One input condition that is thought to promote bilingual development is une personne- une langue (one person-one language).
In this condition, each person, say Mom and Dad speaks only one language to the child. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to keep them separate. Whether this affects bilingual development in some important way hasn’t been established. In practice this “ideal” input situation may be difficult to attain.
How much input does a child need in each language to become “native” in both?
• The answer isn’t straight forward. It seems intuitively clear that if a child hears 12 hours of English a day and only 2 hours of Spanish, he will probably develop English h much more quickly and completely than Spanish.
• In reality bilingual children are raised vary circumstances. Some may have more or less equal exposure to the two languages. For practical purposes, the rule of thumb is that the child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the twp languages to achieve native proficiency in both.
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
Does being bilingual make you more or less intelligent, more or less creative, and so on?
• Early studies before1960s shows that bilingual children did worse than monolingual children on IQ and other cognitive and educational tests.
• The results of recent research indicate that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving. Also bilingual children seem to have better metalinguistic awareness.
• Whether children enjoy some cognitive or educational benefit from being bilingual seems to depend a great deal on extralinguistic factors such as the social and economic positions of the child’s group, the educational situation, and the relative “prestige” of the two languages. Studies shows that positive effects generally involve children reared in societies where both languages are valued, and whose parents were interested and supportive of their bilingual development.
Second language acquisition.
Many people are introduced to a second language (L2) after they are “native” in first language.
Is L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition?
There are some reasons why the L2 and L1 acquisition are different:
• Learning second language usually requires conscious attention.
• Adult second language learners (L2ers) do not often achieve nativelike grammatical competence in the L2, especially with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they make syntactic or morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language.
• Many L2ers “fossilize” mistakes, so that even if they use the L2 regularly and are constantly exposed to input un it, they fail to develop full grammatical competence.
• Adults vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented, others are hopeless. Success may depend on arrange factors, including age, talent, motivation, and etc.
But, in certain important respect, however, L2 acquisition is like L1 acquisition. Like L1, L2ers go through some stages to construct grammars.
• These grammars reflect their competence in the L2 at each stage and so their language at any particular point, though not nativelike, is rule-governed and not haphazard.
• The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called interlanguage grammar.
• Unlike children, L2ers often do not reach target. In this case, L1ers have specifically linguistic principles of UG to help them, but adult do not.
• In conclusion, although L2ers may fall short of L1ers in terms of their final grammar, they may acquire rules in the some way as L1ers.
Native language influence in L2 acquisition
• L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are clearly different is that adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language.
• L2ers, especially at the beginning stage of acquiring their L2,seem to rely on their L1 grammar to some extent. This is shown by the kinds of errors L2ers make, which often involve the transfer of grammatical rules from their L1.
• This is most obvious in phonology. L2ers generally speak with an accent because they may transfer the phonemes, phonological rules, or syllable structures of their first language to their second language.
For example:
Japanese speaker, who doesn’t distinguish between write [rajt] and right [lajt]. Because the r/l distinction isn’t phonemic in Japanese.
• Native language influence may show up in more subtle ways. For example, people whose L1 is German, acquire English yes/no question that is very close to the English aux movement rule, while in Japanese there is no syntactic movement in question formation.
The creative component of L2 acquisition
• There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. Many language particular parts of the L1 grammar do not transfer. Items that a speaker considers irregular, infrequent, or semantically difficult are not likely to transfer to the L2.
Example:
1. It is awkward to carry this suitcase.
2. This suitcase is awkward to carry.
In (1) the NP “this suitcase” is in logical direct object position, while in (2) it has been moved to the subject position away from the verb that selects it.
• It is clear, however, that although construction of the L2 grammar is influenced by the L1 grammar, there are also develop mental principles, possibly universal, that operate in L2 acquisition.
A critical period for L2 acquisition?
• Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when exposed to a second language, the more likely she is to achieve nativelike competence.
So, does this mean that there is a critical period for L2 acquisition??
• Many researchers hesitate to make such a strong claim. Although age is an important factor in achieving nativelike L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire a second language as an adult. Indeed, many teenage and adult L2 learners become quite proficient, and few highly talented. Ones even manage to pass for native speaker.
• It is more appropriate to say that there is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities with age and that there are “sensitive period” for the nativelike mastery of certain aspects of the L2. The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest. To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2 generally require exposure during childhood.
Second Language Teaching Methods
• Grammar-translation method: The student memories words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from English to L2 and vice versa.
• The direct method: abandons memorization and translation; the native language is never used in the classroom, and the structure of the L2 language or how it differs from the native language is not disused.
• Audio-lingual method: language is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement.
Most individual methods have serious limitations: probably a combination of many methods is required.
• People can acquire a second language under many different circumstances. You may have learned it when you began middle school or collage. Other people live in communities in which more than one language is spoken and may acquire two languages simultaneously.
• The term second language acquisition, or L2 acquisition, generally refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language.
• Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneously acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy.
• The younger you are, the easier it seems to be learning a language. Young children who are exposed to more than one language before the age of puberty seem to acquire all the languages equally well.
Theories of bilingual development
The mixed utterances raise an interesting question about grammars of bilingual children. Does the bilingual child start out with only one grammar that is eventually differentiated, or does she construct a separate grammar for each language right from the start?
• The unitary system hypothesis says that the child usually construct only one lexicon and one grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual child may know the Spanish word for milk is “leche”, but not the English word.
• The separate system hypothesis says that the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language. The language mixing of bilingual children isn’t due to confusion, but is rather the result of two grammars operating simultaneously.
For example French-English bilingual children may say:
A house pink (a pink house)
Two monolinguals in one head
Although we must study many bilingual children to reach any firm conclusions, the evidence accumulated so far seems to support the idea that bilingual children construct multiple grammars at the outset. Moreover, it seems that bilingual children develop their grammars along the same lines as monolingual children. They go through babbling stage, a holophrastic stage, a telegraphic stage, and so on. During the telegraphic stage, they show the same characteristics in each of their languages as the monolingual children.
• For example, monolingual English –speaking children omit verb endings in sentences such as “Eve play there” and German-speaking children use infinitives as in “Thorstn das haben” (Thorstn that to have).
• Remarkably, two year old German-Italian bilinguals use infinitives when speaking German but not when they speak Italian. Result such as these have led some researchers to suggest that the bilingual child is like “two monolinguals in one head”
The role of input
What rule does input play in helping the child to separate the two languages?
• One input condition that is thought to promote bilingual development is une personne- une langue (one person-one language).
In this condition, each person, say Mom and Dad speaks only one language to the child. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to keep them separate. Whether this affects bilingual development in some important way hasn’t been established. In practice this “ideal” input situation may be difficult to attain.
How much input does a child need in each language to become “native” in both?
• The answer isn’t straight forward. It seems intuitively clear that if a child hears 12 hours of English a day and only 2 hours of Spanish, he will probably develop English h much more quickly and completely than Spanish.
• In reality bilingual children are raised vary circumstances. Some may have more or less equal exposure to the two languages. For practical purposes, the rule of thumb is that the child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the twp languages to achieve native proficiency in both.
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
Does being bilingual make you more or less intelligent, more or less creative, and so on?
• Early studies before1960s shows that bilingual children did worse than monolingual children on IQ and other cognitive and educational tests.
• The results of recent research indicate that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving. Also bilingual children seem to have better metalinguistic awareness.
• Whether children enjoy some cognitive or educational benefit from being bilingual seems to depend a great deal on extralinguistic factors such as the social and economic positions of the child’s group, the educational situation, and the relative “prestige” of the two languages. Studies shows that positive effects generally involve children reared in societies where both languages are valued, and whose parents were interested and supportive of their bilingual development.
Second language acquisition.
Many people are introduced to a second language (L2) after they are “native” in first language.
Is L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition?
There are some reasons why the L2 and L1 acquisition are different:
• Learning second language usually requires conscious attention.
• Adult second language learners (L2ers) do not often achieve nativelike grammatical competence in the L2, especially with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they make syntactic or morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language.
• Many L2ers “fossilize” mistakes, so that even if they use the L2 regularly and are constantly exposed to input un it, they fail to develop full grammatical competence.
• Adults vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented, others are hopeless. Success may depend on arrange factors, including age, talent, motivation, and etc.
But, in certain important respect, however, L2 acquisition is like L1 acquisition. Like L1, L2ers go through some stages to construct grammars.
• These grammars reflect their competence in the L2 at each stage and so their language at any particular point, though not nativelike, is rule-governed and not haphazard.
• The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called interlanguage grammar.
• Unlike children, L2ers often do not reach target. In this case, L1ers have specifically linguistic principles of UG to help them, but adult do not.
• In conclusion, although L2ers may fall short of L1ers in terms of their final grammar, they may acquire rules in the some way as L1ers.
Native language influence in L2 acquisition
• L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are clearly different is that adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language.
• L2ers, especially at the beginning stage of acquiring their L2,seem to rely on their L1 grammar to some extent. This is shown by the kinds of errors L2ers make, which often involve the transfer of grammatical rules from their L1.
• This is most obvious in phonology. L2ers generally speak with an accent because they may transfer the phonemes, phonological rules, or syllable structures of their first language to their second language.
For example:
Japanese speaker, who doesn’t distinguish between write [rajt] and right [lajt]. Because the r/l distinction isn’t phonemic in Japanese.
• Native language influence may show up in more subtle ways. For example, people whose L1 is German, acquire English yes/no question that is very close to the English aux movement rule, while in Japanese there is no syntactic movement in question formation.
The creative component of L2 acquisition
• There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. Many language particular parts of the L1 grammar do not transfer. Items that a speaker considers irregular, infrequent, or semantically difficult are not likely to transfer to the L2.
Example:
1. It is awkward to carry this suitcase.
2. This suitcase is awkward to carry.
In (1) the NP “this suitcase” is in logical direct object position, while in (2) it has been moved to the subject position away from the verb that selects it.
• It is clear, however, that although construction of the L2 grammar is influenced by the L1 grammar, there are also develop mental principles, possibly universal, that operate in L2 acquisition.
A critical period for L2 acquisition?
• Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when exposed to a second language, the more likely she is to achieve nativelike competence.
So, does this mean that there is a critical period for L2 acquisition??
• Many researchers hesitate to make such a strong claim. Although age is an important factor in achieving nativelike L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire a second language as an adult. Indeed, many teenage and adult L2 learners become quite proficient, and few highly talented. Ones even manage to pass for native speaker.
• It is more appropriate to say that there is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities with age and that there are “sensitive period” for the nativelike mastery of certain aspects of the L2. The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest. To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2 generally require exposure during childhood.
Second Language Teaching Methods
• Grammar-translation method: The student memories words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from English to L2 and vice versa.
• The direct method: abandons memorization and translation; the native language is never used in the classroom, and the structure of the L2 language or how it differs from the native language is not disused.
• Audio-lingual method: language is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement.
Most individual methods have serious limitations: probably a combination of many methods is required.
second language learning-introduction to linguistic
Knowing more than one language
• People can acquire a second language under many different circumstances. You may have learned it when you began middle school or collage. Other people live in communities in which more than one language is spoken and may acquire two languages simultaneously.
• The term second language acquisition, or L2 acquisition, generally refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language.
• Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneously acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy.
• The younger you are, the easier it seems to be learning a language. Young children who are exposed to more than one language before the age of puberty seem to acquire all the languages equally well.
Theories of bilingual development
The mixed utterances raise an interesting question about grammars of bilingual children. Does the bilingual child start out with only one grammar that is eventually differentiated, or does she construct a separate grammar for each language right from the start?
• The unitary system hypothesis says that the child usually construct only one lexicon and one grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual child may know the Spanish word for milk is “leche”, but not the English word.
• The separate system hypothesis says that the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language. The language mixing of bilingual children isn’t due to confusion, but is rather the result of two grammars operating simultaneously.
For example French-English bilingual children may say:
A house pink (a pink house)
Two monolinguals in one head
Although we must study many bilingual children to reach any firm conclusions, the evidence accumulated so far seems to support the idea that bilingual children construct multiple grammars at the outset. Moreover, it seems that bilingual children develop their grammars along the same lines as monolingual children. They go through babbling stage, a holophrastic stage, a telegraphic stage, and so on. During the telegraphic stage, they show the same characteristics in each of their languages as the monolingual children.
• For example, monolingual English –speaking children omit verb endings in sentences such as “Eve play there” and German-speaking children use infinitives as in “Thorstn das haben” (Thorstn that to have).
• Remarkably, two year old German-Italian bilinguals use infinitives when speaking German but not when they speak Italian. Result such as these have led some researchers to suggest that the bilingual child is like “two monolinguals in one head”
The role of input
What rule does input play in helping the child to separate the two languages?
• One input condition that is thought to promote bilingual development is une personne- une langue (one person-one language).
In this condition, each person, say Mom and Dad speaks only one language to the child. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to keep them separate. Whether this affects bilingual development in some important way hasn’t been established. In practice this “ideal” input situation may be difficult to attain.
How much input does a child need in each language to become “native” in both?
• The answer isn’t straight forward. It seems intuitively clear that if a child hears 12 hours of English a day and only 2 hours of Spanish, he will probably develop English h much more quickly and completely than Spanish.
• In reality bilingual children are raised vary circumstances. Some may have more or less equal exposure to the two languages. For practical purposes, the rule of thumb is that the child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the twp languages to achieve native proficiency in both.
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
Does being bilingual make you more or less intelligent, more or less creative, and so on?
• Early studies before1960s shows that bilingual children did worse than monolingual children on IQ and other cognitive and educational tests.
• The results of recent research indicate that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving. Also bilingual children seem to have better metalinguistic awareness.
• Whether children enjoy some cognitive or educational benefit from being bilingual seems to depend a great deal on extralinguistic factors such as the social and economic positions of the child’s group, the educational situation, and the relative “prestige” of the two languages. Studies shows that positive effects generally involve children reared in societies where both languages are valued, and whose parents were interested and supportive of their bilingual development.
Second language acquisition.
Many people are introduced to a second language (L2) after they are “native” in first language.
Is L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition?
There are some reasons why the L2 and L1 acquisition are different:
• Learning second language usually requires conscious attention.
• Adult second language learners (L2ers) do not often achieve nativelike grammatical competence in the L2, especially with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they make syntactic or morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language.
• Many L2ers “fossilize” mistakes, so that even if they use the L2 regularly and are constantly exposed to input un it, they fail to develop full grammatical competence.
• Adults vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented, others are hopeless. Success may depend on arrange factors, including age, talent, motivation, and etc.
But, in certain important respect, however, L2 acquisition is like L1 acquisition. Like L1, L2ers go through some stages to construct grammars.
• These grammars reflect their competence in the L2 at each stage and so their language at any particular point, though not nativelike, is rule-governed and not haphazard.
• The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called interlanguage grammar.
• Unlike children, L2ers often do not reach target. In this case, L1ers have specifically linguistic principles of UG to help them, but adult do not.
• In conclusion, although L2ers may fall short of L1ers in terms of their final grammar, they may acquire rules in the some way as L1ers.
Native language influence in L2 acquisition
• L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are clearly different is that adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language.
• L2ers, especially at the beginning stage of acquiring their L2,seem to rely on their L1 grammar to some extent. This is shown by the kinds of errors L2ers make, which often involve the transfer of grammatical rules from their L1.
• This is most obvious in phonology. L2ers generally speak with an accent because they may transfer the phonemes, phonological rules, or syllable structures of their first language to their second language.
For example:
Japanese speaker, who doesn’t distinguish between write [rajt] and right [lajt]. Because the r/l distinction isn’t phonemic in Japanese.
• Native language influence may show up in more subtle ways. For example, people whose L1 is German, acquire English yes/no question that is very close to the English aux movement rule, while in Japanese there is no syntactic movement in question formation.
The creative component of L2 acquisition
• There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. Many language particular parts of the L1 grammar do not transfer. Items that a speaker considers irregular, infrequent, or semantically difficult are not likely to transfer to the L2.
Example:
1. It is awkward to carry this suitcase.
2. This suitcase is awkward to carry.
In (1) the NP “this suitcase” is in logical direct object position, while in (2) it has been moved to the subject position away from the verb that selects it.
• It is clear, however, that although construction of the L2 grammar is influenced by the L1 grammar, there are also develop mental principles, possibly universal, that operate in L2 acquisition.
A critical period for L2 acquisition?
• Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when exposed to a second language, the more likely she is to achieve nativelike competence.
So, does this mean that there is a critical period for L2 acquisition??
• Many researchers hesitate to make such a strong claim. Although age is an important factor in achieving nativelike L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire a second language as an adult. Indeed, many teenage and adult L2 learners become quite proficient, and few highly talented. Ones even manage to pass for native speaker.
• It is more appropriate to say that there is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities with age and that there are “sensitive period” for the nativelike mastery of certain aspects of the L2. The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest. To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2 generally require exposure during childhood.
Second Language Teaching Methods
• Grammar-translation method: The student memories words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from English to L2 and vice versa.
• The direct method: abandons memorization and translation; the native language is never used in the classroom, and the structure of the L2 language or how it differs from the native language is not disused.
• Audio-lingual method: language is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement.
Most individual methods have serious limitations: probably a combination of many methods is required.
• People can acquire a second language under many different circumstances. You may have learned it when you began middle school or collage. Other people live in communities in which more than one language is spoken and may acquire two languages simultaneously.
• The term second language acquisition, or L2 acquisition, generally refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language.
• Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneously acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy.
• The younger you are, the easier it seems to be learning a language. Young children who are exposed to more than one language before the age of puberty seem to acquire all the languages equally well.
Theories of bilingual development
The mixed utterances raise an interesting question about grammars of bilingual children. Does the bilingual child start out with only one grammar that is eventually differentiated, or does she construct a separate grammar for each language right from the start?
• The unitary system hypothesis says that the child usually construct only one lexicon and one grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual child may know the Spanish word for milk is “leche”, but not the English word.
• The separate system hypothesis says that the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language. The language mixing of bilingual children isn’t due to confusion, but is rather the result of two grammars operating simultaneously.
For example French-English bilingual children may say:
A house pink (a pink house)
Two monolinguals in one head
Although we must study many bilingual children to reach any firm conclusions, the evidence accumulated so far seems to support the idea that bilingual children construct multiple grammars at the outset. Moreover, it seems that bilingual children develop their grammars along the same lines as monolingual children. They go through babbling stage, a holophrastic stage, a telegraphic stage, and so on. During the telegraphic stage, they show the same characteristics in each of their languages as the monolingual children.
• For example, monolingual English –speaking children omit verb endings in sentences such as “Eve play there” and German-speaking children use infinitives as in “Thorstn das haben” (Thorstn that to have).
• Remarkably, two year old German-Italian bilinguals use infinitives when speaking German but not when they speak Italian. Result such as these have led some researchers to suggest that the bilingual child is like “two monolinguals in one head”
The role of input
What rule does input play in helping the child to separate the two languages?
• One input condition that is thought to promote bilingual development is une personne- une langue (one person-one language).
In this condition, each person, say Mom and Dad speaks only one language to the child. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to keep them separate. Whether this affects bilingual development in some important way hasn’t been established. In practice this “ideal” input situation may be difficult to attain.
How much input does a child need in each language to become “native” in both?
• The answer isn’t straight forward. It seems intuitively clear that if a child hears 12 hours of English a day and only 2 hours of Spanish, he will probably develop English h much more quickly and completely than Spanish.
• In reality bilingual children are raised vary circumstances. Some may have more or less equal exposure to the two languages. For practical purposes, the rule of thumb is that the child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the twp languages to achieve native proficiency in both.
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
Does being bilingual make you more or less intelligent, more or less creative, and so on?
• Early studies before1960s shows that bilingual children did worse than monolingual children on IQ and other cognitive and educational tests.
• The results of recent research indicate that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving. Also bilingual children seem to have better metalinguistic awareness.
• Whether children enjoy some cognitive or educational benefit from being bilingual seems to depend a great deal on extralinguistic factors such as the social and economic positions of the child’s group, the educational situation, and the relative “prestige” of the two languages. Studies shows that positive effects generally involve children reared in societies where both languages are valued, and whose parents were interested and supportive of their bilingual development.
Second language acquisition.
Many people are introduced to a second language (L2) after they are “native” in first language.
Is L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition?
There are some reasons why the L2 and L1 acquisition are different:
• Learning second language usually requires conscious attention.
• Adult second language learners (L2ers) do not often achieve nativelike grammatical competence in the L2, especially with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they make syntactic or morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language.
• Many L2ers “fossilize” mistakes, so that even if they use the L2 regularly and are constantly exposed to input un it, they fail to develop full grammatical competence.
• Adults vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented, others are hopeless. Success may depend on arrange factors, including age, talent, motivation, and etc.
But, in certain important respect, however, L2 acquisition is like L1 acquisition. Like L1, L2ers go through some stages to construct grammars.
• These grammars reflect their competence in the L2 at each stage and so their language at any particular point, though not nativelike, is rule-governed and not haphazard.
• The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called interlanguage grammar.
• Unlike children, L2ers often do not reach target. In this case, L1ers have specifically linguistic principles of UG to help them, but adult do not.
• In conclusion, although L2ers may fall short of L1ers in terms of their final grammar, they may acquire rules in the some way as L1ers.
Native language influence in L2 acquisition
• L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are clearly different is that adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language.
• L2ers, especially at the beginning stage of acquiring their L2,seem to rely on their L1 grammar to some extent. This is shown by the kinds of errors L2ers make, which often involve the transfer of grammatical rules from their L1.
• This is most obvious in phonology. L2ers generally speak with an accent because they may transfer the phonemes, phonological rules, or syllable structures of their first language to their second language.
For example:
Japanese speaker, who doesn’t distinguish between write [rajt] and right [lajt]. Because the r/l distinction isn’t phonemic in Japanese.
• Native language influence may show up in more subtle ways. For example, people whose L1 is German, acquire English yes/no question that is very close to the English aux movement rule, while in Japanese there is no syntactic movement in question formation.
The creative component of L2 acquisition
• There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. Many language particular parts of the L1 grammar do not transfer. Items that a speaker considers irregular, infrequent, or semantically difficult are not likely to transfer to the L2.
Example:
1. It is awkward to carry this suitcase.
2. This suitcase is awkward to carry.
In (1) the NP “this suitcase” is in logical direct object position, while in (2) it has been moved to the subject position away from the verb that selects it.
• It is clear, however, that although construction of the L2 grammar is influenced by the L1 grammar, there are also develop mental principles, possibly universal, that operate in L2 acquisition.
A critical period for L2 acquisition?
• Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when exposed to a second language, the more likely she is to achieve nativelike competence.
So, does this mean that there is a critical period for L2 acquisition??
• Many researchers hesitate to make such a strong claim. Although age is an important factor in achieving nativelike L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire a second language as an adult. Indeed, many teenage and adult L2 learners become quite proficient, and few highly talented. Ones even manage to pass for native speaker.
• It is more appropriate to say that there is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities with age and that there are “sensitive period” for the nativelike mastery of certain aspects of the L2. The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest. To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2 generally require exposure during childhood.
Second Language Teaching Methods
• Grammar-translation method: The student memories words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from English to L2 and vice versa.
• The direct method: abandons memorization and translation; the native language is never used in the classroom, and the structure of the L2 language or how it differs from the native language is not disused.
• Audio-lingual method: language is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement.
Most individual methods have serious limitations: probably a combination of many methods is required.
second language learning-introduction to linguistic
Knowing more than one language
• People can acquire a second language under many different circumstances. You may have learned it when you began middle school or collage. Other people live in communities in which more than one language is spoken and may acquire two languages simultaneously.
• The term second language acquisition, or L2 acquisition, generally refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language.
• Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneously acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy.
• The younger you are, the easier it seems to be learning a language. Young children who are exposed to more than one language before the age of puberty seem to acquire all the languages equally well.
Theories of bilingual development
The mixed utterances raise an interesting question about grammars of bilingual children. Does the bilingual child start out with only one grammar that is eventually differentiated, or does she construct a separate grammar for each language right from the start?
• The unitary system hypothesis says that the child usually construct only one lexicon and one grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual child may know the Spanish word for milk is “leche”, but not the English word.
• The separate system hypothesis says that the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language. The language mixing of bilingual children isn’t due to confusion, but is rather the result of two grammars operating simultaneously.
For example French-English bilingual children may say:
A house pink (a pink house)
Two monolinguals in one head
Although we must study many bilingual children to reach any firm conclusions, the evidence accumulated so far seems to support the idea that bilingual children construct multiple grammars at the outset. Moreover, it seems that bilingual children develop their grammars along the same lines as monolingual children. They go through babbling stage, a holophrastic stage, a telegraphic stage, and so on. During the telegraphic stage, they show the same characteristics in each of their languages as the monolingual children.
• For example, monolingual English –speaking children omit verb endings in sentences such as “Eve play there” and German-speaking children use infinitives as in “Thorstn das haben” (Thorstn that to have).
• Remarkably, two year old German-Italian bilinguals use infinitives when speaking German but not when they speak Italian. Result such as these have led some researchers to suggest that the bilingual child is like “two monolinguals in one head”
The role of input
What rule does input play in helping the child to separate the two languages?
• One input condition that is thought to promote bilingual development is une personne- une langue (one person-one language).
In this condition, each person, say Mom and Dad speaks only one language to the child. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to keep them separate. Whether this affects bilingual development in some important way hasn’t been established. In practice this “ideal” input situation may be difficult to attain.
How much input does a child need in each language to become “native” in both?
• The answer isn’t straight forward. It seems intuitively clear that if a child hears 12 hours of English a day and only 2 hours of Spanish, he will probably develop English h much more quickly and completely than Spanish.
• In reality bilingual children are raised vary circumstances. Some may have more or less equal exposure to the two languages. For practical purposes, the rule of thumb is that the child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the twp languages to achieve native proficiency in both.
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
Does being bilingual make you more or less intelligent, more or less creative, and so on?
• Early studies before1960s shows that bilingual children did worse than monolingual children on IQ and other cognitive and educational tests.
• The results of recent research indicate that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving. Also bilingual children seem to have better metalinguistic awareness.
• Whether children enjoy some cognitive or educational benefit from being bilingual seems to depend a great deal on extralinguistic factors such as the social and economic positions of the child’s group, the educational situation, and the relative “prestige” of the two languages. Studies shows that positive effects generally involve children reared in societies where both languages are valued, and whose parents were interested and supportive of their bilingual development.
Second language acquisition.
Many people are introduced to a second language (L2) after they are “native” in first language.
Is L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition?
There are some reasons why the L2 and L1 acquisition are different:
• Learning second language usually requires conscious attention.
• Adult second language learners (L2ers) do not often achieve nativelike grammatical competence in the L2, especially with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they make syntactic or morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language.
• Many L2ers “fossilize” mistakes, so that even if they use the L2 regularly and are constantly exposed to input un it, they fail to develop full grammatical competence.
• Adults vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented, others are hopeless. Success may depend on arrange factors, including age, talent, motivation, and etc.
But, in certain important respect, however, L2 acquisition is like L1 acquisition. Like L1, L2ers go through some stages to construct grammars.
• These grammars reflect their competence in the L2 at each stage and so their language at any particular point, though not nativelike, is rule-governed and not haphazard.
• The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called interlanguage grammar.
• Unlike children, L2ers often do not reach target. In this case, L1ers have specifically linguistic principles of UG to help them, but adult do not.
• In conclusion, although L2ers may fall short of L1ers in terms of their final grammar, they may acquire rules in the some way as L1ers.
Native language influence in L2 acquisition
• L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are clearly different is that adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language.
• L2ers, especially at the beginning stage of acquiring their L2,seem to rely on their L1 grammar to some extent. This is shown by the kinds of errors L2ers make, which often involve the transfer of grammatical rules from their L1.
• This is most obvious in phonology. L2ers generally speak with an accent because they may transfer the phonemes, phonological rules, or syllable structures of their first language to their second language.
For example:
Japanese speaker, who doesn’t distinguish between write [rajt] and right [lajt]. Because the r/l distinction isn’t phonemic in Japanese.
• Native language influence may show up in more subtle ways. For example, people whose L1 is German, acquire English yes/no question that is very close to the English aux movement rule, while in Japanese there is no syntactic movement in question formation.
The creative component of L2 acquisition
• There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. Many language particular parts of the L1 grammar do not transfer. Items that a speaker considers irregular, infrequent, or semantically difficult are not likely to transfer to the L2.
Example:
1. It is awkward to carry this suitcase.
2. This suitcase is awkward to carry.
In (1) the NP “this suitcase” is in logical direct object position, while in (2) it has been moved to the subject position away from the verb that selects it.
• It is clear, however, that although construction of the L2 grammar is influenced by the L1 grammar, there are also develop mental principles, possibly universal, that operate in L2 acquisition.
A critical period for L2 acquisition?
• Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when exposed to a second language, the more likely she is to achieve nativelike competence.
So, does this mean that there is a critical period for L2 acquisition??
• Many researchers hesitate to make such a strong claim. Although age is an important factor in achieving nativelike L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire a second language as an adult. Indeed, many teenage and adult L2 learners become quite proficient, and few highly talented. Ones even manage to pass for native speaker.
• It is more appropriate to say that there is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities with age and that there are “sensitive period” for the nativelike mastery of certain aspects of the L2. The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest. To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2 generally require exposure during childhood.
Second Language Teaching Methods
• Grammar-translation method: The student memories words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from English to L2 and vice versa.
• The direct method: abandons memorization and translation; the native language is never used in the classroom, and the structure of the L2 language or how it differs from the native language is not disused.
• Audio-lingual method: language is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement.
Most individual methods have serious limitations: probably a combination of many methods is required.
• People can acquire a second language under many different circumstances. You may have learned it when you began middle school or collage. Other people live in communities in which more than one language is spoken and may acquire two languages simultaneously.
• The term second language acquisition, or L2 acquisition, generally refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language.
• Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneously acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy.
• The younger you are, the easier it seems to be learning a language. Young children who are exposed to more than one language before the age of puberty seem to acquire all the languages equally well.
Theories of bilingual development
The mixed utterances raise an interesting question about grammars of bilingual children. Does the bilingual child start out with only one grammar that is eventually differentiated, or does she construct a separate grammar for each language right from the start?
• The unitary system hypothesis says that the child usually construct only one lexicon and one grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual child may know the Spanish word for milk is “leche”, but not the English word.
• The separate system hypothesis says that the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language. The language mixing of bilingual children isn’t due to confusion, but is rather the result of two grammars operating simultaneously.
For example French-English bilingual children may say:
A house pink (a pink house)
Two monolinguals in one head
Although we must study many bilingual children to reach any firm conclusions, the evidence accumulated so far seems to support the idea that bilingual children construct multiple grammars at the outset. Moreover, it seems that bilingual children develop their grammars along the same lines as monolingual children. They go through babbling stage, a holophrastic stage, a telegraphic stage, and so on. During the telegraphic stage, they show the same characteristics in each of their languages as the monolingual children.
• For example, monolingual English –speaking children omit verb endings in sentences such as “Eve play there” and German-speaking children use infinitives as in “Thorstn das haben” (Thorstn that to have).
• Remarkably, two year old German-Italian bilinguals use infinitives when speaking German but not when they speak Italian. Result such as these have led some researchers to suggest that the bilingual child is like “two monolinguals in one head”
The role of input
What rule does input play in helping the child to separate the two languages?
• One input condition that is thought to promote bilingual development is une personne- une langue (one person-one language).
In this condition, each person, say Mom and Dad speaks only one language to the child. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to keep them separate. Whether this affects bilingual development in some important way hasn’t been established. In practice this “ideal” input situation may be difficult to attain.
How much input does a child need in each language to become “native” in both?
• The answer isn’t straight forward. It seems intuitively clear that if a child hears 12 hours of English a day and only 2 hours of Spanish, he will probably develop English h much more quickly and completely than Spanish.
• In reality bilingual children are raised vary circumstances. Some may have more or less equal exposure to the two languages. For practical purposes, the rule of thumb is that the child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the twp languages to achieve native proficiency in both.
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
Does being bilingual make you more or less intelligent, more or less creative, and so on?
• Early studies before1960s shows that bilingual children did worse than monolingual children on IQ and other cognitive and educational tests.
• The results of recent research indicate that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving. Also bilingual children seem to have better metalinguistic awareness.
• Whether children enjoy some cognitive or educational benefit from being bilingual seems to depend a great deal on extralinguistic factors such as the social and economic positions of the child’s group, the educational situation, and the relative “prestige” of the two languages. Studies shows that positive effects generally involve children reared in societies where both languages are valued, and whose parents were interested and supportive of their bilingual development.
Second language acquisition.
Many people are introduced to a second language (L2) after they are “native” in first language.
Is L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition?
There are some reasons why the L2 and L1 acquisition are different:
• Learning second language usually requires conscious attention.
• Adult second language learners (L2ers) do not often achieve nativelike grammatical competence in the L2, especially with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they make syntactic or morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language.
• Many L2ers “fossilize” mistakes, so that even if they use the L2 regularly and are constantly exposed to input un it, they fail to develop full grammatical competence.
• Adults vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented, others are hopeless. Success may depend on arrange factors, including age, talent, motivation, and etc.
But, in certain important respect, however, L2 acquisition is like L1 acquisition. Like L1, L2ers go through some stages to construct grammars.
• These grammars reflect their competence in the L2 at each stage and so their language at any particular point, though not nativelike, is rule-governed and not haphazard.
• The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called interlanguage grammar.
• Unlike children, L2ers often do not reach target. In this case, L1ers have specifically linguistic principles of UG to help them, but adult do not.
• In conclusion, although L2ers may fall short of L1ers in terms of their final grammar, they may acquire rules in the some way as L1ers.
Native language influence in L2 acquisition
• L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are clearly different is that adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language.
• L2ers, especially at the beginning stage of acquiring their L2,seem to rely on their L1 grammar to some extent. This is shown by the kinds of errors L2ers make, which often involve the transfer of grammatical rules from their L1.
• This is most obvious in phonology. L2ers generally speak with an accent because they may transfer the phonemes, phonological rules, or syllable structures of their first language to their second language.
For example:
Japanese speaker, who doesn’t distinguish between write [rajt] and right [lajt]. Because the r/l distinction isn’t phonemic in Japanese.
• Native language influence may show up in more subtle ways. For example, people whose L1 is German, acquire English yes/no question that is very close to the English aux movement rule, while in Japanese there is no syntactic movement in question formation.
The creative component of L2 acquisition
• There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. Many language particular parts of the L1 grammar do not transfer. Items that a speaker considers irregular, infrequent, or semantically difficult are not likely to transfer to the L2.
Example:
1. It is awkward to carry this suitcase.
2. This suitcase is awkward to carry.
In (1) the NP “this suitcase” is in logical direct object position, while in (2) it has been moved to the subject position away from the verb that selects it.
• It is clear, however, that although construction of the L2 grammar is influenced by the L1 grammar, there are also develop mental principles, possibly universal, that operate in L2 acquisition.
A critical period for L2 acquisition?
• Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when exposed to a second language, the more likely she is to achieve nativelike competence.
So, does this mean that there is a critical period for L2 acquisition??
• Many researchers hesitate to make such a strong claim. Although age is an important factor in achieving nativelike L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire a second language as an adult. Indeed, many teenage and adult L2 learners become quite proficient, and few highly talented. Ones even manage to pass for native speaker.
• It is more appropriate to say that there is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities with age and that there are “sensitive period” for the nativelike mastery of certain aspects of the L2. The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest. To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2 generally require exposure during childhood.
Second Language Teaching Methods
• Grammar-translation method: The student memories words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from English to L2 and vice versa.
• The direct method: abandons memorization and translation; the native language is never used in the classroom, and the structure of the L2 language or how it differs from the native language is not disused.
• Audio-lingual method: language is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement.
Most individual methods have serious limitations: probably a combination of many methods is required.
second language learning-introduction to linguistic
Knowing more than one language
• People can acquire a second language under many different circumstances. You may have learned it when you began middle school or collage. Other people live in communities in which more than one language is spoken and may acquire two languages simultaneously.
• The term second language acquisition, or L2 acquisition, generally refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language.
• Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneously acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy.
• The younger you are, the easier it seems to be learning a language. Young children who are exposed to more than one language before the age of puberty seem to acquire all the languages equally well.
Theories of bilingual development
The mixed utterances raise an interesting question about grammars of bilingual children. Does the bilingual child start out with only one grammar that is eventually differentiated, or does she construct a separate grammar for each language right from the start?
• The unitary system hypothesis says that the child usually construct only one lexicon and one grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual child may know the Spanish word for milk is “leche”, but not the English word.
• The separate system hypothesis says that the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language. The language mixing of bilingual children isn’t due to confusion, but is rather the result of two grammars operating simultaneously.
For example French-English bilingual children may say:
A house pink (a pink house)
Two monolinguals in one head
Although we must study many bilingual children to reach any firm conclusions, the evidence accumulated so far seems to support the idea that bilingual children construct multiple grammars at the outset. Moreover, it seems that bilingual children develop their grammars along the same lines as monolingual children. They go through babbling stage, a holophrastic stage, a telegraphic stage, and so on. During the telegraphic stage, they show the same characteristics in each of their languages as the monolingual children.
• For example, monolingual English –speaking children omit verb endings in sentences such as “Eve play there” and German-speaking children use infinitives as in “Thorstn das haben” (Thorstn that to have).
• Remarkably, two year old German-Italian bilinguals use infinitives when speaking German but not when they speak Italian. Result such as these have led some researchers to suggest that the bilingual child is like “two monolinguals in one head”
The role of input
What rule does input play in helping the child to separate the two languages?
• One input condition that is thought to promote bilingual development is une personne- une langue (one person-one language).
In this condition, each person, say Mom and Dad speaks only one language to the child. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to keep them separate. Whether this affects bilingual development in some important way hasn’t been established. In practice this “ideal” input situation may be difficult to attain.
How much input does a child need in each language to become “native” in both?
• The answer isn’t straight forward. It seems intuitively clear that if a child hears 12 hours of English a day and only 2 hours of Spanish, he will probably develop English h much more quickly and completely than Spanish.
• In reality bilingual children are raised vary circumstances. Some may have more or less equal exposure to the two languages. For practical purposes, the rule of thumb is that the child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the twp languages to achieve native proficiency in both.
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
Does being bilingual make you more or less intelligent, more or less creative, and so on?
• Early studies before1960s shows that bilingual children did worse than monolingual children on IQ and other cognitive and educational tests.
• The results of recent research indicate that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving. Also bilingual children seem to have better metalinguistic awareness.
• Whether children enjoy some cognitive or educational benefit from being bilingual seems to depend a great deal on extralinguistic factors such as the social and economic positions of the child’s group, the educational situation, and the relative “prestige” of the two languages. Studies shows that positive effects generally involve children reared in societies where both languages are valued, and whose parents were interested and supportive of their bilingual development.
Second language acquisition.
Many people are introduced to a second language (L2) after they are “native” in first language.
Is L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition?
There are some reasons why the L2 and L1 acquisition are different:
• Learning second language usually requires conscious attention.
• Adult second language learners (L2ers) do not often achieve nativelike grammatical competence in the L2, especially with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they make syntactic or morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language.
• Many L2ers “fossilize” mistakes, so that even if they use the L2 regularly and are constantly exposed to input un it, they fail to develop full grammatical competence.
• Adults vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented, others are hopeless. Success may depend on arrange factors, including age, talent, motivation, and etc.
But, in certain important respect, however, L2 acquisition is like L1 acquisition. Like L1, L2ers go through some stages to construct grammars.
• These grammars reflect their competence in the L2 at each stage and so their language at any particular point, though not nativelike, is rule-governed and not haphazard.
• The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called interlanguage grammar.
• Unlike children, L2ers often do not reach target. In this case, L1ers have specifically linguistic principles of UG to help them, but adult do not.
• In conclusion, although L2ers may fall short of L1ers in terms of their final grammar, they may acquire rules in the some way as L1ers.
Native language influence in L2 acquisition
• L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are clearly different is that adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language.
• L2ers, especially at the beginning stage of acquiring their L2,seem to rely on their L1 grammar to some extent. This is shown by the kinds of errors L2ers make, which often involve the transfer of grammatical rules from their L1.
• This is most obvious in phonology. L2ers generally speak with an accent because they may transfer the phonemes, phonological rules, or syllable structures of their first language to their second language.
For example:
Japanese speaker, who doesn’t distinguish between write [rajt] and right [lajt]. Because the r/l distinction isn’t phonemic in Japanese.
• Native language influence may show up in more subtle ways. For example, people whose L1 is German, acquire English yes/no question that is very close to the English aux movement rule, while in Japanese there is no syntactic movement in question formation.
The creative component of L2 acquisition
• There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. Many language particular parts of the L1 grammar do not transfer. Items that a speaker considers irregular, infrequent, or semantically difficult are not likely to transfer to the L2.
Example:
1. It is awkward to carry this suitcase.
2. This suitcase is awkward to carry.
In (1) the NP “this suitcase” is in logical direct object position, while in (2) it has been moved to the subject position away from the verb that selects it.
• It is clear, however, that although construction of the L2 grammar is influenced by the L1 grammar, there are also develop mental principles, possibly universal, that operate in L2 acquisition.
A critical period for L2 acquisition?
• Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when exposed to a second language, the more likely she is to achieve nativelike competence.
So, does this mean that there is a critical period for L2 acquisition??
• Many researchers hesitate to make such a strong claim. Although age is an important factor in achieving nativelike L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire a second language as an adult. Indeed, many teenage and adult L2 learners become quite proficient, and few highly talented. Ones even manage to pass for native speaker.
• It is more appropriate to say that there is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities with age and that there are “sensitive period” for the nativelike mastery of certain aspects of the L2. The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest. To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2 generally require exposure during childhood.
Second Language Teaching Methods
• Grammar-translation method: The student memories words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from English to L2 and vice versa.
• The direct method: abandons memorization and translation; the native language is never used in the classroom, and the structure of the L2 language or how it differs from the native language is not disused.
• Audio-lingual method: language is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement.
Most individual methods have serious limitations: probably a combination of many methods is required.
• People can acquire a second language under many different circumstances. You may have learned it when you began middle school or collage. Other people live in communities in which more than one language is spoken and may acquire two languages simultaneously.
• The term second language acquisition, or L2 acquisition, generally refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language.
• Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneously acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy.
• The younger you are, the easier it seems to be learning a language. Young children who are exposed to more than one language before the age of puberty seem to acquire all the languages equally well.
Theories of bilingual development
The mixed utterances raise an interesting question about grammars of bilingual children. Does the bilingual child start out with only one grammar that is eventually differentiated, or does she construct a separate grammar for each language right from the start?
• The unitary system hypothesis says that the child usually construct only one lexicon and one grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual child may know the Spanish word for milk is “leche”, but not the English word.
• The separate system hypothesis says that the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language. The language mixing of bilingual children isn’t due to confusion, but is rather the result of two grammars operating simultaneously.
For example French-English bilingual children may say:
A house pink (a pink house)
Two monolinguals in one head
Although we must study many bilingual children to reach any firm conclusions, the evidence accumulated so far seems to support the idea that bilingual children construct multiple grammars at the outset. Moreover, it seems that bilingual children develop their grammars along the same lines as monolingual children. They go through babbling stage, a holophrastic stage, a telegraphic stage, and so on. During the telegraphic stage, they show the same characteristics in each of their languages as the monolingual children.
• For example, monolingual English –speaking children omit verb endings in sentences such as “Eve play there” and German-speaking children use infinitives as in “Thorstn das haben” (Thorstn that to have).
• Remarkably, two year old German-Italian bilinguals use infinitives when speaking German but not when they speak Italian. Result such as these have led some researchers to suggest that the bilingual child is like “two monolinguals in one head”
The role of input
What rule does input play in helping the child to separate the two languages?
• One input condition that is thought to promote bilingual development is une personne- une langue (one person-one language).
In this condition, each person, say Mom and Dad speaks only one language to the child. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to keep them separate. Whether this affects bilingual development in some important way hasn’t been established. In practice this “ideal” input situation may be difficult to attain.
How much input does a child need in each language to become “native” in both?
• The answer isn’t straight forward. It seems intuitively clear that if a child hears 12 hours of English a day and only 2 hours of Spanish, he will probably develop English h much more quickly and completely than Spanish.
• In reality bilingual children are raised vary circumstances. Some may have more or less equal exposure to the two languages. For practical purposes, the rule of thumb is that the child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the twp languages to achieve native proficiency in both.
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
Does being bilingual make you more or less intelligent, more or less creative, and so on?
• Early studies before1960s shows that bilingual children did worse than monolingual children on IQ and other cognitive and educational tests.
• The results of recent research indicate that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving. Also bilingual children seem to have better metalinguistic awareness.
• Whether children enjoy some cognitive or educational benefit from being bilingual seems to depend a great deal on extralinguistic factors such as the social and economic positions of the child’s group, the educational situation, and the relative “prestige” of the two languages. Studies shows that positive effects generally involve children reared in societies where both languages are valued, and whose parents were interested and supportive of their bilingual development.
Second language acquisition.
Many people are introduced to a second language (L2) after they are “native” in first language.
Is L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition?
There are some reasons why the L2 and L1 acquisition are different:
• Learning second language usually requires conscious attention.
• Adult second language learners (L2ers) do not often achieve nativelike grammatical competence in the L2, especially with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they make syntactic or morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language.
• Many L2ers “fossilize” mistakes, so that even if they use the L2 regularly and are constantly exposed to input un it, they fail to develop full grammatical competence.
• Adults vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented, others are hopeless. Success may depend on arrange factors, including age, talent, motivation, and etc.
But, in certain important respect, however, L2 acquisition is like L1 acquisition. Like L1, L2ers go through some stages to construct grammars.
• These grammars reflect their competence in the L2 at each stage and so their language at any particular point, though not nativelike, is rule-governed and not haphazard.
• The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called interlanguage grammar.
• Unlike children, L2ers often do not reach target. In this case, L1ers have specifically linguistic principles of UG to help them, but adult do not.
• In conclusion, although L2ers may fall short of L1ers in terms of their final grammar, they may acquire rules in the some way as L1ers.
Native language influence in L2 acquisition
• L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are clearly different is that adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language.
• L2ers, especially at the beginning stage of acquiring their L2,seem to rely on their L1 grammar to some extent. This is shown by the kinds of errors L2ers make, which often involve the transfer of grammatical rules from their L1.
• This is most obvious in phonology. L2ers generally speak with an accent because they may transfer the phonemes, phonological rules, or syllable structures of their first language to their second language.
For example:
Japanese speaker, who doesn’t distinguish between write [rajt] and right [lajt]. Because the r/l distinction isn’t phonemic in Japanese.
• Native language influence may show up in more subtle ways. For example, people whose L1 is German, acquire English yes/no question that is very close to the English aux movement rule, while in Japanese there is no syntactic movement in question formation.
The creative component of L2 acquisition
• There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. Many language particular parts of the L1 grammar do not transfer. Items that a speaker considers irregular, infrequent, or semantically difficult are not likely to transfer to the L2.
Example:
1. It is awkward to carry this suitcase.
2. This suitcase is awkward to carry.
In (1) the NP “this suitcase” is in logical direct object position, while in (2) it has been moved to the subject position away from the verb that selects it.
• It is clear, however, that although construction of the L2 grammar is influenced by the L1 grammar, there are also develop mental principles, possibly universal, that operate in L2 acquisition.
A critical period for L2 acquisition?
• Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when exposed to a second language, the more likely she is to achieve nativelike competence.
So, does this mean that there is a critical period for L2 acquisition??
• Many researchers hesitate to make such a strong claim. Although age is an important factor in achieving nativelike L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire a second language as an adult. Indeed, many teenage and adult L2 learners become quite proficient, and few highly talented. Ones even manage to pass for native speaker.
• It is more appropriate to say that there is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities with age and that there are “sensitive period” for the nativelike mastery of certain aspects of the L2. The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest. To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2 generally require exposure during childhood.
Second Language Teaching Methods
• Grammar-translation method: The student memories words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from English to L2 and vice versa.
• The direct method: abandons memorization and translation; the native language is never used in the classroom, and the structure of the L2 language or how it differs from the native language is not disused.
• Audio-lingual method: language is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement.
Most individual methods have serious limitations: probably a combination of many methods is required.
Selasa, 08 Juni 2010
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