Second Language Acquisition Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching 9780472034987

Citation preview

Second Language Acquisition Myths Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching

STEVEN BROWN Youngstown State University

JENIFER LARSON-HALL Kyushu University

Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2012 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America 9) Printed on acid-free paper

ISBN-13: 978-0-472-03498-7 2015

2014

2013

2012

4

3

D

i

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Acknowledgments Steve would like to thank Rebekah Hoy for her help in editing the manuscript and tracking down references, and the School of Graduate Studies and Research at Youngstown State University for funding her research assistantship. Phillip Hamrick and Tere Brusca offered valuable comments on the manuscript. Jenifer would

like to thank the students

in her Linguistics 4030

class at the University of North Texas over the years for forcing her to consider what findings from SLA were the most useful for students who want to be teachers. We also acknowledge Keith Folse for writing the first Myths book, Vocabulary Myths. This book follows the chapter sequence first used in that book. Finally, thanks to Kelly Sippell and the terrific staff at the University of Michigan Press. Grateful acknowledgment is given to these publishers for permission to reprint

previously published materials. Elsevier for two figures in “Age constraints on second-language, acquisition” by Flege et al., published in Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 41. Copyright 1999. Used with permission. John Wiley & Sons for figure in “Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms” by Pearson et al., published in Volume 43 of Language Learning. Copyright 1993. Used with permission. John Benjamins for table

and figure from Second Language Acquisition Abroad: The LDS Missionary Experience. Copyright 2012. Used with permission.

Contents

Introduction

Myth 1

vi

Children learn languages quickly and easily while adults are ineffective in comparison.

Myth 2.

A true bilingual is someone who speaks two languages perfectly.

Myth 3.

You can acquire a language simply through listening or reading.

Myth 4 Myth 5

Practice makes perfect. Language students learn (and retain) what they are taught.

Myth 6

Language learners always benefit from correction.

105

Myth 7

Individual differences are a major, perhaps the

ue

major, factor in SLA.

Myth 8

Language acquisition is the individual

145

acquisition of grammar.

Conclusion References

165

Subject Index

191

Author Index

194

161

Topics For those curious about the coverage of the book, here is an alternative contents listing.

Myth 1

Language learning and age; the Critical Period Hypothesis

Myth 2

Bilingualism

Myth 3

Input, output, and interaction

Myth 4

Attention and noticing

Myth 5

Explicit and implicit learning; developmental sequences; interaction

Myth 6

Correction and recasts

Myth 7

Individual differences

Myth 8

Social Approaches: pragmatics, emergentism, sociocultural

approaches, language socialization

Introduction

What Is Second Language Acquisition? The term second language acquisition (SLA) takes in multiple contexts. It

includes both naturalistic (“on the street”) and instructed (classroom) learning.

It refers to both second

and foreign language learning.

Second language (sometimes actually third or fourth language) learning occurs in a setting in which the language is used in most areas of life at most times. Immigrants to a country learning the national language are studying in a second language context. Somali immigrants

learning English in Columbus, Ohio (USA), are studying English as a Second Language (ESL). Foreign language learning occurs usually in

classrooms, but not in the world outside. Students studying Arabic in Columbus, Ohio, are studying a foreign language. Much of the early research published in English in SLA reported on students studying English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Those students were learning English to enter U.S. universities.

As we will see, Stephen Krashen has made a distinction between learning and acquisition and that distinction has led to this paragraph appearing in most books

about SLA. Basically, this distinction

is

between traditional classroom learning (learning the rules) on the one hand and meaning/input-based teaching leading to acquisition, feel for the language, on the other. We will make no distinction unless discussing Krashen’s work.

About This Book Second Language Acquisition Myths was written to be a first book in SLA for upper-division undergraduate and introductory M.A. courses. It is not the final statement on SLA. There are “introductions” to SLA that are 400 and 1,000 pages long. This book comes out of our experience vi

Introduction

—

vii

teaching the introductory SLA course that is required for education majors, foreign language education majors, and English majors. We

hope it’s useful for non-specialists, as well as for practicing teachers who would like to brush up on their SLA knowledge.

We have structured this book in the same way that the other volumes in the University of Michigan Press’s Myths books are structured. Each chapter begins In the Real World, an anecdote introducing the

theme of the chapter. What the Research Says forms the largest part of each chapter. It surveys the relevant research but is not exhaustive (and

also not exhausting to the non-specialist audience). What We Can Do applies the research to the classroom, either through policy suggestions or possible activities. Because we approach the topics from myths, and by extension

from questions that students have at this level, we have combined some topics in non-traditional ways. There is an advantage to approaching SLA this way. First, it makes the research real to prospective (and practicing) teachers. It allows us to present the information as an answer to a series of classroom-related

issues. It also directly

addresses the often very real myths that non-specialist teacher candidates (and sometimes teachers) have about language learning. Most introductory SLA texts are organized by either theories of SLA

or through a vaguely historical approach, or both. Theories and history are necessary, but we would submit, not in a first book. We have not

included every theory of SLA and have left out bits of its past, but we think we have done so in a principled way, with the principle being attention to what is uppermost in the minds of our students.

Likewise, we have focused on selected studies and gone into some

depth in the case of some in order to give novices an idea of how the field operates. Our prejudice is that it is better to look at a limited number of studies than to have novices read sentences like There is gen-

eral agreement that learning must be explicit (Jones, 1989; Takahashi, 1995; Park, 2001, Smith, 2009). We have also defined terms within the text itself that we think will be unknown

and explained some

research

methodology that readers might not know. However, this book makes no attempt to teach research methodology.

viii ——

Introduction

We also, where appropriate, tie SLA research to research focused on education more broadly. Language learning is learning.

We hope you find this approach useful. A word about the first two chapters: Myths 1 and 2 are necessarily

a little more technical than the others. Ideally, they probably wouldn't go first, since they are by far the most difficult reads. But since they deal

with childhood language acquisition, we thought it made sense to put them before the others. If you’re a general reader, don’t be afraid to skip the first two chapters and then come back to them after you get a better sense of the whole subject. The myths are largely self-contained. SLA studies make extensive use of graphs and charts. If you know what you're looking for, they give you the information faster than words. If you're a word person, that’s fine. Ignore the graphs and read the prose.

NY A

Children learn languages quickly and easily while adults are ineffective in comparison.

In the Real World Hi, this is Jenifer. I have four bilingual children, all with different stories. Let me tell you about the one where language acquisition seemed very quick. In 2010, my husband and IJ ended up adopting a seven-yearold Japanese girl who only spoke Japanese and whose experience with English only went about as far as singing songs about numbers and colors in once-a-month English conversation classes. We adopted her and brought her into our home with three other children whose dominant language at the time was English. If we had been living in an

English-speaking country, we wouldn't have worried about her learning English, as we had seen other people adopt older children who seemed to quite quickly adjust to using English. However, since we were living in Japan and since all of us in the family were able to communicate in Japanese, we worried about how we would help our daughter become bilingual. However, we had a lot more pressing problems than having

her learn English, such as helping an older child from an orphanage

2 ——

SLA Myths

adjust to life in a family, but we knew that eventually she would need to be bilingual to really fit into our family. Therefore, in the first year, from July 2010 to June 2011, we did not do much more than speak to our daughter, Aiko, in English some of the time.

Aiko was learning English, if she was learning it at all, mostly naturalistically, simply by living in a home with native English speakers. We

spoke to our three other children in English, watched English movies at home, and read English as well as Japanese books to the children. But most often we spoke to Aiko in Japanese because communicating

with her was our first priority. During the school year I spent about two hours a week teaching her vocabulary and basic phrases in English

such as “I like ,” but Aiko rarely voluntarily used English herself. Her first English phrase was when she tried to insult her little brother by calling him a “monkey baby elephant”! I’m afraid we all found that

rather cute and not at all insulting! After living with our family for 10 months (the end of May 2011), Aiko was occasionally uttering an English phrase or two and could understand when we told her to do routine things like “brush your teeth” or “stop bothering your brother,” but she could not communicate in any normal way with a native speaker of English. At least, we had never heard her do so. This story contradicts in many ways stories of older children adopted into families who cannot communicate with them in any other way than in English. In those families, the children often begin trying to speak within weeks of their adoption if they are older children, and after a year, they may sound very close to fluent native speakers of English of their own age. However, the big difference between those stories and ours is the context, since we were living in Japan and could communicate in Japanese.

We knew that without additional help and pressure Aiko would never learn to speak English well. So Aiko spent July and August in the

United States. During the month of July, Aiko and her older brother and sister went to live with relatives for a month. Those relatives spoke to Aiko in English, but we also heard that Aiko was still not speaking much English back to them. She still had her brother and sister to translate for her. When the rest of the family got to the United States, |

1: Children learn languages more quickly than adults.

——

3

had decided that we would need to insist on Aiko speaking English if she was ever going to gain that skill. So when we arrived at the beginning of August, we began traveling around the U.S. as a family and instituted a rule that we parents would “understand” only English until 3 pM. After that, Aiko could speak to us in Japanese. For the first few days, we didn’t hear much out of her until after 3 PM, when she would talk up a storm. But after just a few days, no more than a week, something seemed to change and she began to speak English. All day long! She was clearly saying everything she could say in English. Our rules were thrown away because we didn’t need them anymore, and Aiko emerged at the end of August as an English speaker, making typical mistakes but forming complex sentences. For example, she said, Buy this me. My’s is broken and Nobody told me that put it onto the genkan (genkan is a Japanese word meaning the entry hall of the house, and Aiko’s shirt was there). Here’s another utterance | recorded at the end of September: Why you need that Daddy? I know which one is the small one. Upon hearing that Aiko was speaking English, friends in Japan marveled at the speed with which she had picked English up. Certainly the change from someone who could not (or would not) communicate in English was accomplished within the space of at most a month. However, her ability to speak English must have depended on her understanding of English, which was something that gradually improved over the year. Although Aiko progressed from being someone who would not speak in English to someone who seemed to do so at an amazing speed, we would more accurately say it took her about a year to get to the point where she could say the sentences | listed in the previous paragraph. Although this anecdote is different from the normal one of children learning to speak a second language when they move to live in a different country, such anecdotes are plentiful. I knew a family who adopted an eight-year-old Russian boy and within a few months he seemed able to communicate

at a basic level, and after a year, he

seemed to speak at nearly the same level as his peers, with an occasional funny collocation thrown in. If you have heard such anecdotes

4 ——

SLA Myths

or seen this process yourself, you may naturally think that children

are better language learners than. adults. It seems to be “common knowledge” that childrens’ brains are like sponges and that they can absorb languages much better than adults can. Many people are firmly convinced that children are always the best language learners and that they pick up languages rapidly. In fact, most people seem to think that children are better at learning almost anything, because of the plasticity and flexibility of children’s brains. It is a common belief that children are born ready to learn, and that this ability fades as we become adults. There is no doubt that language acquisition in children is a won-

derful and awe-inspiring event. As a parent of four children, I have been fascinated to watch (and occasionally record) my children learning language. All of my children are bilingual in both Japanese and English, and this has also been a fun process to watch, albeit one that has taken a lot of hard work and conscious planning to bring to pass. (You can read about my family and others in Barron-Hauwaert,

2010.) Many linguists teach that human beings are born with an instinct or inborn ability to learn language. Advocates of this position teach that this process will occur regardless of whether parents correct their childrens’ grammar or not, and regardless of the amount or type of input that the children receive. There does seem to be a very natural process in which young children learn their native language in a way that parallels naturally occurring developmental processes in human beings, such as learning to walk or seeing the visual world. However, this chapter provides research to show that some of the most common

views of the language acquisition process are incorrect—children do not learn language especially quickly and they are not actually better than adults at learning languages in many contexts. Most adults underestimate their own cognitive abilities and overestimate the abilities of children.

1: Children learn languages more quickly than adults.

——

5

What the Research Says Speed of First Language Acquisition First, we should define how long it takes for normal, monolingual children to acquire their first language when they receive input from birth (in other words, the normal situation). A study by Bates, Dale, and Thal (1995) found that the average child understands about 17 words at 8 months of age but doesn’t really begin to produce language until after 12 months of age. An adult who studied a language without producing words for a year would most likely be considered an idiot, but we consider the same behavior by children quite normal. Of course, a baby’s vocal apparatus may not be finely tuned enough to produce language until after a year of age, so perhaps this is an unfair comparison. Recently a number of studies have been done with older adoptees who are learning a new language at an older age, so this may be a better comparison with adults. A survey by Glennen and Masters (2002) found that children adopted at 13-18 months of age knew an average of 68 words by 22-24 months (4-9 months later) and an average of 111 words by 28-30 months (10-15 months after adoption). It took them until 28 months of age to reliably produce two-word utterances, on average. These children were making good progress given the situation, but again we must ask whether an adult, constantly exposed to a new second language, would have been using more than 111 words and using sentences larger than two words after a

year of exposure. It seems clear they would have, and this is due to the advanced cognitive abilities of adults over children (Snedecker, Geren,

& Shafto, 2007). Returning to the situation of children exposed to one language from birth, a majority of children won't begin to produce word combinations (such as me go) until nearly 21 months of age, and Bates, Dale, and Thal (1995) link this occurrence to the presence of larger vocabularies (when children are producing 50-200 words). Still, sentences don’t begin to get complex until children have about 400 words in their productive vocabularies, and children have not finished their

6 —— SLA Myths acquisition of basic English grammar until around age 4 (Hudson, 2000). Obviously language is a skill that can be acquired by a child while other activities are taking place, but if we consider the finding that it takes adults 10,000 hours to acquire a skill to the level of expert (Ericsson & Charness, 1994; Ward, Hodges, Williams, & Starkes, 2004) the child is lagging behind if he or she requires 17,520 hours of input and interaction (my conservative estimate, assuming the child is awake 12 hours a day, multiplied by 365 days in a year, multiplied by four years) in order to become a proficient speaker of a language. It is clear that monolingual children do not really learn their first language very rapidly. They are slow learners but become quite skilled by the end of the process.

Speed of Second Language Acquisition by Children The older the child, the faster his or her progress seems to become in the second language, although of course the child has farther to go to catch up. A case study of a seven-year-old Polish boy who moved to the U.S. with no prior English experience detailed his rapid gains of proficiency (Winitz, Gillespie and Starcev, 1995). This boy, AO, could use single words such as grass and flowers and could say things such as no, good day, and I English [indicating that he was doing his English lessons] after a month and a half. By three months, the authors state that he “was gaining a mastery of pronouns, some prepositions, and a few verbs” (1995, 133) but that his range of expression was still extremely limited, with some phrases such as I today school and We play; just a

minute noted. His understanding of English was close to that of a twoyear-old monolingual English speaker. However, by one year of residence, AO could create full sentences such as Tammy, can I have your cake? and I do not. Yesterday I didn’t get my strike on the board [in his school, if you did something bad, you got a mark on the board called a strike].

One study of young children adopted from China illustrates the faster progress of older children in English, their “second first language.” Snedecker, Geren, and Shafto (2007) tracked the progress over

1: Children learn languages more quickly than adults.

——

7

18 months of children adopted at ages 2-5. The study found that the children’s vocabulary acquisition was faster than monolingual infants, at roughly four times the rate of infants. Interestingly though, they also found that the children progressed through the same stages of vocabulary acquisition as monolingual

children by acquiring more nouns

than verbs at first and then by not producing two-word phrases until their vocabulary was over the 300-word level. One reason why so many people believe children acquire language

much more rapidly than adults may be because the language we expect from a child and an adult are so different. Collier (1989, 513) says, “Children’s SLA [second language acquisition] appears superior largely because the structures and vocabulary they need for adequate communication are so much simpler than those required of adults.” When the

reader considers the rapid language progress of someone like my daughter, Aiko, they are likely thinking of the child’s ability to communicate in normal

conversation—a

different type of language ability

than the kind needed to do well in school. In fact, several studies that have compared how quickly children and adults acquire the same lan-

guage have shown that older adolescents or adults performed better and faster than the younger children. Cummins (1979, 1980, 1981a, 1981b) made a distinction between what can be thought of as normal conversational fluency (called Basic

Interpersonal Communication Skills, or BICS) and the language that is used in school and other academic contexts (called Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, or CALP). Generally, studies have shown that it takes children much longer to master the academic skills (CALP) than it does the normal conversational skills (BICS). Hakuta, Butler, and Witt (2000) found that it took Spanish-speaking children in California beginning their study of English in first grade three to five years to develop oral proficiency equal to their monolingual peers, and four to seven years to develop academic English proficiency. Cummins

(1981b) found that it took

children who had never attended school in their first language at least five to seven years to become equal to their monolingual peers in aca-

demic achievement (CALP).

8 ——

SLA Myths

Speed of Second Language Acquisition by Adults In order to make any sort of meaningful comparison between the

speed of young children who are learning a second language and

adults who also do so, we would need to look at adults who are getting massive exposure every day to a language. One situation this occurs in

is in the U.S. foreign service, when adults are expected to learn new

languages in order to function in the countries they will be assigned to work in. The government provides intensive language training for such

language learners. With languages that are typically easiest for native English speakers to learn, such as Spanish, Dutch, or French, after 24 weeks (or 720 hours in a six-hours-a-day, five-day-a-week program), motivated adults with normal levels of language aptitude reached a level of 2+ (Advanced High) (Omaggio-Hadley,

2000). This level is

defined by the ability to connect speech into paragraph-like narratives and explanations and to speak with a wide vocabulary on many concrete topics. The learners speak fluently, and their grammar is consis-

tently accurate. This level excludes the ability to discuss abstract concepts or hypothesize about topics. For the more difficult languages for native English speakers to learn (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean) about 80-92 weeks would be required (that's 2,400-2,760 hours of classroom study). Perhaps a context that provides an even better comparison than

foreign service employees is the case of missionaries who are learning a foreign language while living in the country. This population may contain a more representative slice of a normal population than foreign

service employees, whose job it is to learn foreign languages and who likely have above-normal levels of language learning aptitude. The missionaries are normal language learners, but the amount of input they get is quite substantial since they are immersed in the language. We

might expect their language learning would not happen as quickly as the foreign service employees and that there would be more variation

in their outcomes. Several recent studies have been done with missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), who vol-

1: Children learn languages more quickly than adults.

——

9

unteer to spend two years being missionaries when they are in their early twenties. Conservative estimates from these studies are that the

missionaries spend 40 hours per week engaged in activities during which they are exposed to the Japanese language (either as input or output). Given that the missionaries spend 24 months (for men) or 18 months (for women) on a mission, at 40 hours per week this translates

into a total of 4,160 hours of input (or 3,120 for women). This is substantially more time than what the foreign service guidelines give, but the missionaries do not typically represent an extraordinarily linguistically gifted portion of the population either.

Dewey and Clifford (2012) explored the language level of missionaries who

had learned Spanish,

French, German,

Italian, Russian,

Mandarin, or Japanese after their mission. They found that only 7 per-

cent of the missionaries achieved a ranking lower than Advanced (2-, 2, or 2+), with the majority of this 7 percent coming from missionaries learning Russian, Mandarin, or Japanese. Eighty percent of the returned missionaries reached the 2 or 2+ level (Advanced Mid or Advanced High), with an additional 6 percent more reaching the level of a 3 (Superior speaker, who can talk about abstract ideas, hypothesize, and support opinions). Table 1 gives the distribution of missionaries into their oral proficiency levels after the completion of their mission (reproduced from Dewey and Clifford, Table 2). TABLE 1: Scores on Oral Proficiency Test by Returned Missionaries (percentages from 391 participants) All Spanish

French

German

italian

Russian

Mandarin

Japanese

Languages

Reprinted from Second Language Acquisition Abroad: The LDS Missionary Experience, Dewey, D., & Clifford, R. “The Development of Speaking Proficiency of LDS Missionaries.” Copyright © 2012, with permission of John Benjamins.

10 —— SLA Myths In short, by being exposed to a second language in a naturalistic context, most adults were able to become quite fluent and proficient speakers after 18-24 months. Larson-Hall and Dewey (2012) surveyed missionaries’ speaking proficiency as well by testing missionaries who were still living in country. This was done to observe what impact time would have on

proficiency level. This study showed that participants with less than 11 months of missionary service were still improving in their oral proficiency, and for these participants time on mission explained about 80 percent of their oral proficiency scores. For missionaries after a year of in-country immersion, the relationship between time spent on the mission and oral proficiency score dramatically decreased, explaining only about 25 percent of their scores. This indicates that it takes the missionaries roughly one year of intensive study and exposure to Japanese to reach the Intermediate High (1+) or Advanced

(2) level. A graph

showing what proficiency levels were achieved by the participants at the time they were tested is shown in Figure 1 (reprinted from LarsonHall and Dewey, Figure 3). ie

ORONO

ONS

ee

EMO NT

NON

ON

ON NTN

Nae

NNT

What Graphs Tell Us If you have a series of numbers, such as {3,5,6,7}, you can calculate the aver-

age of these numbers by adding them up and dividing by the number of items—here it will be (3+5+6+7)/4=5.25. The average represents the number that is most representative of all the numbers. It is also a number where the difference between each item in the list and the average is the smallest. In the same ways, a regression line takes all of the data in a scatterplot and draws a line that best represents the two-dimensional data. It is the line where the distance from the line to each point will be the smallest. Because it can be extended beyond the actual data points, it can predict where data will fall in areas where there is no data available (in other words, it can extrapolate from

the data). A regression line assumes that the best way to represent the data is a straight line, though, and this may not always be the best assumption. |

Therefore, another useful piece of information on a scatterplot is a Loess line,

which draws a line between successive points, but in a smooth way. In Figure 1 it appears that a straight line (the regression line, or broken line in Figure 1)

is not the best representation of the data. Instead, there seem to be two dif|

ferent patterns, one steeply improving up until about 11 months, and the other showing only gradual improvement after 11 months.

1: Children learn languages more quickly than adults.

——

11

FIGURE 1: Relationship between Time Spent on Mission and Proficiency Level on the Oral Proficiency Test 2=Novice (0), 3=Novice

High (0+), 4=Intermediate

Low (1-), 5=Intermediate

Mid

(1), 6=Intermediate High (1+), 7= Advanced (2), 8=Advanced High (2+), 9=Superior (3) (note that there is no Advanced Low level in this rating scale). The unbroken line is called a Loess line. It follows the trend of the data and shows a leveling out around 11 months. The broken line shows regression line (see the box on page 10 for more information).

Proficiency Oral Score

5

10

15

20

Months on Mission Reprinted from Second Language Acquisition Abroad: The LDS Missionary Experience, LarsonHall, J., & Dewey, D., “An Examination of Effects of Input, Aptitude, and Motivation on the

Language Proficiency of Missionaries Learning Japanese as a Second Language.” Copyright © 2012, with permission of John Benjamins.

12 ——

SLA Myths

You may be an adult who spent many hours taking language classes in high school or college but never got to the point where you could speak the language well enough to communicate with native speakers. You may look at children who seem to quickly acquire a sec-

ond language after moving to a different country where they receive large amounts of exposure and thus conclude that children are better language learners than adults. However, the studies cited on foreign service employees and missionaries show that if adults are also immersed in a situation where they are receiving massive amounts of input in the second language and are also forced to speak and express themselves in that language, they too are able to reach quite good levels of speaking proficiency within a relatively short amount of time (about a year). We may therefore question whether children are faster or better language learners than adults who have the time available to devote to full-time language acquisition.

Ultimate Attainment in a Second Language But are children better learners in the long run than adults? The answer here is a clear yes, given some certain circumstances. If we are discussing ultimate attainment after 5-10 years where both the child and adult live in the country where the target language is spoken, then

clearly the outcomes for children surpass those of adults. In this type of immersion experience, where we assume that the language learner in question is interacting and having to use the target language to communicate, children will end up with skills that more closely resemble native speakers than adults will. Figure 2, taken from the largest critical period study conducted to date (Flege, Yeni-Komshian, & Liu, 1999), shows the basic trends on tests of simple grammar that ask participants to say whether a sentence like My mom like pepperoni on her pizza is grammatical. Results show fairly high scores until after about age 12.

1: Children learn languages more quickly than adults.

——

13

FIGURE 2: Scores on a Grammar Test for 24 Native Speakers of English and 240 Korean Learners of English as a Second Language The line is a fit line to the data (similar to the Loess line, explained in Box on page 10).

° Native English ® Native Korean

Morphosyntax correct) (% Scores

0

5 10 15 Age of Arrival in the U.S.

20

Reprinted from Journal of Memory and Language, 41, Flege, J. E., Yeni-Komshian, G. & Liu, S.,

Age constraints on second-language acquisition, 78-104, Copyright (1999), with permission from Elsevier.

Figure 2 shows that the variability in scores on the test increases with age. The white circles are the scores of native English speakers on the test, who all received scores of between 90-100 percent correct. The line that is fit to the data (showing the trend of the direction the points are moving, either up or down) in this figure begins to curve downward after age 5-6 but scores do not routinely go below 80 percent until age 12 and older. After age 12 there seem to be some participants

who can still score well (there are scores in the 90s for all age groups), but the range of variation becomes much wider than was seen before

this age. Figure 2 shows that it is not impossible for people who start at an older age to learn the basic grammar of a language well; it just becomes less likely as the starting age increases. Also, there is no real clear

14 —— SLA Myths demarcation line where everyone who starts before a certain age will perform like a native speaker of a language. Instead, there is a general decrease in ultimate outcomes as the language learners move beyond age 5 or 6.

The situation for nativelike acquisition of pronunciation is different from that of grammar. The ability to sound like a native speaker is lost earlier than the ability to do well on the grammar test. Figure 3 shows results on a test of pronunciation from the same group of Korean learners of English as was seen in Figure 2.

FIGURE 3: Foreign Accent Ratings for 24 Native Speakers of English and 240 Korean Learners of English as a Second Language The highest accent rating of 9 means the person is rated as a native speaker of English with no accent, while the score of 1 means having a very strong foreign accent. The unbroken line is a fit line to the data.

© Native English ® Native Korean

Foreign Mean Rating Accent

0

5

10

15

20

Age of Arrival in the U.S. Reprinted from Journal of Memory and Language, 41, Flege, J. E., Yeni-Komshian, G. & Liu, S., Age constraints on second-language acquisition, 78-104, Copyright (1999), with permission from Elsevier.

1: Children learn languages more quickly than adults.

——

15

Figure 3 shows that even the earliest English starters do not seem to score, aS a group, as well as the native speakers (again, in the white circles). The decline in overall pronunciation levels is gradual, but by age 14 only the rare participant can score over 5, and most score well below that.

The research has established, then, that in a context with massive amounts

with more

of exposure to a language, children will generally end up

nativelike abilities in a language than adults. However,

this result does not mean that in all types of situations be better language learners than adults. For example, in the world, young children attend English language enrichment activity an hour a week, similar to piano

children will many parts of classes as an lessons or a

chess club. There is no research to show that children will learn English well in such an input-poor environment. In fact, there is every reason to think that adults’ advanced cognitive abilities would put them at an advantage for learning a language in such a situation, although it would be difficult for anyone to learn a language well with just an hour of input a week.

Learning in Children versus Adults The fact that children are more accurate language learners in the long run with large amounts of input has caused some researchers to posit that there is a critical period for learning a language. If there is a biologically determined time when learning a language results in better outcomes for humans (a critical period), then there must be a biological mechanism for this difference. Many researchers have assumed that the biological reason for the difference in ultimate language outcomes was that children’s brains are still pliable and plastic while adults’ brains have hardened and cannot change. This is commonly reflected in the phrase “children’s brains are like sponges” that accompanies the idea that children are able to learn information much more quickly than adults and without any effort. In fact, as shown in this chapter, children do not acquire a language more quickly than adults and that with lots of time to devote to language acquisition, adults can learn a

16 ——

SLA Myths

second language to a high level of proficiency in the same amount of time it takes a baby to learn its first 20 words. Current brain research is showing that adults’ brains are still malleable and can physically change in response to input. Macguire et al. (2000) studied the brains of London taxi drivers who memorize voluminous amounts of spatial information in order to navigate the city. This study found that the size of the hippocampus, where spatial information is stored, was substantially larger in these taxi drivers than in the normal population. Since the drivers presumably learned this information about the roadways of London as adults, we can conclude that adults’ brains are plastic enough to grow and change in even radical ways in response to information and experience. Another study (Kwok et al., 2011) found that adults’ brains can change so quickly in response to learning that in a matter of only two hours of practice associating Mandarin color words with the colors themselves, adults had developed additional gray matter in an area of the cortex associated with learning and memory. One study done with young and old rats showed that the results of exposure to a new environment result in actual physical growth of areas in the brain, but of different types depending on the age of the rat. Briefly, if the rats were young, then structures in the brain increased in number but not density, while if the rats were older, the

structures got longer and denser. If we are justified in translating this research to the human brain, it is clearly not accurate to say that children’s brains are ready to learn while adults’ brains have hardened— it appears that our brains are set up to learn and grow at any age, although there may be different kinds of growth when the exposure occurs at different ages.

1: Children learn languages more quickly than adults.

——

17

What We Can Do 1. In the classroom, consider what adults and children

bring to the table. Adults bring life experience and a lot of experience with language to the classroom. They are able to learn explicitly, using rules. Children, conversely, are still adding to their native language ability, and they probably learn best implicitly—picking up examples, storing them, and eventually sorting them out to form their own rules. We need to keep in mind the differences and play to the respective strengths of each group. This is not to say that adults can’t learn implicitly, but adult students may be in a hurry to learn, and rules (and strategy use) might

facilitate learning for them. Younger children are not ready for rules and meta-linguistic discussions.

2. Encourage adults to learn languages. One of the major points is that adults can learn languages. Although children may do better in the long run, adults can become functionally proficient in speaking a language at least as quickly as children if both receive large amounts of input. Adults should not feel that they are handicapped by brains that cannot change and learn as quickly or as well as children. Although adults and children may learn in different ways, both have brains that will change and grow in response to

enrichment.

If adults want to learn a language, like any other skill,

their brains are ready and capable of doing so.

3. Set realistic expectations for how long it can take for adults to reach an intermediate speaking level. One of the problems with adults learning languages in formal settings such as university classes is that they usually do not receive enough

input to really progress very far. Information provided in this chapter

18 ——

SLA Myths

shows that many hundreds of hours of input and practice are needed to learn to speak and comprehend (not to mention read and write!) a second language, whether the learner in question is a child or an adult.

Teachers must be realistic in their expectations of what students can achieve when they spend only a limited amount of time learning a language. If teachers expect students to make much progress in learn-

ing a language, they will need to provide outlets where they can really improve in the amount of time they spend learning a language. In a university setting, for example, intensive language classes in the sum-

mer might fulfill a language requirement better than having students study a language for only a few hours a week the rest of the year. If increased input is not feasible, language teachers should make sure to have very specific and focused goals that can actually be accomplished

in the limited time available. They should remind students that it takes

at least 1,000 hours to become an intermediate speaker of almost any language. Students should not feel like they are failures when they take a language class and are not really able to communicate with native

speakers of that language.

4. Set realistic expectations for how long it takes children to learn a language. The idea that children are faster learners than adults is not accurate. In general, the older the learner, the faster he or she can acquire a language, although the results may not be as good in the long run. Teachers who expect that children can acquire a language more quickly and more easily than adults may handicap them in some cases. For example, if the general public feels that children immersed in a second

language environment will be proficient users of that language in only a year, they may be unwilling to fund school programs that continue to help L2 learners progress. In 1998, a referendum passed in California

that cut off funding for bilingual education and replaced it with just one year of language immersion classes. L2 learners may become quite good at speaking conversationally in one year of immersion, but it is

1: Children learn languages more quickly than adults.

——

19

virtually impossible for them to reach the academic level of their peers after just one year of language learning assistance. Consider how well adults would do if placed in an immersion environment and only given one year of help. We can guess that they would ask for help for longer than a year. It is likely only because many adults think that children are so different from themselves and so much better at learning languages that they are willing to withdraw help so quickly. If everyone understood better the amount of time it

takes to learn a language well—whether children or adults—more programs would be in place to provide support to second language learners. The belief that children will acquire a language easily, quickly, and

without any effort does child language learners a disservice.

5. Schools that teach second languages should provide a high number of contact hours. Children who take language classes that provide a very minimal num-

ber of contact hours a week (usually in the range of 1-3 hours) are not common in the U.S., but they are common in many other countries such as Japan, Korea, and China. The common belief that children are

always better language learners no matter the circumstances may lead some people to spend quite a bit of money on such classes (currently, in Japan, my son’s pre-school sends home

fliers for such 30-minute

weekly English lessons that cost $85 a month). If a child is interested in learning a language and enjoys spending time in their week to play and enjoy the environment of a language class, there is no harm in this. However, if parents find they are paying large amounts of money for one or two hours of language instruction per week in the misguided belief that this is the best time to learn a language, they are wasting

their money. It would also be a mistake to spend a lot of time teaching children grammar rules or trying to help them see patterns when they are too young to learn this way efficiently. Of course, this conclusion does not just apply to parents. School districts and even whole countries have made decisions about teaching languages in primary schools (especially English, which is a language

20 ——

SLA Myths

of wider communication). While teaching English to young children in

a situation where there is minimal input should not hurt anyone, policymakers may mistakenly think that even one or two hours of English a month will be a valuable addition to childrens’ education. In other words, the belief that children will always be the best language learners may lead to large-scale policy implications that are based on a flawed premise.

VY

Fa

A true bilingual is someone who speaks two languages perfectly.

in the Real World This is Jenifer. My friend Sadie has lived in Japan for more than 20

years. She attended university in Japan and has a fantastic vocabulary along with great Japanese pronunciation. Her kids were raised mostly in Japan and are dominant in Japanese, not in New Zealand English, her native language. Yet Sadie wonders if she is really a bilingual since she learned her second language as an adult. Many monolinguals think that, in theory, being a bilingual is cool. However, they have a conception of a bilingual as someone who speaks two languages perfectly and who has been raised since birth speaking both of those languages. Therefore, they themselves,

even if they

learned a second language, would never qualify as ‘true’ bilinguals. These same monolinguals may disparage certain types of bilinguals as inferior. For example, they may consider someone whose first language

is Spanish and who has learned some English as an adult, and who mixes both of the languages (for example, by saying, voy a grocear—I'm

21

22 ——

SLA Myths

going grocery shopping)

as someone

who cannot speak either lan-

guage properly.

The truth is that perfectly blended bilinguals—that is, people who have the same abilities as a monolingual in both their languages—are probably non-existent. Grosjean (1989) has argued that it is a miscon-

ception to think that a bilingual is essentially “two monolinguals in one.” Instead, the bilingual has developed a unique linguistic system, which is complete in its own right. Grosjean compares being bilingual with being an athlete called a “high-hurdler.” A high-hurdler runs and jumps over hurdles. A high-hurdler neither runs as fast as a sprinter nor jumps as high as a high-jumper, but the abilities are uniquely suited to this sport. A high-hurdler would not ever be compared to other ath-

letes. So too, argues Grosjean, the bilingual is rarely perfectly as fluent and accurate as monolinguals in both of his languages because his abilities have developed in response to his own communicative needs

and situations. Possessing two languages also means that these lan-

guages influence each other linguistically, something that of course does not happen with monolinguals. Also, a fundamental part of being a bilingual is that the person is able to mix both languages, and can do so (or not) as he or she chooses. Thus, it is not the case that an adult who mixes vocabulary from both languages is ignorant or stupid. He or she is just doing what bilinguals do (and what monolinguals obvi-

ously can't!). I consider all four of my children bilinguals but their histories are quite different. Both of my girls were adopted in Japan. The first, Kiki, heard only Japanese at an orphanage until she was one year old, but after coming into our bilingual home was fluent in both English and Japanese by about age two. You already read about our second daughter, Aiko, in Myth 1. My oldest child, Lachlan, was my first experiment

in teaching a child a second language as a non-native speaker. He lived

in Japan from 3 months to 1;6 (one year and six months), then for a year in the US., and then back to Japan. His first words were intelligible at about 13 months, but I couldn't understand his sentences until he was about 4. At that point I realized not only that he was mixing languages but he was using a local dialect of Japanese that I didn’t

2: A true bilingual speaks two languages perfectly.

——

23

know (picked up at Japanese pre-school). Age 4 is a rather late age to speak in comprehensible sentences, but it’s possible he had begun earlier and my husband and I just heard what he said as gibberish because

of dialect difference and the mixing. My youngest son, Case Kaye, was actually hearing three languages from birth, as I would speak Japanese to him (this had become quite natural to me by this point even as a non-native speaker of Japanese), he heard English from his dad and siblings, and he had a Chinese babysitter. His first words were at about one year in all three languages, but for the most part the words did not overlap—in other words, at least with Japanese and English, for one

concept he had a word from one language only. For example, he said

dadatsu for train and bicycle in Japanese (the proper words are densha and jitensha) and nana for banana in English. At about two years, he was making two-word sentences such as uma inai (there are no horses) or mama daisuki (I love you mom) in Japanese or me go in English. What these histories show is that children learn languages in different circumstances, depending on what country they live in, what language their parents or caregiver speaks to them, and their own personal

pace of language acquisition. There is no board to certify anyone as a “true” bilingual, and the term has no standardized

meaning that

entails a precise definition of proficiency in one or both languages.

What the Research Says Toward a Definition of a Bilingual In order to look at this myth, we first need to work toward an understanding of what the word bilingual means.

Obviously,

literally it

means two (bi-) languages or tongues (-lingua), so that we could label as bilingual someone who only knows a couple of words in a second

language as well as someone who communicates

perfectly naturally

and equally fluently in two languages. Most people would find this an unsatisfying resolution, as do I. Grosjean (1989, 7) identifies anyone

24 ——

SLA Myths

who has “developed a communicative competence that is equivalent to

other speaker-hearers, be they monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual” as bilingual. In other words, those who function in two languages should be considered bilingual. Thus knowing just a few words of a second language would not qualify someone as bilingual. But, if a person was not exactly equivalent to a monolingual speaker, it would not

mean he or she was not bilingual. This definition satisfies most linguists.

The ideal bilingual that most people think of when they think of a bilingual is an early balanced bilingual, someone

who has received perfectly balanced input in two languages from birth. But even people who seem perfectly balanced in two languages typically have one dom-

inant language (almost without exception the dominant language will be the majority language spoken around them in the community, if we exclude bilinguals who are too young to be attending school) and know vocabulary in one language that may not be found in the other language.

Bialystok (2001), in her very readable book on bilinguals, goes through some of the problems in identifying bilinguals and notes that

bilingualism is not a categorical variable. That is, there is no clear cutoff point in language proficiency or fluency where one may say, “There! Stop at that line! Anyone below that level of proficiency is a monolingual and anyone above it is bilingual.” There will clearly be a continuum of language proficiency that bilinguals find themselves on, and this will depend mostly on factors of age and continued language usage. This can be illustrated by the research population that Bialystok

used in a study that will be discussed later (Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004). The researchers wanted to find participants who

were “balanced bilinguals,” which for this study meant people who used both languages about an equal amount of time. The bilingual

participants the researchers used were Tamil-English bilinguals living

in India (notice that linguists label bilinguals by putting their dominant language first, so in this case, we assume that these participants were more dominant in Tamil than in English). Their native language was Tamil, but they began using English when they entered school at

2: A true bilingual speaks two languages perfectly.

——

25

age six. At school the pupils were taught school subjects in both Tamil

and English but effectively began using both languages in daily life from that age. The participants in the study reported the percentage of time they used each language daily with friends, at home and at work, and on average they used English 56 percent of the time, making them relatively balanced in their usage. The researchers compared these functionally bilingual participants to monolinguals living in Canada, who

had taken some

language classes as school subjects but who the

researchers did not consider bilingual because they were neither profi-

cient in a second language nor used one on a regular basis. Clearly, these Indian participants were not those “ideal” bilinguals who had

heard two languages from birth and were perfectly fluent in both languages, but they just as clearly were people who could function quite well in their languages and did so on a daily basis.

When discussing bilingualism, linguists prefer to add qualifications to the word bilingual to distinguish between different types of bilingualism,

instead of trying to define a “true” bilingual and

exclude all others who might consider themselves bilingual. We have already seen what the label of balanced bilingual might mean in practice in the Bialystok et al. (2004) study. Another common

type of

bilingual would be people who are dominant in the language of the community around them and can only receptively understand a sec-

ond language (in other words, they cannot actively speak their second language). This would describe some percentage of immigrant children to the United States. Some of these children, after entering primary school, start speaking the majority language of the community (English, in this example) to their parents even though their parents speak the minority language

(for example,

Spanish)

back to

them. These type of bilinguals are called receptive bilinguals, and this situation is not unusual. In a survey of 1,899 families in Belgium where at least one parent spoke a minority language at home,

de

Houwer (2007) found that one-quarter of the families had children who did not speak the minority language actively. I have met a number of such students in my undergraduate

courses and inevitably

26 —— SLA Myths these people do not actually consider themselves bilingual because they are unable to speak their second language. Although it may seem unusual to a monolingual, it is perfectly possible for a person to understand a second language fluently but not be able to speak it well. These types of receptive bilinguals are included in the category of heritage language learners, and research in this area has found that such speakers are different from typical early bilinguals who grow up using two languages. Montrul (2010, 4) says such heritage language learners “have achieved partial command of the family language, short of the native speaker level.” The actual proficiency and literacy levels of such speakers depends on their own family histories, and can range from those who have only receptive skills to those who have advanced speaking skills as well but who may display gaps in their knowledge if compared to native speakers. For example, heritage speakers of Russian and Spanish often have trouble with marking grammatical gender correctly (choosing between el gato versus la gato in Spanish, for example). Another category of bilingual is the late bilingual. This includes people like Sadie (mentioned at the beginning of the chapter), who learned a second language as an adult. Late bilinguals can differ widely in how proficient they become in a second language. Myth 1 discussed the Critical Period Hypothesis, which says that language acquisition will be much more effortful for adults than for children, and the chapter clearly showed that the outcomes for adults are much more varied than for children. Nevertheless, it is certainly the case that many adults around the world learn second languages and may even use both languages in their everyday life. These types of speakers can legitimately be labeled bilingual as well. There may be something that tells us intuitively that unless someone begins using a second language at a young age, he or she is not a “true” bilingual, and clearly many adult language learners have gaps in their linguistic knowledge if compared to native speakers of the language. However, there is also evidence to indicate that late bilinguals who use both languages fluently are in many respects the equals of native speakers. Abutalebi, Cappa, and Perani (2001) surveyed studies

2: A true bilingual speaks two languages perfectly.

——

27

of bilingual brains using neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI and PET scans and concluded that, for early bilinguals, the areas of activation within the brain are the same for both production and compre-

hension. For late bilinguals who are fluent in their second language and use it daily, the areas of activation in the brain appear in the same area as for early bilinguals, and they are also the same for both production and comprehension. For late bilinguals who have low profi-

ciency, there are differences in brain activation areas and differences in the size of the areas activated when compared with early bilinguals. The researchers conclude that the findings “appear to indicate that attained proficiency, and maybe language exposure,

might be more

important than age of acquisition as a determinant of the cerebral rep-

resentation of languages in bilinguals” (Abutalebi et al., 2001, 184).

How Children Become Bilingual In terms of the research that has been done on early bilingual children, most of it has been obtained through case studies, not large-scale experiments, so there is a wealth of in-depth knowledge. The breadth

comes from questionnaires that have been given to bilingual families. Although for some readers it may seem that bilingualism is an extraordinary condition, sources claim that being bilingual is more the rule than the exception and that bilinguals globally outnumber mono-

linguals (Harris

& McGhee Nelson, 1992; Tucker, 1998). Children will

learn the majority language of the country they grow up in. The key question is whether the children will learn their minority language and

thus grow up to be bilinguals, or whether they will lose their minority language and become monolinguals (Pearson, 2007). On an individual level it can be quite difficult to maintain bilingualism, especially in large monolingual countries like the U.S., Brazil, Argentina, or Australia. Maintaining bilingualism in countries that are functionally multilingual,

like Belgium

(which has three official

languages—Dutch, Flemish, and German) can be difficult as well, as was shown

in de Houwer’s

(2007) survey of families who spoke a

minority language at home. de Houwer found that the most successful

28 —— SLA Myths pattern for maintaining a bilingual child was when both parents spoke the minority language in the home (or only one parent could speak the

majority language as well). If both parents could speak the majority language or if only one parent was a monolingual minority language speaker, the probability that the children would stop speaking the

minority language was about 25 percent. The worst case scenario was when one parent was bilingual in the minority language and Dutch and one parent was a native speaker of Dutch only (monolingual in the majority language). Here only one-third of the children continued

to speak the minority language. One example of children becoming monolingual even when their parents are bilingual is a study done by Dodpke (1992) of EnglishGerman bilinguals in Australia. Dopke followed six families closely in which only one parent spoke German to the pre school-aged children (five of them were stay-at-home mothers, but in one case there was a non-native German-speaking father). All of the children had heard both English and German since birth, and Dépke recorded the children when they were two years old (two were 2;4 and four were 2;8). This was an important time because it was when the children were really just beginning to speak their languages. Dopke came back six

months later and examined the childrens’ language and found that of the six families, only two had children who continued to choose to

speak German to their parent and who were progressing developmentally in German. The other children had either refused to speak German to their German-speaking parent or were not speaking much German. Surprisingly, one of the two families whose children contin-

ued to speak German was the one with the non-native speaking father. The parents whose children were still speaking German at the second visit were those who would pretend they didn’t understand or who would ask for a translation if the child spoke English instead of German to them. Dépke concluded that only the children whose parents made it a necessity to speak German in order to communicate with them remained bilingual. One important issue that many people new to the idea of raising

children bilingually from birth might be concerned about is whether

2: A true bilingual speaks two languages perfectly.

——

29

being raised bilingually retards children’s progress in the languages so that they are slower to begin speaking. The quick answer is no. It is true that bilingual children do have some deficits compared to monolinguals in each language; for example, many studies have found that bilingual children often have smaller vocabularies in each of their languages than monolingual children do. However, a study by Pearson, Fernandez, and Oller (1995) found that comprehension abilities in each language matched those of monolingual children and that if the productive vocabularies of the bilingual children for each language were added together, their production abilities were comparable to

monolingual children. As for rate of acquisition, as far as can be ascertained by researchers, bilingual children develop vocabulary within normal rates of acquisition for monolingual children (de Houwer, 1995). One study that examined English-Spanish bilingual children over time (Oller, Eilers, Urbano, & Cobo-Lewis, 1997) found that bilingual infants did not differ from monolingual infants in the time it took them to begin babbling or in the amount of vocalization they produced. Pearson, Fernandez, and Oller (1993) compared the lexical development of 25 Spanish-English bilingual children to 35 monolingual (mostly English, but three were Spanish) children from ages 8 to 30 months. The researchers tested the childrens’ comprehension at regular interviews and used parental reports to calculate the childrens’ productive vocabulary. This study found that the bilinguals could comprehend just as much vocabulary as the monolinguals could in their language. For production, the researchers found that the bilinguals produced less than the monolinguals in each language but when they added the bilinguals’ productive vocabulary together it equaled the productive capacities of the monolingual children.

30 —— SLA Myths FIGURE 4: Productive Vocabulary of Children in Pearson et al. (1993) study The Bilingual Total category measures the number of all words the child knows while the Bilingual Total Conceptual category is a measure of the unique number of words that the bilingual knows (so identical words in both languages would be eliminated).

500

— — — —

Bilingual Total

———_ —e—e—

Bilingual Total Conceptual Monolingual

400

300

200

100

16-17 Bilingual N Monolingual NV

9 8

18-19 20-21 22-23 Ages in Months AZ 10

8 20

i 21

2425

26-27

8 17

9 15

Reprinted from Language Learning, 43(1), Pearson, B.Z., Fernandez, S.C., & Oller, D.K., “Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms,” 93-120. Copyright © 1993, with permission of John wiley & Sons.

2: A true bilingual speaks two languages perfectly.

——

31

Figure 4 (see page 30) shows the number of words that the monolingual and bilingual children produced at various ages and shows that the patterns are quite similar and that neither the monolinguals nor bilinguals can be considered to be ahead of the other overall, although

there are differences at certain ages. Figure 4 makes it clear that bilinguals’ vocabulary development is

not any slower than that of monolinguals. It does seem to be the case that children may develop more slowly in their less dominant language, although this is related to the amount of input the children receive in each language. For vocabulary development, Pearson, Fernandez, Lewedeg, and Oller (1997) found that the amount of time the child received input in his or her minority language, Spanish, correlated very highly with the percertage of total words that the children had in Spanish, with a strong correlation of r=.82.

de Houwer

(2007)

also found

that parental

input

levels

accounted for 84 percent of the variation in trilingual children’s lan-

guage patterns. One interesting side note from this study (Pearson et al., 1997) was that if children received less than 20 percent of their input in the

less dominant

language, the children would

not actively produce

words in that language. There is also data to suggest that grammatical development may be slower for the less dominant language as well. Studies such as Paradis,

Nicoladis, and Crago (2007) as well as Schlyter and Hakansson (1994)

found that sentences were shorter in the less dominant language and the children made some grammatical errors in that language as well. Gathercole (2002) found that children may work out grammatical rules, such as the many vs. much count noun distinction in English at a faster or slower pace depending on the amount of input they receive, but that there is a certain threshold where they do work out a grammatical rule and do not need any more examples. The stages are the same for monolinguals and bilinguals but, depending on the amount of input, bilinguals may take longer to reach the threshold. I'd like to make two last points about how children become bilingual. The first is that even very young children, as young as two or three

32 —— SLA Myths years old, can realize that they are bilingual. Not only do they understand that they know two languages, but research has shown that bilingual pre-schoolers are adept at using their language appropriately

depending on who they talk to (Lanza, 1992; Marcon & Coon, 1983). The second point is that although non-deliberate language mixing may

occur with very young children (up to one and a half according to Bialystok, 2001, 112), language mixing rarely occurs when bilinguals are speaking to monolinguals

and may only happen with children

older than one and a half when they lack the word in the language they are speaking (de Houwer, 1990).

How Does Bilingualism Affect Children’s Cognitive Development? Most readers of this text are probably too young to remember a time when people thought it was dangerous to be a bilingual. In the early 1900s (Barac & Bialystok, 2011, provides a nice timeline summary),

there were mixed results from studies on IQ tests, with some showing that bilinguals had lower IQ levels than monolinguals. Some studies also showed

that bilinguals fared more

poorly on school content

courses like math. By the 1950s, however, there was evidence pointing to some benefits of bilingualism and proof that most of the negative results on tests of bilinguals were due to methodological flaws in the studies (chiefly being lower socio-economic status for the bilinguals as a group, which was not taken into account, and inadequate precision

as to the degree of bilingualism the children possessed). Today most people recognize that there are economic and personal advantages to being bilingual, but research has also shown that bilin-

gualism has a strong effect on some parts of the individual's cognitive system, leading to intellectual and even physical advantages for bilin-

guals over monolinguals. Bilingual children have been found to understand at an earlier age than monolingual children that labels for words are arbitrary (Bialystok, 2001). If a child knows that a dog could be called both a dog and a perro (in Spanish), then he or she will under-

2: A true bilingual speaks two languages perfectly.

——

33

stand that these words are just labels for the concept instead of an inherent characteristic of the thing. In an example of physical advantage to bilingualism, Bialystok and Majumder (1998) found that level of bilingualism did indeed correlate with the ability to control attention to irrelevant information, with participants who had higher levels of bilingualism more able to control their attention. A review and meta-analysis of the cognitive correlates of bilingual-

ism by Adescope et al. (2010) lists some of the following advantages for bilinguals: e Stronger symbolic representation and abstract reasoning skills e Stronger control of attention in both linguistic and nonverbal tasks (because, if they are speaking one language, then the other language, which is always activated, must be ignored, so the brain learns to deal with

this control of attention) e Better learning strategies

e Enhanced problem-solving skills because of their ability to selectively attend to relevant information and disregard misleading information e Enhanced creativity and divergent thinking skills

(because of ability to switch back and forth between two languages and perspectives) e Greater cognitive flexibility

Many of these advantages accrue to both early and later bilinguals who use both languages on a regular basis, although early bilinguals will obtain more cognitive benefits.

34 ——

SLA Myths

1. Educators should provide extra help for bilinguals. Being bilingual adds cognitive benefits to the child, but it may also mean the child may not meet monolingual standards on all measures. Vocabulary has been shown to be an area where bilinguals can show a deficit if they are tested in only one of their languages. Ideally, children should

be tested on academic

content

in the language they are

strongest in or allowed to use both languages on a test. Achieving high academic proficiency in the majority language can take considerable time if the child only knows the minority language when entering school. Helping children become academically proficient in the majority language may take extra resources that monolingual children do not need. Teachers should make sure to seek out extra

resources for their bilingual children.

2. Encourage bilingualism by respecting the value of the minority language. Given the cognitive benefits of bilingualism, we recommend that insofar as is possible educators should support bilingualism and not the

elimination of the minority language. Educators are most likely working to help children become proficient in the majority language of the community and may have no knowledge of the minority language. But, teachers’ attitudes toward the minority language may have an effect on whether the child keeps the minority language or lets it go. If it is possible to have programs where children can learn in their minor-

ity language as well, these should be supported and valued.

3. Learn another language. Not only is learning a language an excellent way to keep an older brain active, but cognitive benefits can accrue to anyone who uses two lan-

guages on a regular basis, regardless of the age at which he or she

2: A true bilingual speaks two languages perfectly. ——

35

started learning the languages. Beyond cognitive benefits, a person who learns another language will find that he or she can communicate with a larger portion of the world. Learning a second (or third, or fourth) language will also offer insights into the struggles that bilinguals have in learning to control automatic responses, and into the pleasure that can be derived from being able to mix languages to achieve a nuanced way of conveying exactly what you want to say.

YS LL

You can acquire a

language simply through listening or reading.

This is Steve. To learn a language, all you have to do is .. . fill in the blank: Study abroad. Talk to native speakers. Relax. There have been scores of proposals to complete that sentence. (For a history of methods in ELT, see Richards and Rodgers, 2001.) Prominent among prescriptions for language learning has been “just listen to or read in the

language.” Or “get good input.” Consider the case of Alberto (Schumann, 1978). Alberto was a 33-

year-old Costa Rican immigrant to the U.S. who was one of a halfdozen language learners followed by researchers over ten months. Alberto’s English did not develop over time. He ended the ten months

still speaking “a reduced and simplified form of English” that Schumann likened to a pidgin (Schumann, 1978, 65). Why? Schu-

mann said that Alberto’s lack of linguistic development was linked to his social and psychological distance from U.S. culture. He didn’t make an effort to meet Americans, instead staying within his group of Spanish-speaking friends. He didn’t own a television. He listened to 36

3: You can acquire a language by listening or reading.

——

37

Spanish-language music. He worked day and night in a factory where he had little contact with English. From Schumann’s

point of view, social and social-psychological

factors combined to keep Alberto uninterested in acquiring English. It

is possible to read this case differently. If only Alberto had mixed more with English speakers, listened to English, and gotten good input, he

would have acquired more English. This acquisition might have motivated him, given him different goals (see Myth 7). Or maybe it wasn’t the lack of input, but the lack of interaction. If he had interacted, the struggle to make himself understood might have led to linguistic growth. Or maybe what he really needed was an opportunity to examine his output (or the input he received) in a critical fashion. The

answer is probably “all of the above.” Because I believe language teachers should always be learning languages, I once, in the early 1990s, tried to learn French through a comprehension-based approach. The student was supposed to work alone,

saying nothing, looking at the line drawings, and hearing sentences describing the pictures. The grammar

and vocabulary gradually got

more complex. The idea was to learn as we do our native language, just

by listening but not being forced to speak (you may have seen ads for the Rosetta Stone course, which uses this same type of language learn-

ing approach). It was not an unpleasant experience because I enjoyed the puzzle aspect of the course. I was a little troubled that nothing was written down, but I decided to follow the instructions and not cheat by taking notes. I wish I could say that I learned much, and maybe | did

for a few months, but now all I remember is Tout le monde rit. (Everyone laughs.) I remember that because of the odd accompanying nasal laugh at the end of the sentence. (Tout le monde rit. Ha ha ha!) Is the fact that this was the only emotion displayed significant? Is the fact that it stuck out, was salient, the reason I remembered? I don't know. I do know that I've never been able to work the sentence into a conversation. So my experience is, no, you can’t learn a language by simply listening to sentences. But that’s not my conclusion alone. Early work in SLA explored input and interaction, sometimes pitting them against

38 —— SLA Myths each other, as if they could be separated in the real world. Output was

soon added to the discussion. Each factor has had its articulate advocates, as we will see. According to the research, we need at least all three factors of input, interaction, and output to learn a language, and probably more.

Judging from my students, it seems that if an education major has heard of any SLA theorist, it is Stephen Krashen, and this might be because of his eloquent defense of bilingual education or his research

on behalf of free voluntary reading as much as his SLA work.

Krashen’s Comprehension Hypothesis Krashen’s (1985) Input Hypothesis was later renamed the Comprehension

Hypothesis (Krashen, 2008). The Input Hypothesis was framed in the context of a total of five hypotheses: e The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis: Acquisition and learning are two separate processes. Acquisition is an

implicit process akin to that which we go through to learn our first language. It is subconscious. Learning is conscious and brings us explicit knowledge about language. e The Natural Order Hypothesis: We acquire the rules of a language in a set, predictable order that is not amenable to change through instruction. e The Monitor Hypothesis: Learned, explicit knowledge serves only as an editor, the Monitor. Acquired lan-

guage is at the heart of our competence. We only use the Monitor when we are focused on accuracy and know the relevant rule.

3: You can acquire a language by listening or reading.

——

39

e The Affective Filter Hypothesis: The acquirer has to be able to accept input. If the acquirer is anxious, unmoti-

vated, or lacks confidence, the affective filter goes up, and input does not get in. e The Input Hypothesis: Humans acquire language in only one way, by comprehending messages (input) at

a level slightly higher (i+1) than they are currently able to understand. Humans can understand unacquired

grammar by using context clues, world knowledge, and our linguistic competence. Thus, producing speech is

not the cause of acquisition, but the result, and if enough input is received, all the necessary grammar

is provided. Krashen made an argument based on Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. He assumed a Language Acquisition Device that operates on the

input to restructure the acquirer's linguistic system. Krashen has been criticized from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the inadequacy of the definitions of key concepts to arguments

over theory building and the philosophy of science. We'll focus on a few important critiques here. First of all, as Krahnke (1985) noted long ago, Krashen equates “language” with “grammatical structures.” Thus, when he compares his method to others, he is inclined to view “tradi-

tional language teaching” as teaching grammar, which can be problem-

atic. Second,

others argue that language

acquisition

is aided by

conscious hypothesis-testing, with students benefitting from explicitly trying out new forms while speaking a second language (for Krashen, acquisition is implicit and subconscious, so conscious hypothesis-test-

ing is not useful). Faerch and Kasper (1986) and White (1987) make similar arguments for hypothesis testing and for the necessity of what White termed

“incomprehensible

input.” Much

of comprehension

comes about as a result of context or prior knowledge. People under-

stand messages by attending to meaning. That doesn’t, according to White’s view, result in acquisition.

However,

when

learners do not

understand input, they must re-analyze their assumptions and make

40 —— SLA Myths new

hypotheses

about

the

language.

Acquisition

can

happen.

Furthermore, VanPatten (2002, 2007) has argued for the necessity of input that is actively attended to by the listener, which Krashen does not consider necessary (this will be considered in Myth 4). All of these authors have thus argued that Krashen’s ideas are not sufficient to explain second language acquisition. Krashen’s evidence for a comprehension-only approach includes making analogies between first and second language acquisition, as

well as making claims for the success of Canadian immersion and U.S. bilingual education programs. While that evidence is open to debate, such debate would get us off the track here. The success of Canadian immersion is explored later in this chapter (see pages 52-53). In order to focus on input, we need to look closely at two other pieces of Krashen’s evidence. First is the role of comprehensible input (CI)—of

simplified language like foreigner talk, teacher talk, and interlanguage talk. Second is the effect for instruction using Cl-based methods.

Comprehensible Input, Simplified Input First of all, simplified input is input that has been changed in some way from how native speakers of a language speak. Krashen does not say that simplified input in itself facilitates acquisition. He believes that simplified speech is helpful only when it is at the level of i+1,

when it makes the input comprehensible. Conversely, if the input is too simple (i-1, if you will), it does no good. Partially to get away from

the question of the unclear definition of i+1, researchers have typically done research on various kinds of simplified input. Simplified input has generally been divided into foreigner talk, teacher talk, and interlanguage talk. Research has been done as to whether such simplified input helps the acquisition process. Foreigner Talk (FT), or non-native

directed speech, to use an

equally problematic term, is the register that we use to speak to those we perceive as non-native speakers of our language. It is analogous to Child Directed Speech (CDS) or caregiver speech. Caregiver speech, at least as practiced by middle-class Westerners, is characterized by the

3: You can acquire a language by listening or reading.

——

41

use of clear, simple sentences using a small number of simple words. It addresses the here and now, what we are currently sharing with the child. Its purpose is to communicate, not to teach language, but there

is some evidence that caregivers do frame new information in ways to highlight it and that they also increase the use of certain structures as children get ready for them, even if this is usually done unconsciously. Caregiver speech is central to first language acquisition (Kuhl, 2000). While everyone seems to know how to talk to babies, people are not always consistent in their approach to foreigner talk. (Some people

prefer to just speak very loudly.) Nevertheless, there is evidence that people do speak to non-native speakers clearly, slowly, and in short,

simple sentences,

using simple words. Speakers may use full forms

instead of contractions, put the topics at the beginning of utterances

(The movie? Are you going?), and use lots of comprehension checks (Do you understand?) and choice questions (Will you go or not go?). While

CDS is mostly grammatical, foreigner talk is sometimes not. For example, I’ve observed Westerners dropping articles when talking to Japanese speakers in English. The Japanese language does not have arti-

cles, and Japanese learners of English tend to have a difficult time acquiring them. Perhaps this ungrammatical input is a result of accommodation, the meeting in the middle that we do when in conversation (Giles & Powesland, 1975). It’s also been thought that ungrammatical input is probably most often used in speech when

the speaker is

addressing someone of (perceived) lower status, (perceived) lower proficiency, or when the speaker's experience with non-native speakers has

been only with low-proficiency

learners.

(See Gass,

1997

for an

overview of research on FI.) Native speakers engaging with non-native speakers may not only simplify their speech. They have the option of elaborating (repeating and paraphrasing)

their message

(Ehrlich, Avery, & Yorio,

Which is better for comprehension?

1989).

Long and Ross (1993) surveyed

sixteen studies of both listening and reading comprehension, a number of them unpublished, and found that both simplification and elab-

oration were effective. Furthermore, either type of modification

there was some

was more

evidence that

effective in helping lower-

42 —— SLA Myths proficiency students than higher. Yano, Long, and Ross (1994), in a

study of reading comprehension, found that simplification and elaboration were both effective. Elaboration was particularly helpful in con-

necting

information

in the text,

in the answering

of inference

questions.

Similarly, both simplified and elaborated input had a facilitating effect on the reading comprehension of Korean EFL students (Oh, 2001). While both simplified and elaborated input helped the comprehension of main idea and specific information questions, only elaborated input had a positive effect on questions that required inference.

Derwing (1996) asked two questions: What kind of paraphrase is effective? How does too much elaboration affect listeners? Marked paraphrase, such as the use of phrases like in other words, unmarked paraphrase (present but no attention drawn to it), and irrelevant detail

were compared to an unmodified baseline (no paraphrase). In a drawing task in which one student had to reproduce the picture of the other without seeing it, pairs of native speakers of English did best with marked paraphrase and worst with the baseline and irrelevant detail. English language learners did worst with irrelevant detail, and their

results in two of the three trials were the same for marked and unmarked paraphrase—they didn’t attend to the markers. Subjects in the third trial gave very few correct answers, so it’s difficult to draw conclusions from that study. Overall, paraphrase was reasonably effective in aiding comprehension, but irrelevant details hurt comprehension, confirming the results of Ehrlich et al. (1989) who found that “embroidery” (excessive elaboration) led to a lower rate of task success than “skeletonizing” (simplification) in an information gap task in which native speakers of English were the speakers and English learners the listeners. Overall, we can conclude that elaboration is helpful, used in the correct amount. Another form of simplified talk is Teacher Talk. Chaudron (1988) argued that teachers made adjustments to their classroom language based on communicative need, on the need to clarify information, or to elicit responses from students. Thus, he did not characterize Teacher Talk as a separate register. Nevertheless, in a review of studies, he did

3: You can acquire a language by listening or reading.

——

43

find that teachers do speak more slowly and use simplified vocabulary to beginners, more simplified compared to intermediate and advanced learners. Teachers made frequent use of pauses, which help with listening comprehension (though the teachers’ pausing may be evidence of

their thinking and modifying language on the fly more than a conscious effort to help comprehension).

Teachers, generally speaking,

also use exaggerated pronunciation and self-repetition. The third kind of simplified language is interlanguage talk, talk between learners while on task (Selinker, 1972, first coined the term

interlanguage to describe the language that learners use that is neither their first language nor exactly the second language that is their target, but that is still governed by rules and is not haphazard). Some would deny that learners can simplify language that they don’t already have control over. Nevertheless, we consider interlanguage talk here as an

important aspect of interaction. Research into interlanguage talk has sometimes focused on characterizing the moves that speakers and listeners make to ensure comprehension.

Confirmation checks are the

sorts of questions that ask, Have I understood you? (The red one?). Comprehension checks can be paraphrased as, Do you understand me?

(OK?) and are used when the speaker thinks in fact there has been a misunderstanding. Clarification requests recognize that things have gotten confused and can take many forms (I don’t understand. Let's start over). The question of interlanguage talk has been: Can it satisfactorily supply the sort of input and the sort of interaction that help acquisition? Early studies of input/interaction focused on native speaker/nonnative speaker (NS/NNS) conversational dyads, with the native language in question English and the non-native English learners. At a time when some teachers were still very wary of NNS/NNS group work, Long and Porter (1985) synthesized research that showed that students have many more opportunities to practice in groups than in teacherled classes or even in NS/NNS pairs. There was also a greater variety of language displayed in group work than in conventional classrooms, where the interaction was frequently a quick question-and-answer exchange. NNS/NNS pairs also negotiated as much or more than did

44 —— SLA Myths NS/NNS

pairs; this is assumed

to assist in language

acquisition.

Furthermore, learners were able to correct each other at a level not sig-

nificantly different than NS/NNS pairs. (Correction was low in each case; people would often rather communicate than correct each other.) NNS almost never mis-corrected each other. Other studies have sup-

ported the basic finding that learners can provide each other with adequate modified input and feedback (Porter, 1986; Pica, Lincoln-Porter, Paninos, & Linnell, 1996; Mackey, Oliver, & Leeman, 2003), though Porter (1986) suggested that NNS/NNS dyads do not always behave in pragmatically appropriate target-language ways. Her subjects expressed

opinions and disagreed in ways that would have been deemed impolite in U.S. society, for example. Surely, this is just a matter of teaching, however. In any case, not just input but also interaction became an important part of the SLA story, and the research showed that students could get lots of interaction between NNS/NNS dyads and practice using the language they were learning without fear of their language getting worse just because they were not speaking to native speakers. Those who research in the sociocultural paradigm speak very differently about the role of interaction. What is important about talk between students, they say, is the ways in which interaction changes the task itself. It's not simply a matter of input/output, but the process the learners go through together. Looking at interaction this way necessitates new research procedures. More about the effects of interaction will be discussed later (see pages 48-52), as will the sociocultural

approach (see pages 153-156). But first, we review a number of studies by Krashen and his colleagues.

Studies of Comprehensible Input-Based Approaches In studies in recent years, Krashen and his colleagues have largely operationalized “comprehensible input” as extensive reading (ER), also known as free voluntary reading. In ER, students select what they want to read, usually from a class library of graded readers (simplified texts that either retell the classics or tell an original story). Students may report on their reading through summaries or may comment on their

3: You can acquire a language by listening or reading.

——

45

selection through a diary or in a public space. Mason and Krashen (1997) report on three studies of ER done in Japan. The first study

compared a group of students retaking a university EFL course (they

had failed a similar course) to a more traditional class. The retakers followed an ER program while the other class followed the traditional curriculum of reading short selections, answering comprehension questions, working on vocabulary and grammar, and translating. The ER group read on average 30 books (up to 16,000 words each), wrote short summaries, and kept a diary. Both groups were tested at the beginning and end of the semester with a cloze test, a gapped reading with every tenth word deleted. The ER group made significantly greater gains on the test than did the traditional group. The diaries indicated that attitudes toward reading English became more positive as well. In the second study, two classes each from a junior college and a four-year university were compared, with similar results. The third experiment

focused on the language used in writing the summary and changed the work the comparison group did to include extensive use of cloze exer-

cises, the test format. Thus, there were two ER groups, one that used L2 English to write their summaries and another that used L1 Japanese. Those who wrote in L2 had significantly better gains on the cloze test than the comparison group. Those who wrote in L1 numerically outgained the comparison group, but the differences were not significant,

meaning we cannot say with a high degree of confidence that there were any real differences between the groups. The third study also included a reading comprehension test based on a graded reader, on which both ER groups did significantly better than the comparison group, but not significantly different from each other. On the basis of the three studies, Mason and Krashen (1997) argue for the superiority of ER over traditional approaches, theoretically based on ER’s status as comprehensible input. To our minds, while extensive reading is useful,

results showing that it is better than fairly unmotivating instruction do not warrant sweeping conclusions.

More reading leads to reading improvement. But what about other aspects of SLA? Lao and Krashen (2000) compared Hong Kong university classes using ER to traditional classes in academic skills develop-

46 ——

SLA Myths

ment (oral skills, reading, writing, note-taking). The ER classes read popular literature written for L1 English audiences.

Class time was

spent discussing the books, watching film adaptations of them, and reinforcing the idea that the students should be reading for pleasure, not looking up words in the dictionary or otherwise studying. Pre-tests

and post-tests of vocabulary and reading speed were given, and the ER

group made significantly greater gains in both vocabulary development and reading rate. Three groups of intermediate university Spanish learners were compared in Rodrigo, Krashen, and Gribbons (2004): a traditional grammar and composition class, a reading class, and a reading-discussion class that combined reading with debates and discussions. The second and third groups were characterized as Cl-based in that there was no direct teaching of grammar, including no error correction. The reading

class combined assigned readings (the same readings as the readingdiscussion class) and free reading. The CI reading and reading-discus-

sion classes did better than the traditional class on both a vocabulary test and a grammar test. On the cloze test, there were no significant differences among the groups. These studies seem to indicate that for

reading, comprehensible input can improve vocabulary and grammar as well as reading ability, but of course it says nothing about productive ability in writing or speaking.

While much

of Krashen’s argument has centered on extensive

reading as effective input, the Natural Approach (Krashen & Terrell,

1983) puts listening at the center of the syllabus. The assumption is that with enough listening input, learners will eventually be able to speak. Krashen argues that linguistic competence is unitary. That is, once language is acquired, that knowledge is used for both compre-

hension and production. That's why listening alone is sufficient. But is that true? We will look at three studies that have investigated the comparative

effects

of listening

input practice

and

production

(speaking) practice and come to the conclusion that listening practice improves listening and speaking practice improves speaking, but the effects are largely separate.

3: You can acquire a language by listening or reading.

——

47

DeKeyser (1997) tested skill specificity. DeKeyser taught volunteers an artificial language, one he constructed for purposes of the experiment. Different rules were taught by different means, through comprehension

or production practice. DeKeyser showed

that the learners

improved significantly only in the skill they practiced. When they had to use rules in comprehension that they had only practiced in produc-

tion, for example, their accuracy decreased and their reaction times increased (they answered more slowly). DeKeyser and Solkalski (1996) saw complex interaction between linguistic structures that they taught, types of practice (production/ comprehension),

and reaction times, but on the whole found that,

basically, comprehension and production skills are learned separately.

You might ask yourself why such a commonsense notion needs to be confirmed by a research study, but remember, Krashen’s influential hypothesis claimed that the production skill of speaking could be developed

through

comprehension

alone, so it was

necessary

to

research this view.

De Jong (2005) was a study of the acquisition by L1 Dutch students of Spanish noun-adjective agreement. Two groups received training in the target structure; one group received receptive training and

the other both receptive and productive training. A third group did receptive and productive tasks that did not include the target structure

and read an explanation of the agreement rule just before taking the post tests, so essentially it was a control group. This was a lab study in which learners had no previous knowledge of Spanish. The receptive training consisted of hearing words, and then sentences, while viewing pictures. The receptive/production training consisted oflistening (judg-

ing a response correct or not based on a picture) and speaking (describing a picture of a word or sentence). There were differences in the results based on the types of adjectives and types of sentences, but, basically, the receptive training led to learners being able to answer quickly and accurately in comprehension tests. However, the receptive group made a relatively large number of production errors. The receptive/production training group was slower to respond on the comprehension tests, but performed well in terms of

48 ——

SLA Myths

accuracy on the production tests. Like the previous two studies, this one was short—in this case four 90-minute sessions—and

well controlled, so connection to the classroom

relatively

can be debated.

However, all three can be taken as evidence that comprehension activi-

ties do not necessarily transfer to speaking.

So, we need to take Krashen’s claim that input is the driving force of acquisition with more than a grain of salt. Krashen also claims that acquisition and learning are separate and learning does not become acquisition. He says that traditional instruction does not work or works only to build the Monitor. However, there

is substantial counter-evidence that traditional instruction does indeed work. In Myth 5, we will look closely at the evidence compiled by Norris and Ortega (2000), who reported that focused instruction of language forms results in large gains in language development, and the gains remain. Teaching, especially explicit teaching, of grammar has a positive effect on acquisition. Krashen (2003) dismisses Norris and Ortega’s results as a vindication of the Monitor Hypothesis. As we will see, the studies reviewed typically tested learners on a focused task involving a particular grammar point. What is being measured is Monitor use, says Krashen. If the task involved free communication, the results would be different, but any test, he says, ultimately involves Monitor use. This would seem to render Krashen’s theory, well, untestable.

Interaction Studies While Krashen said that comprehensible input was necessary for acqui-

sition, Long's Interaction Hypothesis (1996) said that the negotiation of meaning between interlocutors (NS/NNS) would potentially make

the input comprehensible. Furthermore, interaction “connects input, internal learner capacities, particularly selective attention, and output

in productive ways” (Long, 1996, 451-452). That is, not only does interaction make input comprehensible, it has added value. Notice in

the following how studies compare comprehensible input with interaction, and find that interaction is as good or better than input alone.

3: You can acquire a language by listening or reading.

Two

——

49

meta-analyses have reviewed the effects of interaction on

acquisition. Keck et al. (2006), in a meta-analysis of 14 studies, found a large effect size (d=.92) for interaction vs. no interaction in speaking

tasks. What does that mean? It means that tasks in which students interacted with each other led to gains in language learning. Jigsaw and information gap tasks, in which partners held different information, were particularly effective for language learning, as was task-essentialness. Task essentialness means the learners are forced to use the structure the teacher wants them to use, as opposed to just saying yes or the other one when interacting. Of course, in the real world, this type of minimal answer is exactly what we do, so task essentialness is notoriously difficult to build into materials. (You'll find more about effect sizes in Myth 5.) Mackey and Goo (2007) included the studies in Keck et al. and added more, for a total of 28 studies. In Mackey and Goo’s meta-analysis, interaction had a large effect (M=.75, SD=.78) on the immediate post-tests of acquisition of vocabulary and grammar. Development in

vocabulary was greater than that in grammar in immediate post-tests, while effects for grammar, measured by delayed post-tests, tended to be

greater in the weeks after the interaction. At this point, whether these results always hold, whether there might be some delayed effects for interaction, is unclear. A number of studies have investigated the relative effects of input and interaction on SLA. Loschky (1994) is a study of the acquisition of Japanese as a foreign language by university students,

mostly L1

English speakers. The targets for acquisition were 34 concrete nouns

and the grammar of locative sentences (for example, The station is this side of the park). Listeners had to identify which object was being described in spoken sentences. There were three conditions.

In the

baseline condition, sentences were read once at normal speed. In the pre-modified input condition, redundant or clarifying sentences were

added to the baseline sentences, and the reader was allowed to slow down the speech rate. In the interaction condition, negotiation of meaning was allowed; that is, the listener could ask questions and check understanding.

50 —— SLA Myths Interaction led to more comprehension than no interaction; however, pre-modified, elaborated input was not seen to facilitate compre-

hension. Furthermore, those who comprehended more did not acquire more of the target words or structures. Loschky (1994) concludes that negotiation improves moment-by-moment

comprehension

and was

especially effective on the most difficult task, but there is no necessary relationship between levels of comprehension and subsequent acquisition. What is understood does not necessarily become intake available for acquisition. There were better results for acquisition in R. Ellis, Tanaka, and

Yamazaki (1994). They affirmed that interaction led to better comprehension than pre-modified input, but they also found that the groups that interacted acquired more vocabulary, at least in the short term (there were delayed post-tests whose results are less clear). An interesting aspect of their research is the finding that learners who actively negotiated comprehended no better than those who simply overheard the negotiation of others. This would seem to give hope to those teachers who want to do whole-class information gap activities (and is some evidence for input over interaction). However, Mackey (1999) reported that only active participants in interaction saw gains in question devel-

opment in English.

He and Ellis (1999) suggest, however, in a direct comparison of teacher-fronted and pair activities, that pair work might hold interest for students. They compared pre-modified input, interaction, and negotiated output. The task was to place furniture in an apartment. A completed picture had to be reproduced by writing the number of the item in the appropriate place. In the pre-modified input condition, the

teacher slowly read a set of instructions that included the definition of

each item as well as its location. In the interaction condition, the teacher read instructions minus the definitions (Here is a cushion. Would you please put the cushion on the sofa?) and students could negotiate the meaning of the word (What's a cushion?) as well as the placement of the item (p. 121). The output condition was an activity in which students wrote their own directions for pair work; they could also negotiate.

3: You can acquire a language by listening or reading.

——

51

The output group was most accurate in understanding the directions, scoring significantly higher than the other two groups, which had no significant difference between their scores. That is, comprehen-

sion was best in the condition in which students negotiated meaning together. This output group was also best at acquisition, in remembering the words for the items, and best on a test that required producing

the words. Results of a study by de la Fuente (2002) also showed that giving learners a chance to produce output, in this case taking the role of the describer in a pair work task involving placement of items in a room, had a positive effect on retention of vocabulary.

Pica (1994) noted that negotiation seems to be effective on vocabA study that looks at this idea is McDonough and Mackey (2000). While these researchers did find that almost half of the negotiation centered on lexical items, another 28 percent of negotiations were about morphosyntax. Their study looked at the use in pair work of Thai noun classifiers, which are obligatory; they follow the noun and a number to tell what sort of noun is being enumerated. McDonough and Mackey looked at both the interaction and output generated by the learners. Of the 22 episodes that involved noun classifiers, 18 of the interactions produced a correct form of the classifier. The listener was either able to supply the word when the speaker paused, or the negotiation over the incorrect form led to correction. Of course, there are sometimes problems with interactions, and McDonough and Mackey found them in this study. Some pairs simply avoided classifiers when they were unsure of which to use, and they reinforced each other in this behavior. Occasionally, a partner would suggest an incorrect form. The researchers suggest that teacher monitoring of pair work would alleviate these problems much of the time. I would also suggest that in a classroom it would be appropriate to have the target structures available on the board while the task is being done, so that pairs have a ready reference. In Garcia and Ascencion (2001) an experimental group of beginning Spanish learners was allowed to interact in small groups while the control group worked individually on a listening activity. Before listenulary but less on morphology.

52 —— SLA Myths ing, students were given three hours of instruction on target grammar

useful in comprehending the passage. After listening to a short lecture, the experimental group shared their notes while the control group studied their own notes. Everyone then reconstructed the text of the lecture from their notes, and took an open-note listening comprehension test. The reconstruction was scored on grammatical accuracy of the target forms. The two groups scored similarly on the text recon-

struction, but the experimental interaction group did significantly better on the listening comprehension test. What made the interaction useful for the listening test? It seems that the degree of interaction itself had an effect. The three groups that most actively collaborated (based on an analysis of their discourse) had the highest listening test mean

scores. The issue of adding output to interaction was raised by many of the previous studies. Next, output is discussed and we will see that giving learners an opportunity to produce output can lead to acquisition.

Output Before we consider Swain’s (1985) Output Hypothesis, let’s look at the context out of which it arose. Immersion education began in Canada

in the mid-1960s. In that case, the goal was to make English-speaking Canadian children fluent in French by teaching all classes in all subjects in the second language. Over the years, immersion programs have expanded and there is now early immersion (children begin L2 in kindergarten or first grade) and late immersion (at ages 12 to 14). By the 1980s, evaluators of immersion programs began to see that while comprehension skills of students were on a par with native French speakers by the end of schooling, the students’ productive (writing and speaking) skills, particularly with respect to grammar,

rather far from native-like (Swain,

were

1985; Allen et al., 1990; Swain,

1991). Why might that be the case? After all, learners received massive amounts of comprehensible input. Subsequent classroom observations

found a limited set of language forms and functions used. Verbs tended to be limited to the present tense or imperative forms. The variety of

3: You can acquire a language by listening or reading.

——

53

verbs used was actually quite limited, as well. The tone of the classroom led to the use of an informal register that didn’t reflect the diversity of forms in everyday language use. Furthermore,

students had

limited opportunities to produce language, and the language they did produce consisted of one- or two-word responses to the teacher. Errors

were not corrected (Allen et al., 1990; Swain, 1991). At some level, perhaps this is not surprising. The teacher's responsibility was to teach content, not language; the language was to emerge from the natural interaction of the classroom, which one could argue turned out not to

be very natural at all. Swain

(1985,

1991,

1995, 2000, 2005) formulated

the Output

Hypothesis, partially based on the results of these classroom observations. She said that what was missing from immersion was comprehensible output, or pushed output. Students need an opportunity to

produce language and to examine the language they produce. Input itself was not sufficient. As we have noted, it is possible to comprehend

a message by making use of a few words, some non-linguistic cues, and the context. When we actually have to produce an utterance, we are

often forced to consider what we know and don’t know about the language. That in turn sometimes leads to a new hypothesis about the language (Faerch & Kasper, 1986; White, 1987). Swain (2005) said that output has four functions: production (practice that enhances fluency); noticing; hypothesis testing (the learner

thinks the language works a certain way and produces an utterance to test her hypothesis); and a metalinguistic or reflective function (fre-

quently seen when students get a chance to observe their production). Swain and Lapkin (1995) show that adolescent learners indeed can make use of output in practice. When learners encountered difficulties in a writing and editing task, working together they were able to generate alternatives (corrections, rephrasings, etc.) based on their knowledge, and to assess those alternatives. They were able to apply

their L1 resources to L2 contexts, to extend their L2 knowledge to new L2 contexts, and to formulate and test new hypotheses about the target language.

54 —— SLA Myths But does output actually lead to acquisition? A series of studies

reported in Swain (1998) suggests that learners who found the correct solution when discussing a grammatical structure’s accuracy (for example, reconstructing from their notes a text they had heard collaboratively) in fact performed well on a test assessing that structure. On the other hand, if they came to the wrong conclusion, they were likely to answer that test item incorrectly. This suggests that teachers need to monitor group work carefully if accuracy is the goal. Nobuyoshi and R. Ellis (1993) studied six adult learners, three in the experimental condition and three in the control condition. In the experimental condition, they worked with their teacher on a picture description task in which the student described a past event. For each poorly formed example of the past tense, the teacher asked for clarification (Sorry? Uh?). In the control condition, the teacher asked for clarification only in cases of lack of comprehension, and never for the past tense. Two of the three learners not only corrected 44 percent and 64 percent of their mistakes, but a week later on a similar task, they displayed a high degree of accuracy on the past tense, without being prompted. The third student apparently was not concerned with accu-

racy. This small study, along with Swain’s review, and subsequent work by others (e.g., Bitchener, 2004), suggests that pushing students to supply better output leads to acquisition, though much research remains to be done. There are many more studies on this topic, and output will

be discussed again in Myth 4.

The conclusion is that input alone does not lead to language acquisition. We saw that when comprehensible input was compared to interaction, interaction often led to superior results. We also saw that interaction

is not the whole

story. Students

improve when

pushed to give better output (by their partners or by the teacher), and there is evidence that the corrections they make can be retained and be available for acquisition.

3: You can acquire a language by listening or reading. ——

55

TABLE 2: Input, Interaction, and Output Incomprehensible input is needed. When people do not understand, they may re-analyze their assumptions about the language.

Faerch & Kasper (1986); White (1987)

Practice in input and production tasks leads | DeKeyser & Solkalski (1996); DeKeyser to different skills.

(1997); De Jong (2005)

Traditional instruction leads to acquisition.

Norris & Ortega (2000)

Interaction leads to acquisition.

Keck et al. (2006); Mackey & Goo (2007)

Interaction is more effective than

Loschky (1994); Ellis, Tanaka, & Yamazaki,

comprehensible input at facilitating comprehension.

(1994)

Student to student interaction plus output is |Nobuyoshi & Ellis (1993); Swain & Lapkin effective.

(1995); He & Ellis (1999); McDonough &

Mackey (2000); Garcia & Ascension (2001); de la Fuente (2002) Canadian bilingual education led to

Swain (1985, 1991); Allen et al. (1990)

proficiency in comprehension but not in production.

What Can We Do? Input, interaction, and output all have their place in the classroom.

Here, we discuss two classroom issues: making input comprehensible and constructing good speaking tasks.

1. To make input comprehensible, always do a

pre-listening or pre-reading task. Here is an effective sequence of pre-tasks for both listening and reading:

e What's the topic? Write three things that you know about the topic. e If there is a word list before the listening/reading passage, check the words you know. Find out the

meanings of the words you don’t know.

56 ——

SLA Myths

e What is your purpose? Are you looking for the main idea or specific details, or are you being asked to infer meaning? e Look at the instructions. How can they help you?

What's the situation of the listening? Where is the reading from? e Look at any choices you have for answers. e Ask yourself: What do I know? What will I focus on as I read/listen? e After reading/listening, ask yourself: What difficulties did I have? What can I do better next time?

2. Use effective interaction activities. Here is a distillation of some research on what makes an effective inter-

action activity.

¢ One-way vs. two-way tasks: Two-way tasks lead to more negotiation of meaning. An example of a one-way task is one in which one partner tells the other how to draw

a picture. An example of a two-way task is an information gap. In a two-way task, each partner holds a different portion of information, which must be exchanged and manipulated to reach the task outcome. e Closed vs. open tasks (convergent/divergent): Closed tasks have only one acceptable outcome and partners

are forced to come to a conclusion. Closed tasks feature more topic and language “recycling,” more feedback, and more precision. In other words, giving students topics such as “Discuss how you celebrate the New Year holiday in your culture” will often lead to less actual language use than a task such as “Find three differences in how you and your partner celebrate the

3: You can acquire a language by listening or reading.

——

57

New Year in your own family.” The first task is open and does not require students to come to any one specific outcome.

¢ Sometimes a more advanced student can scaffold a less proficient student effectively so it can be productive to put learners of different proficiency levels together in pair or group work.

e Pre-task planning is effective in improving fluency and complexity of language. Results for accuracy are mixed.

Give students a few minutes (two or three might be enough) to think about what they are going to do

before beginning the task. e Repetition of the task with a different partner or partners can be effective. Just because we get bored as teachers doesn’t mean that learners do. The key is mixing partners, however.

e¢ Consider the cognitive and task demands. Is the task appropriate for your learners in terms of what it asks them to do? (Repetition may help here to simplify an initially demanding task.)

3. Monitor pair work and group work. This should be obvious, and I hope I’m not insulting anyone, but I’ve seen teachers zone out when the class is working. Studies show that

students benefit from getting it right when they are producing output. Intervene when

students are off track. Collect common

relevant, do a debriefing.

errors and, if

MYTH

Practice makes perfect.

In theReal World This is Steve. Remember the old joke? A tourist asks a New Yorker,

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The New Yorker answers, “Practice, practice, practice.” Practice is important, but not if we conceive of practice simply as doing a series of unfocused communicative tasks meant to exemplify

a linguistic structure, as I'm afraid sometimes happens. Just engaging in communicative practice is not enough. As Lightbown (2000, 443) put it, “Research evidence shows that communicative practice in the classroom, as valuable as it is, is not sufficient to lead learners to a high degree of fluency and accuracy in all aspects of second language production.” In cognitive psychology, the classic account is that practice helps declarative knowledge (knowledge of rules, for example) become procedural knowledge (knowledge of how to do a specific thing). When I taught at the University of Pittsburgh, our office doors had combination locks instead of keys. The ELI administrative staff's offices also held libraries of textbooks and reference materials, so sometimes someone would need to get into an office. The person would ask for the combination, and you could never remember it. The best you 58

4: Practice makes perfect. ——

59

could do was to perform the actions of pressing the relative locations of the three letters or pairs of letters on your palm while the other person watched. When

you first got your office, you had declarative

knowledge of your combination: A, J, B, D; then you proceduralized

your knowledge and didn’t need the “rule” any longer. So too with language. We think of verb endings, and then we use them with less effort, and, if we get really good, our knowledge is automatized. It is practice that drives this process. This is a simplified view of a complex topic that is beginning to attract even more attention, but my point is that

few would deny that practice is a key part in learning a language. There have, of course,

been

disagreements

over what

constitutes

good practice. When I was in high school, practice consisted of drilling structures and memorizing dialogues. We don’t do that much anymore. What I want to look at in this chapter is practice that is focused, what is often called Focus on Form, though I don’t want to enter the debates around the definition of that concept here. What we will look at are

activities that focus on linguistic forms while also attending to meaning. Ortega (2007) argues that for L2 practice to be effective, it should be interactive, meaningful, and focused on task-essential forms. This chapter is about the third of those requirements, looking at research on whether drawing learners’ attention to forms will help them progress in their development of a particular grammatical form. We will first

look at the concept of attention since it is foundational to understand-

ing the goal of the research and then look at five ways that researchers have tried to call learners’ attention to particular language forms in the classroom: input enhancement, processing instruction, planning, repe-

tition, and output. Each section will consider research on whether each

technique, all of which provide practice with using a second language, results in improvement in particular language forms. Recasts fit into this general topic, but correction is discussed in Myth 6. The five uses of attention differ in how they draw the learner's attention to form. Input enhancement and processing instruction are input-based and use a variety of techniques to draw the attention of the student to the existence of the form in the input. Planning activities can draw attention to specific forms before students do a task or can lead to a more sponta-

60 —— SLA Myths neous focus on forms by the students as they plan. Because they have thought about what they will say before doing the task, students have more cognitive resources when they do the task itself. Repetition also allows for a spontaneous focus on forms; as learners realize the gaps in

their performance on the first try, they may attend to those forms more carefully the second and third times they do the same task. Output also shows students the gaps in their knowledge.

‘What the Research Says Attention Richard Schmidt kept a diary of his acquisition of Portuguese during a semester-long stay in Brazil (Schmidt & Frota, 1986). He did not have time to study Portuguese before moving to Brazil, though he had studied other languages and was a professor of linguistics. Schmidt at first had a difficult time scheduling a Portuguese class, but after three weeks,

he was able both to take a class and start to interact socially with Brazilians. The combination lasted five weeks. For the last 14 weeks of his stay, he stopped taking classes and just interacted with a group of friends in Portuguese. Schmidt's teachers explicitly taught grammar and drilled the students extensively, yet he did not learn all that was taught. He had extensive interaction with native Portuguese speakers, who answered

his questions and sometimes even corrected him. Despite forms being in the input, he did not acquire them (for example, articles are quite frequent, but Schmidt routinely dropped them in his own speech).

However, when he was taught the form, then heard it used and made

links, or when he heard a form used enough to notice it, he usually subsequently acquired it.

Out of his experiences, Schmidt concluded that “a second language learner will begin to acquire the target-like form if and only if it is present in comprehended input and ‘noticed’ in the normal sense of the

4: Practice makes perfect.

——

61

word, that is, consciously” (Schmidt & Frota, 1986, 311). Since then, noticing has become an important topic in SLA, part of a larger cluster

of concerns with attention and awareness, and something that underlies all of the methods considered in this chapter.

The information-processing approach uses “attention” in several senses

(Robinson,

2003). Listeners attend to speech and readers to

print; they select information in the environment

of speech or text.

Attentional resources help us to focus when thinking. We “pay attention” to our task. We try to sustain our attention to a task like reading a

textbook. Input becomes intake and learning occurs, according to Schmidt, when we pay attention to input and have the subjective experience of

“noticing” it (Schmidt,

1983,

1995, 2001). Psychologists agree that

attention is basic to learning. We must attend to something in order for it to reach our long-term memory. Otherwise, the stimuli stay in shortterm memory for a few seconds and then disappear. What is noticed is not what Schmidt calls “the raw data of the input (the phonetic stream

of speech).” Input is interpreted through what we already know, the representations stored in our long-term memory. People notice exam-

ples of the linguistic system,

“but not the principles of the system

itself.” Noticing is thus “the first step in language building, not the end of the process.” (Schmidt, 2001, 31). How conscious does noticing have to be? How aware does the learner have to be? Robinson (1995, 296) says that attention exists on a continuum. He defines noticing as “detection plus rehearsal in short-

term memory.” Leow (1997) tested if awareness indeed contributes to learning. Beginning U.S. university students of Spanish completed a crossword

puzzle with examples of stem-changing verbs (irregular verbs that change vowels in the stem in third person, simple past). They did so while thinking aloud. The crossword’s intersecting clues made for conflicts. To be successful at completion, the students would have to realize that the verbs were irregular and change their spelling (this is also an example of a task where correct use of the verb form was task-essential). The students then took tests to see if they had learned the correct

62 —— SLA Myths forms while doing the puzzle. Leow looked at the transcripts of the

recorded completion of the crosswords and discovered that learners who approached the task with meta-awareness were much more accurate on the test. Meta-awareness occurred when the learners developed hypotheses

while doing the task (Oh, maybe the stems change) and/or

figured outike rule. Students who did not approach the task this way were

less successful

at learning.

Leow’s

findings give support

to

Schmidt's noticing hypothesis, as did Leow’s (2000) replication of this study.

Input Enhancement How do we get students to notice? The first way we will consider of

drawing attention to forms is called input enhancement.

Perhaps if

learners’ attention is directed to a certain form in the input, they will spontaneously develop the focus on that form that teachers would like them to. Teachers have experimented with forms of written input enhancement—typographical cues like bolding, underlining, and font changes.

In Leow (2001), first-year students of Spanish were exposed to the formal imperative through a short text on how to live a happy life. The

verbs were underlined and the verb endings, which mark the form, were bolded. Students thought aloud. “Noticing” was counted when

students translated, marked, or referred to the verbs. Simply reading the sentence aloud did not count as noticing. The group that received

the enhanced text did not notice more than the group that received the unenhanced

text. Overall, only about 60 percent of the forms were

noticed (though it's difficult to know just what is really noticed). Both

groups showed a significant correlation between noticing and recognizing the form on a later test. There were no differences in comprehension between the two groups. Leow says that enhancement in reading

may not be effective because students use a variety of strategies to read, including in this case translation. Problem-solving tasks like the crossword puzzle might make better use of noticing because they involve learners in specific steps, not holistically, as reading does. So, we can

4: Practice makes perfect. ——

63

take away at least two things from this study. Noticing leads to learning. Input enhancement in reading may not be the most effective way to draw attention to forms. Similar results were found in Leow, Egi, Nuevo, and Tsai (2003). The students who read the enhanced text did not notice more than the students who read the unenhanced text. In this case, 55 percent of the targeted forms, the present perfect or present subjunctive in Spanish, were noticed. The present perfect form was noticed more, probably because it is formed with two words (much like the English have lived) while the subjunctive simply has a verb ending. There was also no effect on comprehension for enhancement. There was a significant relationship between what was noticed and later recognition of the forms. Thus, the research ties noticing to learning, but students in nonenhanced conditions also seem to be able to notice. Better results for enhancement were found in Lee (2007). Lee exposed the subjects to a longer training session than most of the previous studies but also admits that the subjects had been exposed numerous times to the structure (the English passive voice) in school. Lee shows that those in the textual enhancement condition outperformed the non-enhancement group on a grammar test. However, disturbingly, the enhancement group recalled significantly fewer ideas from those texts, suggesting that their comprehension was affected by the enhancement; they chose form over meaning. This, incidentally, has been found in other studies. Lee and Huang (2008) found a small negative effect (d=-0.22) on reading comprehension when input enhancement was used to teach grammar. In a study of vocabulary acquisition comparing the effects of various combinations of glossing (defining in the margins) a word’s meaning, asking for a translation, and bolding, Rott (2007) found that once learners saw the word glossed, multiple boldings of the same word had a positive effect on comprehension, but multiple enhancements had no effect on learners’ ability to produce the words. Overall, in fact,

enhancement was the least effective of the methods. Ellis and Sagarra (2010) talk about “learned attention.” Learned attention may be a reason that L2 acquisition is difficult for adults. We

64 —— SLA Myths learn to pay attention to cues in L1, and, at least initially, transfer those cues to L2. For example, Ellis and Sagarra point out that we know that

time words like yesterday are available in other languages and our reliance on their availability may block acquisition of past-tense verb

morphology. This depends partially on our native language; if we have a language rich in morphology, we may be better able to focus on verb

endings, because we are in this case using an L1 cue. Ellis and Sagarra show that pedagogical

interventions,

including input enhancement,

that draw the learner's attention to forms help learners overcome their L1 processing style.

VanPatten (2007), using different theoretical assumptions, comes to similar conclusions.

Processing Instruction The second method of calling attention to particular grammar forms that we will look at is called processing instruction (PI). PI is a pedagogical method that is backed by VanPatten’s (2007) theory of Input Processing. Here’s VanPatten’s argument. Comprehension is necessary

for acquisition; acquisition depends on learners making connections between forms and meaning. When we try to comprehend a foreign

language, we may use our L1 processing strategies. We may assign syntactic roles based on the way our L1 is put together. That is, we may try

to figure out who is doing what to whom based on our processing of our first language. Comprehension, especially at first, is difficult in L2 because our processing capacity is limited and, because we are process-

ing according to our L1, inefficiently. An effective strategy for learners

who find themselves trying to understand a second language is to catch the content words first and ignore the function words and inflections/grammatical endings. Often, the information in a sentence is redundant (the s on three girls, for example), but other times grammatical markers do need to be processed. For example, the -ing in The baby is sleeping tells us that the state is ongoing. At bottom, when we attempt

comprehension, we are focused on what is meaningful in the sentence. Thus, learners need to have their attention directed to forms.

4: Practice makes perfect.

——

65

At this point, VanPatten (2007, 122) has posited a number of processing strategies (such as seeing the first noun in the sentence as the subject) but says that it is unclear whether certain processing strategies are universal or whether transfer is in play. For example, L1 English

speakers learning Spanish have a difficult time with the structure A Juan lo detesta Maria (Maria hates Juan), thinking that it is Juan who hates Maria (because Juan is the first noun, English speakers think Juan

is the subject of the sentence). Would

Italians, who have a similar

structure, have less trouble? Of course, the real world also intervenes in processing. A student hearing The dog was petted by the girl would likely

not think that the dog was doing the petting, because that’s not the way of the world. Input processing, according to VanPatten (2007), is not a theory of acquisition. It is not the same thing as processing instruction, but it

informs it. PI is a type of focus on form or input enhancement that pushes

learners

away

from

“nonoptimal

processing

strategies”

(VanPatten, 2002, 764). In PI, learners are given information about a form; they are informed about a processing strategy that might have an

adverse effect on their comprehension

or acquisition; then they are

pushed to process in a certain way by doing activities that focus on the

target form. Others question whether PI works beyond the limited number of structures and languages it has been used for. VanPatten counters that the number of structures and languages is indeed adequate to support

PI. From a theoretical level, researchers criticize VanPatten’s model of attention (he sees it as limited; others see attention as being less limited, perhaps unlimited) and his model of processing (what gets processed, when). (For the debate, see DeKeyser, Salaberry, Robinson, and Harrington, 2002, and Van Patten’s response, 2002.) VanPatten’s research has often taken the form of comparing PI to “traditional” instruction. The study that is most often cited as the example is VanPatten and Cadierno (1993). This was a study of second-year university learners of Spanish in the United States. A PI group was compared to traditional instruction (TI), which was traditional grammar teaching plus a series of exercises, from drills through com-

66 —— SLA Myths municative practice. The target grammar was object pronouns (A Juan

lo detesta Maria). Students in the PI condition listened to or read sentences. They responded by checking yes or no, agree or disagree, but did not produce any sentences. The PI group outperformed the TI group and the control group on a comprehension test and was as good as the TI group on a production test. (DeKeyser & Solkalski, 1996, discussed in Myth 3, is a replication and critique of this study.) Since both PI and TI groups received explicit instruction on the form, it was unclear if the input processing or the explanation given helped more. VanPatten and Oikkenon (1996) looked at this issue. One group of high school learners got explicit information about the target structure, another got PI only, without the explanation, and a third got both PI and explanation. In the comprehension test, both PI groups did better than the explanation group. In the production test, the group that received both did

better than the explanation group. This led VanPatten and Oikkenon to conclude that it was the structured input that was effective. Things are not completely clear, however, as the structured input group got yes/no feedback on the correctness of their responses, a form of additional instruction, and the explanation group got no practice at all (DeKeyser, Salaberry, Robinson, Harrington, 2002). The effectiveness of input enhancement in general has still to be conclusively proven. Han, Park, and Combs (2008) provide a useful overview of research. Two particularly interesting suggestions are that the effectiveness of IE may depend on prior learner knowledge of the

form and whether the form is meaningful. Lee and Huang (2008) performed a meta-analysis of IE effects on grammar learning. They found a very small effect size for IE (d=0.22), but noted that the comparison groups often received significant amounts of input, which in itself is good for learning. In comparing two good methods, we in essence diminish the strength of each.

4: Practice makes perfect.

——

67

Planning The third way of drawing students’ attention to forms is through giving students time to plan what they will say. R. Ellis in his (2005a) review of planning research, says we can distinguish two kinds of planning— pre-task planning and within-task planning. Pre-task planning includes

rehearsal (which is doing a task before presenting it to the class, for example, or repeating a task) and strategic planning (discussing the task at a more metalinguistic level, thinking about how you are going

to do the task). Planning is thought to make tasks easier to do in that attentional resources are freed up by the planning, and the students do not have as much on their plates when they do the task itself. A largely unspoken assumption is that planning leads to noticing, and noticing facilitates learning, though the research thus far has looked only at short-term gains in accuracy, fluency, and complexity of language. The effects of planning have been measured in a number of ways. Table 3 provides some of the measurements. TABLE 3: Target Measures in Planning Research accuracy

Often measured as percentage of error-free clauses, or number or ratio of correct forms

fluency

Often measured by absence of pauses or absence of silence, lack of repetition of single words or phrases/false starts, syllables per minute

complexity

Often measured by presence of subordinate clauses or other difficult grammar; sometimes measured by lexical or syntactic variety

Let’s view two studies of pre-task planning in some depth. Skehan

and Foster (1997) looked at three kinds of tasks, two planning conditions, and two post-task conditions. Their three task types were a personal information exchange, a narrative task, and a decision task. The personal information exchange asked students to tell their partners what surprised them about living in the U.K. The narrative was a cartoon description task. The decision was based on giving advice. The two planning conditions were “no planning” and “ten minutes to plan.” The final condition was plus or minus knowledge of a post-task; those in the post-task condition were told they would have to repeat

68 —— SLA Myths the task in front of the class. Planning was found to increase fluency,

accuracy (for the personal and narrative tasks) and complexity (for the

personal and decision tasks). The clearest results were for fluency. Knowledge that there would be a post-task largely didn’t influence fluency or complexity, and neither did it unambiguously help accuracy. Task type did make a difference. Planning was very effective in increasing the complexity of language in the decision task. In the narrative and personal exchange tasks, planning was very effective in

increasing accuracy. There’s a potential trade-off between accuracy and complexity; as students attempt more complex language, they may not have control over it. However, there is a disagreement as to whether

trade-offs are inevitable. Foster and Skehan (1999) addressed the source of planning. Intermediate-level

college students engaged

in a debate over who

would be thrown overboard to save the rest as a punctured hot air bal-

loon descended to earth. The conditions were focus of planning (language and content) and source of planning (teacher-led or group-led). There were also control no-planning and solo planning conditions. In the first condition, the group was taught modals and conditionals by the teacher. In the second condition, they worked as a group without the teacher to brainstorm ideas and check their own language for accuracy. In the third condition, the teacher led a discussion of the content of the task. In the fourth condition, the group did the planning. Both teacher-led conditions produced a reasonably balanced performance; they had the highest levels of accuracy, along with reasonable complexity and fluency. The solo planning group also did well, producing complex and fluent language. Group planning did not fare well; the language of the members of those groups was less fluent, less accurate, and not very complex.

How much planning is needed? Crookes (1989) found that giving students ten minutes to plan a monologue resulted in significantly more

complex language (as measured

by- words per utterance and

number of subordinate clauses) than that of a group that did no planning. The planned condition also produced a significantly greater number of words. Mehnert (1998) gave learners one, five, or ten min-

4: Practice makes perfect. ——

utes to plan a message to leave on another person’s phone.

69

One

minute of planning led to improved performance on fluency, lexical density, and accuracy measures, compared to no planning. Giving stu-

dents five minutes of planning time led to increased fluency and lexical density scores. Ten minutes of planning led to improvement over five minutes in fluency, lexical density, and complexity. Accuracy, in other

words, improved with one minute of planning and didn’t get better after that.

Complexity

didn’t

increase

until

planning

time

was

increased to ten minutes.

What do learners do when they plan? Ortega (1999) found that most of her subjects rehearsed the content, focusing on main ideas over details. In a study of group planning, Truong and Storch (2007)

also found that students were most concerned with content. Mochizuki and Ortega (2008) compared no planning, unguided planning, and guided planning

(which gave information

about

English relative

clauses and pointed out that they might be useful in doing the storyretelling task). Neither planning condition had an effect on complexity or fluency, but guided planning led to increased and more accurate use

of relative clauses. Ortega (2005, 106) argued that during planning time learners are able to attend to both form and meaning, and do, “simultaneously holding in long-term memory considerations regard-

ing the message to be conveyed and the essential formal resources to convey it.” In Sangarun (2005), the students in the group that was focused on both form and meaning outperformed those who were

focused on one or the other. Thus far we have looked at pre-task planning. R. Ellis and Yuan

(2005) is a study of within-task planning, which is a function of time on task. What Ellis and Yuan call “careful within-task planning” means that learners got little pre-task planning time (only 30 seconds at best), but were allowed as much time on task as necessary. Their pressured planning condition forced students to complete an oral story retelling in five minutes, with a set number of required sentences, and a written

narrative in 17 minutes. Careful within-task planning led to greater syntactic complexity and accuracy than the pressured condition for the

70 —— SLA Myths oral task, and greater complexity, lexical variety, and accuracy in the

written task. Ellis (2009) surveyed 19 studies of strategic planning and found an overall positive effect on fluency. The effects of planning on complexity were more mixed than for fluency, but positive overall. Planning had

mixed results on accuracy but generally was more effective for lowerproficiency students.

Repetition The fourth method of drawing attention to the forms in the input is through repetition. Repetition can be thought of as a special sort of planning, a form of rehearsal. A task is done multiple times. Bygate (1996) reported on a study of one learner immediately retelling the story of a cartoon after viewing it on two occasions, three days apart.

The student did not know that she would be asked to do so on either occasion. Bygate found that, on the second telling, the student improved in the range of vocabulary used, the accuracy of the lan-

guage, and in fluency. There was a decrease in the number of errors, although a small one. The student used more past tense verb endings, more transitions, and more adjectives and adverbs the second time. She was also more precise in her word choice. Bygate (2001) found strong effects for repetition (in fluency and complexity) when students repeated a task after ten weeks (though in the interim, they had practiced similar tasks, but not repeated the exact one). However, effects of repetition do not necessarily transfer to a different task. Gass, Mackey, Alvarez-Torres, and Fernandez-Garcia (1999) report on a speaking task done by students of Spanish at a U.S. university. One group watched the same video three times, then watched and described another, while another group watched three different videos, and then described the same fourth one as the repetition group. Based on a holistic assessment of the language used, the “same content” group improved more than the “different content” group. Lynch and Maclean (2000) look at a classroom activity, the “poster carousel.” Students in an English for Medical Purposes class worked in

4: Practice makes perfect.

——

71

pairs to develop a poster. One stayed at the poster to explain it while

the other rotated to ask questions of other students. Students at the poster thus explained the same basic content to a number of different partners. Lynch and Maclean present the results from the most and least advanced

students.

Both students whose

work

is presented

improved during the activity. The least advanced student, for example,

was able to change her ratio of correct to incorrect usage of subject-verb order from 3:6 to 8:2. She was fluent, producing words in the last rounds that she searched for in the first. The language of the most advanced student became more precise and more complex. She was able to refine her explanation of a statistical concept, first expanding it

to make it clearer and then contracting it to make it more precise. Lynch and Maclean (2001) analyzed three more of the students from the first study. Of the five total, all improved in phonology and vocabulary; four of the five improved in semantic precision and three of the five in syntax. Discourse, specifically framing, is another possible area of development. Bygate and Samuda duction

(2005) did a detailed analysis of the pro-

of three learners out of a larger group

and saw that all

increased in the amount and specificity of framing in their narratives as they repeated their task. That is, they moved from disjointed stories to more tightly expressed ones, with, for example, better sequence markers, better coordination,

and more

interpretations

of the characters’

actions. Probably the most basic repetition technique was developed by Maurice (1983). He called it “Fluency Workshop.” Students line up in two lines facing each other, pairing off. They have a set time (originally

four minutes) to deliver some information to their partner (what he or she is going to do this weekend, for example). One speaks, and then the other. One of the partners moves to the left. They repeat their information to a different partner, but this time have a reduced amount of time (three minutes). There is one more change of partners and the

time reduces to two minutes. Arevart and Nation (1991) tested the efficacy of the technique.

They changed it so that speakers repeated their role immediately.

72 ——

SLA Myths

Arevart and Nation note that the change in partners eliminates any pressure to add more information to keep the partner interested during repetition. They also note that the reduced time has a similar effect on limiting new information. The repetition has an effect on fluency because the speaker is familiar with both the form and content of the message. Arevart and Nation found that what they called 4/3/2 pro-

duced significant gains in fluency in their sample of learners from a variety of backgrounds. The number of words per minute increased an average of 21.5 percent from first to third delivery and the number of hesitations per 100 words decreased 22 percent. What would happen if you combined Ellis and Yuan’s careful within-task planning with task repetition? Ahmadian and Tavakoli (2010) tried to answer this question and found that the combination had no effect on accuracy, compared to careful planning without repetition, but did have a positive effect on fluency and complexity. These studies show that repetition seems useful, but there are ques-

tions. Does it simply provide a good result for a particular task, or does it lead to acquisition? More research is needed.

Output The last way of drawing language learners’ attention to form in the data considered is broad but basically involves asking learners to produce

specific types of language. This section expands on the idea of output introduced in Myth 3 and places the idea of output in the context of

noticing. Remember that Swain (2005) said that output has four functions: production; hypothesis testing; a metalinguistic or reflective function; and noticing. Noticing may occur in two ways. Learners may notice a hole in their knowledge (for example, a word they need but don’t know) or they may notice a gap between what they produce and what a more competent user of the language produces. Williams (2001) looked at attention to form that arises spontaneously during classroom activities. She analyzed language-related

episodes (LREs), discourse in which learners talk about or question

4: Practice makes perfect.

——

73

their language use, or in which teachers or other learners talk about or

ask about a learner’s problem or error. Eight students in an intensive English program, two at each of four levels, were taped in their classes twice a week for 45 minutes over

eight weeks. LREs were analyzed, and students were given tailor-made tests to assess their knowledge of the words and structures that were the basis of the LREs. Results showed that indeed LREs were linked to performance on delayed tests, suggesting acquisition. The items that got

discussed were learned. LREs had a stronger effect as proficiency increased. Who finally provided the information made a difference. At the beginning level, students did not pay much attention to their peers;

they relied on the teacher and the teacher's information was effective. This balance shifted until at the highest levels peers were supplying

more information than the teacher and the effectiveness was about the same. Learners could also figure out the answer themselves and, when they could, this was effective. Izumi (2002) compares noticing output to input enhancement. Both focus learners on target structures, but the former is internal and the latter external in origin. Izumi studied the acquisition of English relative clauses. Subjects were students enrolled in ESL programs at U.S. universities. Students read a text and took notes (Izumi’s measurement of noticing). There were four experimental groups: output and enhanced input, output and no input, input and no output, and nei-

ther output not input. The two groups that received enhanced input (one that produced output and one that didn’t) noticed more—in the

sense that they took more notes. However, the group that only had to produce output, and received no enhanced input, improved most in

their knowledge of relative clauses. They outperformed the input only group on measures of both production and comprehension.

Izumi speculates that input enhancement works at a fairly shallow level of processing (Craik & Lockhart,

1972). Output may require a

greater depth of processing, which in turn may leave a better trace in long-term memory. Input enhancement may have to be used in conjunction with other tasks. Furthermore, other studies (Izumi, Bigelow, Fujiwara, & Fearnow, 1999; Izumi & Bigelow, 2000) suggest that more

74 ——

SLA Myths

than one output session is necessary for improvement to be seen. Once

is not enough. Swain and her colleagues (e.g., Kowal & Swain, 1997) have used the dictogloss technique (Wajnryb,

1990) to encourage students to

reflect on their own output. Learners hear a short text read at normal

speed and take notes using words and phrases. They then work together to reconstruct the text from their shared resources. Finally, the

various versions are compared. Lesser (2008) used dictogloss in a study comparing output to input. Second-year students in U.S. Spanish classes listened to two passages. The output group took notes and reconstructed the texts while the input group answered questions about the passages. Learners in the output condition reported more noticing of nouns and more total words but did not particularly notice the verb forms that were the targets of the study. The output group comprehended more information as well. On writing tests, the output group decreased their mistakes and increased their attempts at using the target past-tense forms from the pre-test to the post-test. Thus, even though their notes did not show noticing of the verb forms, the fact that they increased their attempted use of the forms in their writing samples led Lesser to claim that there was some noticing of forms. Inspired by Schmidt's noticing hypothesis, teachers and researchers have tried a number of ways to get students to notice forms. All the ways have been successful to the degree that students noticed some (though by no means all) of the forms. However, some of those who were not pushed to notice did notice, suggesting that this is something that can’t be turned off. Is noticing something learners do anyway, something that we don’t need to emphasize in the classroom? I think it’s too early to say that with any certainty. Drawing attention to forms, or giving learners a chance, through

planning, repetition, or communicative activities, to develop sponta-

neous focus on a particular form, seems to have an effect on recognizing that form later. Overall, there does seem to be a connection between noticing and at least short-term learning. However, no longterm studies have been done, and even delayed post-tests are rare (see

4: Practice makes perfect.

——

75

Table 4). It seems as if this will remain an area of interest in SLA for the foreseeable future, and we look forward to clarification of a number of issues.

TABLE 4: Noticing Input enhancement

Processing instruction

Planning

Overall, those who notice can recognize the structures later. A little over half of the forms are actually noticed. Those without input enhancement also notice. There are possible task effects.

| ¢ VanPatten & Cadierno (1993): Pl more effective than traditional instruction. VanPatten & Oikkenon (1996): Structured input itself most effective part of PI Positive effects for fluency ¢ Overall, positive effects for complexity ¢ Mixed results for accuracy

¢ Possible effects for task and source of planning Repetition

Output

Effective for phonology, vocabulary, syntax, discourse ¢ Effects don’t necessarily transfer to other tasks Output effective in learning vocabulary and structures (Williams,

2001) | e More effective than control group (Izumi, 2002; Lesser, 2008)

What We Can Do 1. Put noticing in context. Many teachers use some form of Present-Practice-Produce. The target is introduced, either inductively (let students figure things out from example input) or deductively (explicitly explaining and later providing examples). There is some sort of controlled practice with the form. Finally, the students are turned loose and do a communicative activity for which the form is useful; whether the form is used or not depends on many things. Sometimes the teacher throws the students into the deep end, so to speak, and develops the presentation out of the errors made during interaction.

76 ——

SLA Myths

Ranta and Lyster (2007) argue for a sequence of awareness, practice, and feedback. In the awareness phase, attention is drawn to the target language form, and students have an opportunity to notice the gap. Practice is based on communicative drills that involve repetition of the form. Learners get feedback on their performance while per-

forming the tasks or after completion. Lyster (2004) argues that what he calls prompts work well with form-focused instruction (prompts are

explored in much more detail in Myth 6). Prompts provide feedback on the forms that students produce, and include clarification requests (Sorry?); repetitions of the error with rising intonation (He run?); metalinguistic clues (comments, information); and elicitation (direct questions or pauses like In —? following the student utterance). Let me address the issue of communicative drills. Some people say they hate drills and use only communicative activities. Mechanical drills (J go the store. She. She goes to the store. They. They go to the store.) require production of language, but allow it to be divorced from meaning, and probably should be avoided. (However, I can see some uses for them in some cases. I’m thinking of pronunciation, for example.) Communicative drills are another matter. Think of your speaking textbook’s pair work activities. Take the example of a map pair work, in which one student has to tell the other how to get to a series of places. The same basic structure (the imperative, Turn right/left) is used in each exchange. I would say that’s a communicative drill. The emphasis is on meaning, but the structure is being practiced in a narrow way.

2. Use recycling and activity frames. Don't be afraid to do an activity more than once. You may get bored, but I doubt your students will. They want to become proficient. The

key is to do communicative activities and change partners. If students are communicating, preferably about their own lives and not the lives of some fictional people in the textbook, the information will change while the language forms stay the same. Try the procedure by Maurice

(1983) (see pages 71-72).

4: Practice makes perfect.

——

77

Marc Helgesen and I have worked for a number of years on what we call activity frames. These are simply activities that can be used for a wide variety of structures. Here are two, in hopes they inspire you to

think of the things that activities have in common. CIRCLE DRILL

1. Students work in groups; ten or twelve is a good number. 2. The first person says a sentence. The second repeats and adds

another. The nomination of the next speaker belongs to the students. I usually bring a ball or a wadded-up ball of newspaper.

The speaker throws the ball to the next speaker. 3 This works with almost any structure. Here’s an example using frequency adverbs: I’m Juan and I always go shopping on Saturdays. He’s Juan and he always goes shopping on Saturdays. I'm Maya and I

never eat fish. DO-IT-YOURSELF

FIND SOMEONE

WHO

1. This can be a whole-class activity. 2. Students write information about themselves on slips of paper. The teacher collects the slips and redistributes them. Students

try to find someone for whom that’s true. It doesn’t have to be the original writer. 3. To get started, dictate four stem sentences like I enjoy ——ing. I want to —. Again, many structures can be used.

4. As students find someone who, they go on to another slip of paper. You can either give out all four at once, and the winner is

the one who gets rid of all four first, or you can simply ask the students to come and get a new slip each time one is needed, and award one point for each. Using the same activity frame frequently, with different content, eliminates one of the problems of the communicative

classroom:

it

often takes longer to set up an activity than it does to do it. Notice also how both of these activities are drills.

78 —— SLA Myths

3. Use dictogloss to provide opportunities for reflection. Dictogloss has been used in studies of output as a research tool, but it’s also a good classroom task. Students work together to reconstruct a short text (five or six sentences) that they've heard. In the process, their attention is directed to target words or structures. You can write your own texts, seeding them with whichever forms you are interested in

practicing, by finding human-interest stories on the Internet. Failed bank robberies, meetings of long-lost twins—any sort of odd story works, as long as it is interesting. | wouldn't do a dictogloss on a G-8 meeting, for example.

This is the dictogloss procedure (Wajnryb, 1990):

1. Read the text twice at normal speed. 2. Students write what words and phrases they can. 3. In groups, students pool their words and reconstruct the text to the best of their abilities. The reconstruction won't be 100 percent correct. 4. Class discusses, and then compares answers.

MYTH

Language students learn (and retain) what they are taught.

In the Real World This is Jenifer. Sometimes being a language teacher can be discouraging. My first real job teaching languages was in graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. I was trained in how to teach Russian, and | conducted three sessions a week with small groups of students where the students were called on to actually understand and produce the

language. I really enjoyed my students because, let’s face it, people don’t study Russian just to get an easy credit—the students who took Russian really wanted to learn to speak it. Yet when I saw my students the following fall, a few months after they had finished their year of Russian study, the only thing they could say to me was zdravstvytie, which means “hello” (you get an idea from just this one word how

hard Russian might be!). Then they would laugh and say, “Oh, that’s all I can remember from our class!” This scenario seems to be common for people who have studied foreign languages. Here in Japan, where I’m currently living, I meet many people who say, “I studied English for six years in school but I’m fs

80 ——

SLA Myths

sorry, I still can’t speak English to you!” They of course say this in Japanese. I tell them I understand; I studied Spanish for six years from junior high to college and still did not begin to really speak Spanish

until after I had spent a semester living in Mexico. You probably have some anecdotes yourself of languages that you studied that you feel

like you can’t speak. In teaching English to language learners, I have also found that although I may teach my students a certain grammar rule and they may seem to understand it and do well on a bit of practice immediately after the explanation, they often will not use it correctly in normal speech later. One example is that students forget to change the verb’s ending in the present tense when they are using the third person sin-

gular form. So here is something that one of my students said when giving an impromptu speech explaining how she uses her cell phone:

When she [the camera] receive an email, she sing a song of small birds. Piyopiyo. She have a very good camera. Now I had not taught this student the rule that you need to put an -s at the end of a third person singular verb in the present tense (so

receive should be receives and the irregular verb have should be has), but she clearly knew the rule because she transcribed her speech and corrected these two verbs in her written transcription (though she missed her mistake with sing!). The student had, at some point, been taught this rule. It is also clear that given a situation where she could have

time to think about her answers, this student would have been able to produce the correct forms. However, in normal, everyday speech, she was not able to consistently incorporate this rule into what she was saying.

Another personal example is our daughter, Aiko. She is still a

beginning speaker of English, and lately we have noticed that she mixes up the pronouns he and she. My son can’t seem to help correct-

ing her, even when doing so irritates her. So she may be talking about her little brother, and say, She bumped into the wall. Every time she gets the gender of this pronoun wrong, my son corrects her, but she still continues to make the mistake. I’m not sure whether she was taught a rule explicitly, but she certainly understands that the pronoun he

5: Language students learn what they are taught. ——

81

should be used with boys/men and the pronoun she should be used with girls/women. The same rule applies in Japanese, for that matter.

When Aiko is corrected, she immediately realizes that she used the wrong pronoun and will say the sentence again using the correct pronoun (if she is not so irritated that she just gnashes her teeth and yells at my son). However, in her next utterance she is liable to make the same mistake. When it comes to languages, there seem to be lots of examples of

how language learners do not actually learn what they are taught or know. This can be frustrating for teachers and language learners alike.

What the Research Says The Psychology of Subject Matter Is something wrong with our language teaching if most students feel that they have not learned to speak a language after a year or two of

studying a foreign language? Take it as a given that these students are correctly assessing their own language proficiency. One point we can

take away from research on teaching and learning in different subject areas is that it is not only in speaking a language that students fail to learn from their high school and college courses;

it turns out that

research in many different subject areas shows that students are not learning what their teachers are trying to teach them. History seems to be a straightforward subject—one needs to just learn dates, names, and facts about events that occurred in the past,

right? Actually, most history teachers are probably hoping to achieve

something more than just memorization of facts, something similar to the goals stated in a paper for the U.S. Department

of Education

(Humphrey et al., 2005), which include things like weighing evidence

to draw sound conclusions, establishing the significance of an event, and developing a general conception of the history of that entity (such as a country like the United States). However, learning about impor-

82 —— SLA Myths tant dates and historical figures, at least, would

seem

to be the first

step. But even for this first step, at least American students seem to fail. Smith and Niemi (2001) assert that very few high school seniors can accurately trace important historical ideas that have developed over

time or even recall important dates or figures of American history. It is not likely that these students can progress to the more demanding task

of synthesizing historical facts if they cannot remember the basic facts well, meaning that history teachers may feel that students are not really learning what they are teaching. Learning to speak a second language may be similar to history since it certainly requires the memorization

of lots of vocabulary.

However, I think it may be more instructive to look at research on the

learning of physics as a subject area more parallel to language learning. This is because researchers have found that students learning physics are often hampered by their previous knowledge, which is basically

folk knowledge or naive preconceptions about the way forces in the world work. In the same way, students of language may be hampered

(or helped) by their knowledge of how their own native language works, although in large part this will be knowledge that is procedural (done unconsciously). In other words, students of language already know how to speak their own native language—they know how to do their language, even if they are probably not able to describe grammar rules for their native language. Another parallel from language learning to physics is that students may perceive learning as memorizing a number of unrelated facts or formulas (like vocabulary and grammar rules) and not really put the whole thing together to understand how things around them work (or, in the case of a language, never really be able to speak to a speaker of that language). Researchers studying how well students learn physics in high

school and college courses have found that students’ folk knowledge is quite resistant to change, and that often students do not seem to be able to apply physics laws and formulas to real-life examples. Here’s an example from a case study by Chu, Treagust, and Chandrasegaran

(2008). This study examined 10 students who were taking an introductory physics course. The researchers asked the students to answer ques-

5: Language students learn what they are taught. ——

83

tions about different physics applications of sound and wave motion

to real-life situations before the semester-long course and after it. The participants had weekly interviews to determine what they were learn-

ing. The researchers found that only 2 out of the 10 students developed appropriate physics conceptions after the course. Here is an example of a student who continued to use prior beliefs even after the semester

was over. The question posed was, “Is the time required to swing to and fro on a playground swing longer or shorter when you stand rather than sit?” (Chu, Treagust,

& Chandrasegaran, 2008, 118). One partici-

pant’s answer before instruction was, “If we stand up and are moving against air resistance, it will take longer” (p. 119). Here is her answer

after the end of the semester: “When I was a child, if Iwas standing on the swing it went faster, as I remember” (p. 120). Why explore how well students learn history and physics? This is because of the suspicion that many students feel they have learned a lot in most of their content courses but very little in their language

courses. Because they cannot speak a foreign language, even one that they have studied for years in high school or college, students may

think that language learning is much more difficult (or poorly taught) than other subjects. But when we look at actual learning outcomes in subjects like physics, which require students to overcome

their ten-

dency to transfer their previous knowledge and learn things that may go counter to what they think they know and also to bring together

seemingly disparate formulas and apply them to real-world events, students have not been found to be very successful at this after one college course. Similarily, in learning a language, students must overcome their

unconscious tendency to transfer their knowledge of how their native

language works and also bring together a number of disparate areas such as vocabulary, grammar rules, pronunciation, and pragmatics in order to successfully speak a language. It may be no wonder that so few students feel they succeed at this task. So what does research from other subject areas indicate about how

to succeed in learning a subject? Chi (2000) talks about the fact that, in the 1980s, educational psychologists believed that there were learning strategies that could be generalized across any type of domain, be it

84 —— SLA Myths

Transfer The idea of transfer is one that has figured prominently in Second Language Acquisition, which as a field is relatively young (dating from about the early 1970s). At first, it was widely believed that all of the mistakes language learners made in a second language could be traced back to their first language. However, research showed that learners made some mistakes that could not

be seen as stemming from their first language. For example, beginning Spanish-speaking learners of English tend to overgeneralize the masculine pronoun he and refer to both men and women as he. Spanish has different masculine and feminine pronouns so this could not be a problem of transfer from the first language. It was also found that learners from different language backgrounds all made similar types of mistakes or had similar difficulties when learning a common second language (such as English). There seemed to be some type of universal processing constraints on the learners. At the present time, the state of the art is a realization that both first language influence and universal processing constraints of some kind act on language learners and that neither one should be discounted (although Jarvis,

2000, adeptly shows that more methodological rigor may be needed before transfer should be claimed as a force). We should also realize that transfer does not necessarily lead to mistakes—positive transfer such as words that sound similar in both languages (cognates) also occurs and can be a force for faster language learning.

learning a language, math, or geography. They believed in a transfer of skills from one subject domain to another. While this was not found to

be the case because the various fields all need subject-specific information (Mayer, 2004), Chi asserts that there is one learning approach that

can be generalized across fields, which is that “new knowledge (whether declarative or procedural in nature) cannot be readily and perfectly assimilated (or encoded) by the student from direct instruction, either in the form of listening to a teacher's explanations, or in the form of reading from a textbook” (Chi, 2000, 162-163). Instead, what the student needs is active participation in constructing his or her own knowledge. While the question of what actively constructing knowledge means for many subject disciplines may be hard to conceptualize, for learning a language it is quite simple—one needs to actively use the language itself rather than simply learn about it.

5: Language students learn what they are taught.

——

85

Research on Teaching Grammar in Language Classes I once observed a Japanese language class where the teacher spent 45 out

of the 50 class minutes explaining the form and meaning of the condi-

tional tense (If I were a millionaire, I would . . .). Finally, in the last five minutes of class, the teacher told the students to practice forming their own conditional sentences, but then ignored what they were saying as she handed their homework back to them. In other words, this part of the class was not the most important part to her! As will be discussed in Myth 8, many people think that language teaching primarily means teaching grammar. However, most teachers likely would believe their students had successfully learned the subject matter not if they can perform well on a test given immediately after studying grammar, but if they can successfully use the grammar when speaking the language. There has long been controversy in SLA as to the effectiveness of teaching grammar. One side has asserted that students will pick up the grammar of a language implicitly (in other words, without having it explained to them explicitly) just by hearing, understanding, and using a language. The most famous proponent of this theory is Steven Krashen, who was introduced in Myth 3. Few researchers in second language acquisition believe now that learners will automatically learn to speak the language just from having sufficient input, but there are still researchers who think that explicit grammar explanation cannot

become

part of the learner's unconscious language system; in other

words, learners will not be able to incorporate grammar that they are

taught into the implicit system that is the foundation of what they will use to speak fluently without conscious

reflection

(Paradis, 2009;

Schwartz, 1993; Ullman, 2005). On the other hand, other researchers believe that explicit grammar explanation is useful (DeKeyser, 1997; R. Ellis, 2005b). These researchers also would like to see explicit grammar explanations become part of the learners’ implicit language system so that they can use the grammar without having to consciously think about it, but from their point of view, this happens through practice speaking the language (not necessarily just that grammar point, though). In DeKeyser’s (1997) view, eventually the

86 —— SLA Myths grammar point in question becomes “automatized.” This is a technical

term that means exactly what you think—the grammar gets used automatically without the learner having to consciously retrieve it. If there is enough practice, the grammar point will also become a part of fluent speech and become behaviorally indistinguishable from procedural knowledge. Rod Ellis’ (2005b) view of the process is different but leads to the same outcome: declarative knowledge can support practice of a behavior long enough so that procedural memory can begin to take over with enough repetition. Table 5 gives some definitions from R. Ellis (2006b) and DeKeyser (2003) as to what explicit and implicit language teaching and explicit and implicit knowledge consist of. TABLE 5: Definitions of Explicit and Implicit Teaching and Knowledge Implicit Language

Teaching

Involves intention of teacher to present learners with information but teacher does not verbalize this to students

Students are not aware of any specific focus of lesson

Knowledge

Explicit Involves awareness of what the teacher intends to teach

Students are often taught with metalinguistic rules, that is, rules that discuss the language as an object of study. Teacher may state the objective for the day’s lesson in terms of a grammar rule: “Today we'll study the plural.”

Speaker knows how to do something

Facts that speakers of a language have learned

Not consciously available

Consciously available to speaker

Usually not verbalizable (but can be made so through instruction)

Can be learned Rule can be verbalized

Accessed rapidly Can be drawn on if learner has Available for use in fluent and

spontaneous conversation

enough time to process

5: Language students learn what they are taught.

——

87

Readers might think that the obvious answer to the question of whether grammar should be taught explicitly is yes because they probably learned a language this way. However, Lee and VanPatten

(2003)

note that people who think they have learned a second language through grammar instruction probably had many other experiences in learning the language beyond the classroom, such as a study abroad or extensive contact

and

practice speaking the language

with

native

speakers.

Exposure to meaningful input is probably the most critical component

of second language acquisition, and grammar instruction cannot be considered to be meaning-bearing input (think about the Japanese class I

observed where students were simply lectured to for 45 minutes—in English—about the conditional form). So second

language

researchers

have felt that the answer

to

whether grammar should be taught explicitly is not as obvious as one

might think at first glance. However, it is an important question with obvious practical implications, so many studies have been done to try

to answer the question. In fact, there has been so much research done

on the topic that in 2000, a meta-analysis

(a method

of putting

together the information from a large number of studies in order to arrive at a consensus) was done. Norris & Ortega (2000) decided on a

number of criteria and looked at 49 studies conducted from 1980 to 1998 to answer the question of whether instruction is useful in second

language acquisition. One of the main questions was whether an implicit or explicit approach

is more

useful for second

language

instruction. They did clarify that this question can only be answered

when examining the short-term effects of instruction, since long-term studies have only rarely been done (and thus cannot be gathered into a

meta-analysis). An explicit approach was defined in Norris and Ortega (following DeKeyser, 1995) as one where learners were either given explanations of grammar rules or asked to pay attention specifically to the gram-

mar rules in order to try to generalize a rule on their own (in this case

then learners were not told a rule, but needed to try to generalize a rule from the data). In other words, explicit teaching approaches did

88 ——

SLA Myths

more than ask students to use the language; they asked them to think metalinguistically—thinking

about the language and discussing it

like any other object of study. Any other approach to teaching was considered an implicit approach. Keep in mind that some

only looked

at the results of explicit teaching,

studies

others looked

at

the results of implicit teaching; and still others (and not all) compared both methods within the same experiment. Norris & Ortega

(2000) coded the experimental results of studies as either explicit or implicit, but not all studies had both types of techniques tested together. Before revealing the results of this analysis, let’s look at the kind

of study that was included in the overview. Kubota (1996) reported on the results of an experiment with 120 Japanese college students learning English. The grammatical point they were taught was ergative verbs, which sounds hard but basically just means the difference between saying the boat floats and the boy floated the boat. In the first example, no one does the floating, but it is not a passive verb; in the second example, a person can act on the boat and the form is the

same.

In Japanese, these two sentences would

have different verb

forms so the form in English could be problematic for learners of English. The students were grouped into one of two categories for instruction—either they got input instruction or output instruction. Input instruction was seeing correct sentences containing the ergative forms, while

output

instruction

asked

the students

to provide the

verb forms themselves. This treatment was only 10 minutes long.

These groups were further divided into whether the students got explicit feedback, implicit feedback in the form of more examples, or no further information (the control group), so there were a total of six groups. In the explicit feedback condition, participants received metalinguistic grammar instruction explaining that with ergative verbs what seems to be the object of the verb can function as the subject of the sentence (as in the sentence the boat floats). This took five minutes. In the implicit feedback condition, the participants saw three grammatical sentences on the board, and the teacher read them aloud. This took three minutes. The issue of whether the students

5: Language students learn what they are taught. ——

89

had really learned the grammar point was tested by having the students complete two tests immediately after finishing the treatment. One was a grammaticality judgment test, where the students heard a

sentence and had to judge if it was grammatical

or not. Here are

some examples of the sentences they heard: What was happened here? This skirt was washed well. I found that my wallet was missed. (By the way, only the second sentence is grammatical.) The other type of test was one where they had to fill in the blank with the correct form of the verb. What they saw looked like this: This book

well last year. (sell)

An alarm clock My car

now. (ring)

into a tree yesterday. (crash)

Results were different for the different tests. On the grammaticality judgment test, the groups that got explicit instruction had the biggest gains, but even the highest score was not that high (60 percent correct where 50 percent would be the score if the test-taker were

just guessing). The differences with the control groups, who did not

get any instruction but just took the tests, were rather minimal, as the control group that took the output test scored 52 percent. All the groups except one control group had lower scores on the second post-test, which

was

conducted

a week later, with scores for all

groups around 50 percent. There was one more test one month after the treatment,

and

all the groups

scored

around

48

percent.

Differences for the fill-in-the-blank tests were more differentiated, with the groups that had done output work scoring higher than the other groups (71 percent correct), although these gains were lost for the group with only implicit feedback (reading the sentences) at the delayed post-test. In general, the output groups retained their gains

90 ——

SLA Myths

fairly well over the post-tests while the other groups lost some points or stayed about the same too.

What we can understand from the Kubota study is that the type of treatment done was fairly short and the tests were typically set up to test explicit grammatical knowledge. In general, this is true of most of the studies that Norris & Ortega analyzed. Norris and Ortega’s (2000) analysis showed that the average effect size for all implicit studies was d=0.54, while for explicit studies the

effect size was d=1.13. (See the box on page 91 on effect sizes for more information on how to understand this concept.) For the implicit studies the effect of this type of instruction was about '4 a standard deviation (d=0.54)—this can be considered a smallish effect size. However, for the explicit studies the effect of teaching was much bigger, at a little over 1 standard deviation (d=1.13). This is a large effect size, and twice as large as the effect for the implicit techniques. With this analysis, the conclusion that explicit grammar teaching was useful and would result in students learning grammar well seemed clear. However, several authors, including Doughty (2003), took issue with that conclusion, pointing out that the types of studies surveyed in Norris & Ortega were biased toward a very decontextualized type of teaching grammar explicitly, and that typically the instructional period was very short, between just one and four hours. Such a short instructional period biases learning in favor of explicit instruction because implicit learning takes a lot of time and input. In addition, the type of tests that were administered after the instruction were typically paper-and-pencil types of decontextualized grammar tests, so it was no surprise that the people who were told explicitly about the rules before the test did the best on this type of test. (Norris and Ortega pointed out that 90 percent of the tests used in the studies were highly constrained types of items. They included grammaticality judgment tests, like those illustrated, multiple choice questions, or fill-in-the-blanks-type questions where the participants

had to conjugate a verb correctly, for example.) Doughty (2003, 271) concludes that “most of the outcome measures do not appear to be measuring L2 ability in any valid sense.” In other words, the big

Ss Language students learn what they are taught.

= iS | o

‘

¢ o c nD uu= 3 rrN

What does an effect size mean?

wa

——

91

92 ——

SLA Myths

problem with the studies is that they measure

something close to

what language teachers who teach grammar often measure, which is how well the students can do on grammar tests, but they don’t measure how well learners really use that grammar when they are speaking (or writing) spontaneously in the language. Really, it would only be in these types of measures that we could come

close to measuring

what we really want to know, which is whether students can actually use the grammar

point accurately in their own

speech when

not

specifically concentrating on it.

At that point in time it did seem prudent to agree with Doughty (2003) that Norris and Ortega’s (2000) meta-analysis showed only that “when the outcome of very short-term, explicitly focused instruction is measured on artificial, discrete-point tests, it has been proven effective”

(Doughty, 2003, 274). This would imply that we still could not say with any certainty whether explicit grammar teaching actually affected language acquisition, since, as R. Ellis (2006a) points out, second language acquisition is, in the eyes of most researchers, equated with the

development of implicit knowledge of the language. A more recent meta-analysis by Spada and Tomita (2010) went

beyond Norris and Ortega in finding that explicit instruction is best

for both simple and complex grammatical forms (although with an effect size of d=.66 for implicit instruction with simple forms and d=.88 for explicit instruction with simple forms, the difference is not

large). Like Norris and Ortega, Spada and Tomita (2010) tried to also address the question of whether the gains made in immediate posttests remain in delayed post-tests. They find that over all categories, effect sizes actually increase in the post-test. This seems to bode very

well for the teaching of grammar, at least for Doughty's conclusion that in teaching about language as an object, students do learn something

from grammar teaching. But now we come to the primary reason to be skeptical about the value of grammar teaching, even as an exercise in learning explicit

5: Language students learn what they are taught. ——

93

information that may not help with spontaneous speaking. A study by White (1991) was not included in either of the meta-analyses men-

tioned, and it is the only one that included a post-test that occurred a year after the initial testing. In this study, young adolescents from Canada

whose

first language was

French

and who

were

learning

English in an intensive immersion program were instructed in a grammar point. White was interested in helping the students learn to put

adverbs in the proper place in English. Specifically, in French, adverbs can be placed directly after a verb and before an object, as in the following sentences, which

are fine in French but sound strange in

English: French:

Jean boit rapidement son café.

English translation:

*John drinks rapidly his coffee.

French:

Marie regarde souvent la télévision.

English translation:

*Mary watches often television.

So the French-speaking learners of English basically have to learn that they can put the adverb almost anywhere except between a verb and its object. In White's study, one group of 84 students learned about

this rule for one hour a day for five days, and then two more hours the next week. They not only heard the rule, but they practiced lots of activities where they had to form sentences with adverbs and put the adverbs in the correct place. A control group of 56 students was taught about forming questions in English, so they were focused on a differ-

ent grammar point and not adverbs at all. The tests the students took to examine their knowledge of this grammar point were all what we

would call constrained tests—there was a grammaticality judgment test, a multiple-choice test, and a test where the students had to create

a sentence from cards that needed to be ordered. Just as the metaanalyses found, the approach where students were explicitly taught

about the rule definitely resulted in the group that received instruction

94 ——

SLA Myths

getting much higher marks on these tests than the group that didn’t get

any instruction. On the delayed post-test five weeks later, the instructed group did even a little bit better than on the immediate post-test. Table

6 gives data for the tests. Notice that a good result is to get a very low number, because what is being measured is the number of times the student formed a sentence in English with the adverb between the subject and the verb (the S-V-A-O

order, which

is ungrammatical

in

English). Notice also that there is a control group labeled here, which

was a group of monolingual English-speaking children of the same age as the English-learning children. But the next result is where things get messy. White (1991) came back a year later to retest the children. They had moved up to the next grade, and their intensive English immersion was finished. That had continued for five months, and in the next grade they were only studying English for 45 minutes two times a week. Table 6 shows that the student errors had returned to their pre-test levels and were nearly on a par with those of the uninstructed group. Again, this same pattern held for all three of the tests the students took,

although there is some evidence that students did use the grammatical

S-A-V order (the adverb before the verb) more often than they had

TABLE 6: Data on S-V-A-O Error Rate in Adverb Placement from White, 1991 (Lower error rates are better.)

=

Approximate Scores

First Post-Test

(estimated

from graphs)

Pre-test

(after

Second Post-Test

Follow Up

experiment)

(5 weeks later)

(1 year later)

Instructed

group Uninstructed

group Controls (native speakers)

BE,

5: Language students learn what they are taught.

——

95

before instruction. The question this study raises is what would the results be if other studies of explicit instruction followed up on their tests a year later? Would those studies also find that the learners had

mostly forgotten what they were taught? White (1991) speculates in her article that the reason they forgot what they had learned is because the students did not receive any follow-up instruction on adverbs. However, if the students had initially learned the material well enough to retain it for five weeks after the “treatment,” one might think that it had become part of what they intuitively understood about the language and would not just have disappeared. Existing studies have not done follow-ups of the same length as

White (1991), and so we cannot know for sure whether the trend would be replicated in other second language research studies. However, the fact that the results in White (1991) follow so closely with the general conclusions of the meta-analyses, coupled with the

anecdotal evidence that teachers have that their students continue to make mistakes on very basic grammar points after many years of study leads me to the conclusion that White’s research findings (1991) could well be more the rule than the exception. Add to this the fact that what was found in the White study was more of an explicit type of knowledge about adverb placement than an implicit

measure of what students would do in actual spontaneous speech, and this one study gives one pause about making any strong state-

ments about the effectiveness of grammar teaching. Short-term effectiveness is not really the type of language learning that teachers are hoping for.

Research on the Way Students Do Seem to Learn: Developmental Sequences Work in this area was spurred by work in first language acquisition, specifically by Brown (1973), who looked in detail at the emerging language of three young speakers of English and found that the children

96 ——

SLA Myths

develop language in stages. That is, there were certain forms that the

children would use that were ungrammatical (such as No me go) until they began to use the correct form. Brown found that the three children had strikingly similar orders of acquiring these forms, which can

be called grammatical functors, following Goldschneider and DeKeyser (2001) (an excellent history for those interested in the details of the natural order issue). In the 1970s, L2 researchers began to look at both children and

adults acquiring a second language to see whether their developing

language might also evidence patterns of acquisition.

A methodolog-

ical point needs to be brought up here, which is that while Brown

(1973) investigated the spontaneous speech of the children, the studies described here generally used a cross-sectional method that tested the participants by looking at how many times they used the correct

form on some kind of test that elicited the form (for example, they might look at a picture and have to explain that the fat man was fat because he liked to eat ice cream). What this methodological point

means is that there are reasons to criticize the second language studies and to be cautious about overgeneralizing their findings, but enough studies were done eventually using different methodologies

that Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991, p. 92) stated that “contrary to what some critics have alleged, there are in our view too many studies conducted with sufficient methodological rigor and showing sufficiently consistent general findings for the commonalities

ignored.”

to be

5: Language students learn what they are taught. ——

97

Recognizing the methodological limitations, the SLA morpheme studies of the 1970s showed that there were similar patterns of acquisition of grammatical functors by both children and adults with different first language backgrounds. Ortega (2009, 125) summarizes the order in this way and says that while accuracy may vary within a group the rank of structures is never violated:

possessive ‘s

The research findings, then, seemed to show that all learners, regardless of language background, would quickly be able to use the progressive —ing form in English but would persist in problems with,

say, the third person -s for much longer. An interesting and methodologically sound study was Pica’s (1983) report where she examined learners who were just picking up the language from living in the

country (naturalistic learners), those who were studying English formally at school (instructed learners), and those who were doing both. Pica used an hour-long unstructured interview to collect data, resulting in more spontaneous data. The results, however, were still consonant with the idea of an order of acquisition, with the progressive (-ing) and singular copula (is/-s) form being supplied at very high levels

98 ——

SLA Myths

(above 90 percent of the situations where it should have been used), the past irregular used less (at 60-70 percent of the time), and the third person singular —s being used very infrequently (only about 20-25 percent of the time except for the instructed learners, who used it 63 per-

cent

of the time,

which

still made

it the

instructed

learners’

second-to-lowest ranked functor). The results of these morpheme order studies, then, showed that although a teacher might try to teach students to use the third person -s form correctly, English language learners would not really be able to use it consistently in spontaneous

speech. In other words, students

were not able to learn what their teachers were teaching them. It may seem to the reader that one natural outcome of knowing about this acquisition order is that teachers should try to teach grammar in this order. However, no second language researchers advocate doing so. One reason is that it is impractical to not mention some of

these grammatical

functors when one is teaching a language. Just

because your students won't spontaneously put a third person -s on

their verb forms for many years does not mean

they shouldn’t be

taught this form at all. Another reason is that there is no evidence that the teaching order will influence the order of acquisition! So just as adults might try in vain to correct a child who says jamamas instead of

pajamas, the whole point of the findings on morpheme orders suggests that teaching these points will not alter the order in which language learners will learn the functors, at least in spontaneous speech. One problem with looking at the grammatical functors by testing

different people at different points in their language acquisition is that it may give the impression that language acquisition is an all-or-nothing type of process. That is, either language learners have learned the plural form or they haven’t. But such a way of thinking is not accurate.

If we follow learners over time and look at their progress in learning a language, we see that grammatical forms are acquired gradually, with a beginning period where the learner may not use the form at all,

through a series of stages where differing forms may be used. Finally, if the form is acquired, it will become stable in most situations.

5: Language students learn what they are taught. ——

99

In the same way that children pass through stages with respect to various language forms (Brown, 1973), L2 researchers have also found that adult second language learners pass through stages. In general, instruction may help learners progress through the stages faster, but it generally does not help them to skip the stages altogether (Doughty, 2003). For example, creating accurate questions in English is quite a difficult process, and learners do not usually produce the accurate form in the beginning unless they are using an unanalyzed phrase (something they have learned as one chunk of language, such as What's your name?). Table 7 shows a progression of question forms and is based on information from Mackey and Silver (2005) and Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991). TABLE 7: Explanation of Different Stages English Learners Go Through in Developing Correct Sentence Forms Stages

. Single words and formulas

2. Canonical word order (SVO) with

question intonation . Fronting question word or do auxiliary

(some form of fronting)

Example Sentences

Different? What is that? On the wall? How to say this?

Did you have a old lady is besi ide the fire? What you eat from break?

4. In yes/no questions, an auxiliary or modal is in sentence-initial position. In wh- questions, the copula and the subject change positions.

(Y/N) Can you say again? (Cop) What are your languages?

. Auxiliary verbs and modals are placed in second position to wh- questions and before subject (applies only in main clauses).

| Where were you born? How many cup do you have? What did you ate for breakfast this morning?

. Differentiation, so that subject comes before verb in subordinate clauses (underlined)

et

| have to do?

(Cop) Where is the three cup?

Does she like where she lives? Do you know where the bus station is?

100 ——

SLA Myths

Again, as with the research on the grammatical functors, progression through developmental

stages has been shown

to be a highly

salient feature of learner grammar. What the existence of developmental sequences means is that although a teacher may teach a grammatical form such as the correct question format to learners, they will not

be able to learn the correct form all at once. They will need practice in speaking the language, and progress will be slow. Don’t misinterpret

the information in this section and think that teachers should not try to teach grammar explicitly. There is clearly value in instructing learners as this has been shown to speed progress through the developmen-

tal stages. Pica’s (1983) study showed

that instructed learners had

higher levels of accuracy than naturalistic learners on many grammatical functors, so instruction also resulted in better although still not per-

fect accuracy. However,

students need to spend more time in class

actually using the language instead of listening to lectures about it.

Research on Vocabulary Although grammar has always played a large role in research in second

language acquisition, vocabulary has not been of interest until more recently. Krashen (1989) argues that second language learners can pick up vocabulary in the same way that he hypothesized that they pick up

grammar—incidentally and without conscious effort. Krashen hypothesized that if language learners could understand an unknown word in context, they would be able to learn it. However, incidental vocabulary

acquisition is nowhere near as common as it is for first language acquisition, and it is in fact rather rare (Hulstijn, 2003). It certainly can and does happen, especially through extensive reading (Horst, 2005), but teachers may overestimate its effectiveness. For example, Horst, Cobb,

and Meara (1998) found that low-proficiency adult learners who read a story over six classroom sessions picked up on average only about five words incidentally. Especially at beginning levels of proficiency, teachers probably should explicitly teach all the words that they expect language learners to know. Folse (2004) says that using word lists and

5: Language students learn what they are taught. ——

101

explicitly linking second language vocabulary to first-language transla-

tions is an excellent way to learn vocabulary. One way that teachers can help facilitate the process of vocabulary acquisition in speaking is to involve learners in actively using the vocabulary in an interactive task. Ellis, Tanaka, and Yamazaki (1994)

showed that a group (completing an information-gap task where they had to place kitchen items correctly) who listened to a transcript of directions and were also able to ask their teacher questions compre-

hended the vocabulary better than a group who could only listen to the directions or another group who heard the directions plus ques-

tions from previous task completers. R. Ellis and He (1999) did the same type of activity with a living room

information-gap task. This

study additionally showed that a group who completed the task and

then had to explain to others where to put the pictures had higher scores in recognition,

comprehension,

and retention of previously

unknown vocabulary words. These studies were done in a laboratory context, but Mohamed

(2010) examined incidental vocabulary acquisition in the context of a conversation

class

with

intermediate-level

students.

In

general,

Mohamed found that words were not easily acquired incidentally in the conversation class, but it was possible in certain conditions. Mohamed

targeted a number of vocabulary words to be presented in several different ways during the course of the class, hypothesizing that words that

were essential to completing a task would have a higher chance of being incidentally acquired than those that the students heard the teacher define or just mention during class. Mohamed found that task-essential-

ness was not as important as the overriding effect of cognates for this class of Spanish-speaking learners of English, although words that were both cognates and task-essential were the most widely learned. He also found that many more words were learned receptively—that is, the learners simply recognized them—than

were learned and later pro-

duced. Students also learned more words that were mentioned in conjunction with definitions or synonyms than words simply produced in context that the students should have been able to infer word meanings from. Another factor that played a role was the number of times the

102 —— SLA Myths learners heard or used the word, with higher frequency associated with higher rates of acquisition. In general, Mohamed

found that incidental

acquisition of vocabulary was much lower than he himself had hypothesized going into the study. For vocabulary, many teachers have assumed that they do not need

to teach vocabulary explicitly and that learners will pick up vocabulary words if they are understood in context. However, if learners often do not learn what their teachers teach them, they are even less likely to

learn what their teachers do not teach them!

_ WhatWe Can Do _ 1. Understand that helping students to learn a complex subject area (such as a language) is not a simple task. In order to speak a language, students must start by learning discrete parts such as vocabulary or grammar rules, but in order to feel like a

successful speaker of a language, students must be able to successfully integrate that knowledge into an overall structure that takes time to make. Research from other subject areas such as history or physics shows that the difficulty in doing this does not lie only in language acquisition but extends to many other areas of study as well.

2. Teach grammar explicitly, but recognize the possible limitations of doing so. While research has shown that students can learn grammar explicitly, at least in the short term, this does not necessarily translate into accurate use of the grammar in speaking. Most SLA researchers advocate

some focus on grammar in the classroom but because of its possible limited effectiveness teachers should probably limit the amount of time they spend explaining grammar

and focus instead on having

learners actively construct language in the classroom.

5: Language students learn what they are taught. ——

103

3. Do not expect language learners to perform perfectly on grammar you have taught them. There are many ways that teachers seek to evaluate their language

learners. Asking students to take a constrained type of test after teaching them explicit grammar is probably as fair as any other test that teachers give their students. However, expecting that students can perform as accurately on grammar when they are asked to provide evi-

dence of their implicit language system, such as in free speech where the major focus is on meaning, is not fair. Students are working against natural

processes

sequences

of

and cannot

universal

constraints

and

be expected to perform

developmental

error-free or at the

native-speaker level.

4. Repeat yourself when it comes to grammar. Because students often do not learn what they are taught when it comes to grammar, it is probably worth recycling through problematic grammar points time and time again as a language teacher. Again, the teaching does not need to take a long time, but bringing some limited number of grammar points to students’ attention repeatedly probably won't hurt them and might perhaps help.

5. Teach learners chunks of language. Although learners may not be able to create an original question correctly for a while, if they learn entire questions as individual chunks of

language (What's your name?, Where are you from?) they will be able to use language they need frequently in an accurate manner. This can be true for all types of language, not just questions. Research is ongoing, but there are interesting studies that seem to show that learners can sound more fluent and accurate when they use more chunks of language

(Boers, Eyckmans,

Wood, 2006).

Kappel, Stengers,

& Demecheleer,

2006;

104 ——

SLA Myths

6. Don’t expect learners to learn things you don’t teach them. When it comes to vocabulary especially, but grammar too, don’t expect that learners will just pick up on word meanings or grammatical struc-

tures the way first language learners do. Especially for lower-level students, explicitly teach any vocabulary you expect your language learners to know. Teaching has a more limited effect than teachers might think, but it is clear that not teaching leads to even worse outcomes. Instruction is useful, even as we realize that many things we intend to teach do not get learned.

MYTH

Language learners always benefit from correction.

In the Real World This is Jenifer. As a teacher or anyone who works with language learners knows, language learners make a lot of mistakes. This applies to

children as well as adults. Today I told my four-year-old that we were having spaghetti for dinner and he said, psghetti? Just for the fun of it, I said, No, it’s not psghetti. Say spa-ge-ti. He, being a lovely and compliant child, said psghetti. He also at four still uses me instead of I as the sub-

ject of most of his sentences, saying things like, Me didn’t play with Kay today. My older children have corrected him numerous times, and sometimes he does repeat his mistaken sentence with the correct subject, but after a few sentences, he will revert back to the mistaken one.

Children make adorable mistakes when they are learning to speak a

language that seem cute because we know they will eventually outgrow them. Adult mistakes don’t seem nearly as cute, and it’s clear that second language learners never outgrow some of the mistakes that they make. But is that because no one has ever corrected them? A very common mistake for Japanese learners of English is to not include a necessary 105

106 ——

SLA Myths

object after a verb. For example, if I asked students about their weekends, someone might say something like, I saw a movie. I very enjoyed. | have corrected students who have used this phrase, and some students

repeat the correction after I give it (I enjoyed IT) while others just nod. Later, I have heard the same incorrect phrase from the same student.

Another example of a mistake with using the correct verb and object is the phrase Let’s English, which means Let’s speak English. This mistake is actually printed on advertisements for English conversation schools in Japan. As a teacher, I have to admit that sometimes I just give up and say, OK, let's English! Corrections seem to do no good in some cases.

On the other hand, some corrections do seem to sink in. Teaching a group of students at Kyushu University this semester, I told them that

when they are talking about a list of things, that it might sound more natural in speaking to use the phrase and things like that instead of so

on. Here is an example of what one student said that I thought would sound better with the phrase and things like that: Today cell phones have many functions. For example, listening to music, sending email, telephone, and so on.

The students listened to what I had to say, and here is what another student then said, also about his cell phone: But I don’t use cell phone when I in theater and in

class things like that. Obviously the phrase OR PLACES like that would have sounded more natural here. My point here is that students sometimes do take correc-

tions and remember them, but in some cases those corrections don’t work quite the way we think they will. (And it seems a rule that stu-

dents will remember perfectly whatever you tell them about naughty words in your language. ) One anecdote that has stuck in my mind through many years comes from Patsy Lightbown, who has investigated the acquisition of French

and English in the immersion

Lightbown,

programs

of Canada

(see

1991, for a detailed description of this anecdote). As

6: Language learners benefit from correction.

——

107

Lightbown visited these immersion classrooms in Canada, she noticed that French learners of English often had trouble with the difference between have and be in existential statements like There is a boy sitting on a sofa, something you might say when describing a picture. The French learners would often say You have a boy sitting on a sofa or It have a boy sitting on a sofa instead. However, she found one classroom where the learners did not make this mistake. She asked the teacher how this was possible, as it was a common

mistake for these learners. The

teacher told her that this particular mistake drove her crazy, so she had made a point of consistently correcting her students every time they said it. However, she had done so in a humorous way, by pretending to

look for the boy on the person of the student, as if he literally had the boy. Lightbown says she found similar cases in other language classrooms

for question forms, where teachers had similarly used some

explicit explanation and then consistently but gently and humorously

corrected their students over long periods of time. She says (personal correspondence),

“The point of my anecdote is to say that providing

sustained feedback in the communicative situation seemed to be more effective

in promoting

long-term

use

of the

difficult

feature.

Importantly, the teachers chose their battles and didn’t try to react to every error the students made!”

What the Research Says So let me say up front that a reading of the literature on correction in both spoken and written language suggests that haphazardly correcting errors, either on oral language or written productions, is not an effective way for a teacher to spend time with their students. Many readers will bring a strong bias toward correction to this chapter so it will be

hard to change minds. There is a place for effective correction, but it has to be quite conscious and deliberate and sustained over a period of time, as in the situation Lightbown

(1991) described. This chapter

108 ——

SLA Myths

explores the research in hopes that readers will begin to question their assumptions that correction is effective. Correction is only one possible form of feedback that teachers might want to give their students. Anderson

(2011) claims that too

much attention has been given in the SLA literature to error correction

and not enough to the benefits of feedback in general. Hattie (2009), who conducted a meta-meta-analysis of more than 23 meta-analyses in education (which included more than 800 studies), found that feedback of any kind is one of the most effective types of contributions that teachers can give their students (with an average effect size of d=.73). However, Hattie and Timperley (2007) have noted that some types of feedback are more effective than others. They found that the highest three effect sizes for types of feedback are for cues (d=1.10 based on 89 studies), followed by feedback (d=.95, based on 4,157 studies) and reinforcement (d=.94, based on 19 studies). Corrective feedback, the topic of much of the research in SLA, ranks much lower, with an average d=.37 based on 1,149 studies (remember that these are studies on education in general where English language learning was excluded). Hattie (2009) says that d=.40 is the average effect size for studies in the field of education, but in order to count a method as effective, we would want to see effect sizes larger than this. Keep this in mind. The most effective feedback gives students information about erroneous hypotheses that leads to more effective and correct strategies for understanding the material or performing the task, according to Hattie and Timberley (2007). For example, one type of feedback that the teacher may give is something like, “You need to include more information in this essay about your own personal experience.” Another example of feedback would be when the teacher sees the students performing a task in an incorrect manner. For example, suppose a teacher

explained to students that they should do a task to find the five differences between two similar pictures that each member of a pair had. Suppose the teacher then saw the students simply showing each other

their pictures in order to find the differences. In this case, the teacher's explanation was not clear enough and the actions of the students would have shown the teacher that the students needed more informa-

6: Language learners benefit from correction.

——

109

tion about how to correctly perform the task. This type of feedback would clearly help improve the possibility that they might verbally use the language to find the differences. It is also an example of how students provide feedback to teachers about the effectiveness of their explanations—in this case, the initial explanation was not adequate to

get the students to verbally engage in the task.

Oral Correction Students in language classrooms where the language is used to communicate and practice are sometimes corrected orally. What is the most frequent type of correction given to students orally? According to Lyster

and Ranta (1997), it is what is called the recast. Here is an example of a recast that corrects a grammar problem: Student:

I usually use my cell phone to sent email.

Teacher:

Oh, you usually use your cell phone to send email?

Student:

Yes.

It turns out that people like to correct using the recast because it can be

interpreted as not really a correction. I found that most of my students (education majors) had been taught that the best type of correction is a recast. In Lyster and Ranta’s (1997) study, the recast was used overall

55 percent of the time, much

more frequently than any of the five

other correction types. I suspect that teachers like this type of correc-

tion because it is not threatening to students, who may think the teacher is just commenting on what was said. The teachers are not really correcting the student at all. So, what makes the recast so attrac-

tive is also what makes it not as effective as a method of correction. Mackey, Gass, and McDonough

(2000) asked low-level English

and Italian language learners who had received correction while doing an interactive information-gap task (find the differences between pic-

tures) to watch a videotape of themselves and comment on the feedback their native-speaker partner had given them. The researchers

110 —— SLA Myths classified the type of feedback given from the partners to be mostly correction to their phonology (pronunciation) or morphosyntax (grammar points). However,

the majority of what the language learners

themselves perceived the feedback to be about was choosing the wrong word (a lexical error) or just not correctly communicating their meaning (a semantic error). The language learners only recognized the

grammatical feedback as such 13 percent of the time. Mostly, they thought this feedback was about semantics (38 percent of the time) or

didn’t think it was about anything (21 percent). An example from the Mackey et al. article (2000, 485) where it is stated that the learner perceives the grammar recast as being about semantics is: Language learner: So one man feed for the birds. Native speaker: So one man’s feeding the birds? Language learner: The birds. Later comment by the language learner while watching the video: When I saw the picture I thought this is a park and I tried to describe.

The example shows that the learner does not recognize any grammar problem; the learner thinks the native speaker is requesting clarifica-

tion of the meaning of what was said. Other research has found that recasts can be effective for some learners, but primarily more advanced speakers (Mackey & Philp, 1998). In Philp (2003) low-level ESL learners were less likely to notice recasts than intermediate- or higher-level learners. Thus, one question in the debate as to whether to correct students’

oral productions is whether they will even notice these forms at all. The next question is whether learners who notice recasts, and even repeat their ungrammatical utterance in the correct way, actually bene-

fit from this correction in the sense that their grammar improves over time. At this time, the available research in SLA may not be adequate to answering this question. Although there have been a number of metaanalyses that have included an analysis of the effects of corrective feedback (Li, 2010; Mackey & Goo, 2007; Norris & Ortega, 2000; Russell &

6: Language learners benefit from correction.

——

111

Spada, 2006) and all have found that corrective feedback had a positive effect on short-term tests of grammar learning, many of the studies summarized in the meta-analyses suffer from the same problem shown

in the explicit/implicit grammar

instruction debate in Myth 5—stu-

dents receive short-term treatments and then are tested with tests that tap into explicit, not implicit knowledge of language, so the explicit

types of feedback will obviously have an advantage. However, the few studies that have looked at grammar

learning over time and compared different types of correction in the classroom have found that correction in the form of prompts seems to be more effective than recasts. A prompt is a less ambiguous response than a recast, but Lyster (2004) labels a number of different strategies as prompts. For example, a teacher may just say, Excuse me or I don’t under-

stand in order to get students to reconsider their utterances. Teachers may also repeat just the error itself, with a rising intonation, to highlight the error. For example, if the learner says, Yesterday I go there the

teacher might say, You go? with an emphasis on go and a strong rising intonation. Other forms of prompts are more explicit and may point out metalinguistically what is wrong

(for example, the teacher says,

What verb form do we use in the past? or not go in the past). Lyster (2004) says what all these prompts have in common is that they withhold the

necessary information and make learners generate repairs for themselves. Recasts don’t push the learners to repair their own utterances,

but prompts do. A prompt is different from explicit correction, which tells learners what was wrong but does not prompt them to repair it

(an example of explicit correction is: we say went in the past and not go).

Lyster (2004) tested out his hypothesis that correction from prompts would be more effective than correction from recasts. He tested 179 fifth graders studying French in Canadian immersion programs on their ability to correctly use grammatical gender in French. In French students must use the masculine or feminine form of articles and pronouns that match with the gender of the object. For example, when talking about a marshmallow, the student must say they eat la guimauve and not le guimauve (in English, both la and le would be translated as the or a, but using the masculine form le would be gram-

112 ——

SLA Myths

matically incorrect in French). Obviously this is different from English where only pronouns related to living things have gender (his versus

hers), so gender is a difficult form for English speakers of French to

master. Lyster set up four different types of treatment in the fifth grade classes, each with a different teacher. Three groups of classes received what Lyster called “form-focused instruction” on grammatical gender in French for eight to ten hours over five weeks, and the control class continued on with the same textbook as the other learners but received no special enhancement treatment with grammatical gender. The form-

focused instruction consisted of special treatment materials including a notebook where students specifically noted words that were masculine vs. feminine,

reading texts where grammatical

endings were high-

lighted, activities to figure out rules for the patterns of gender use, crossword puzzles, songs and rhymes highlighting gender, and flash cards with riddles. In the three classes that got the form-focused instruction, two received error correction along with the instruction. One of the groups got feedback through recasts and the other got feedback through prompts. Feedback was consistently given for all errors

made during the instruction period throughout the five weeks. Following the instructional period, the students took a large number of different tests including both oral and written measures. They took a delayed post-test again eight weeks later. There were many tests,

but in general we can say that students who had the form-focused instruction definitely did better than those who did not have any special instruction with grammatical gender. It was not the case, however, that instruction plus feedback was always better than instruction alone. However, in comparing the results of instruction with prompts versus instruction with recasts, the prompt group was the only one that statistically outperformed the control group on all eight measures of proficiency and their superior results were especially evident in the written tasks. A similar study by Ammar and Spada (2006) among Englishlearning Canadian immersion students on possessive pronouns compared the effectiveness of prompts and recasts in twelve 30-45 minute sessions over four weeks with three different classes (the third class was

6: Language learners benefit from correction.

——

113

the control class with a teacher who just ignored errors). The results again showed that the class that received instruction plus prompts to

correct their grammar did better than the group that received recasts and the group that simply got the instruction without any feedback. A recent meta-analysis by Lyster and Saito (2010) conducted

a

classroom-only meta-analysis of 15 studies on corrective feedback. In comparison to control groups who did not receive any corrective feed-

back, the effect size of the corrective feedback was d=.74 while the control groups had an effect size of d=.39, with no overlap in confidence

intervals around these effect sizes so we can say there were real differences between the two conditions. The Lyster and Saito (2010) meta-

analysis also compared the effects of different types of corrective feedback:

recasts, explicit correction, and prompts.

For differences

between groups that received different types of feedback, the effect size for explicit correction was the largest at d=.84, nearly the same for prompts at d=.83, and somewhat less for recasts at d=.53. However, all of these categories had overlapping confidence intervals, meaning that

we cannot say that statistically the effect sizes are different. With oral corrective feedback then, the salient features of the research would lead to these conclusions:

e Feedback can help learners to improve their spoken

grammar if the feedback is given on a focused grammatical point. e Causing learners to notice and then repair their own ungrammatical utterance on one grammatical point by

using prompts seems to be more effective than simply fixing their ungrammatical utterance by using recasts. e Studies that have shown that focused grammatical correction leads to improvements in actual speaking ability have been longer, such as four to five weeks long and set in the context of communicative activities (not drills on the grammatical form).

114 ——

SLA Myths

Written Grammar

Correction

For written grammar correction, there is still a vigorous ongoing debate

about the merits of correcting L2 writers’ written work (Ferris, 2011). The debate became heated with the publication of a controversial and thought-provoking article by Truscott (1996). Up to that point, there had been studies on whether teachers correcting all of the errors on a

piece of writing was an effective way to improve students’ accuracy in writing grammatically and using appropriate vocabulary. However, the studies

with

the most

participants

and the longest time

frames

(Kepner, 1991; Robb, Ross, & Shortreed, 1986; Semke, 1984) had found that all participating students’ grammatical accuracy improved over time and that there was no apparent advantage to the students who were receiving detailed corrections on the ungrammatical bits of their weekly writings. Truscott was the first to lay down a gauntlet to say that writing

teachers should discontinue their practice of correcting written errors. He acknowledged that this might be difficult because writing teachers typically feel a strong urge to correct student writing. And students generally say that they want their papers corrected. Despite this, Truscott

argued that teachers should abandon grammar correction. Truscott’s article (1996) lists evidence that points to the ineffectiveness and even potential harm of grammar correction, as well as the theoretical and

practical reasons that correction should be abandoned. He has insisted that the time teachers spend on error correction in the classroom would

be better spent having students do additional writing practice. Some of the reasons Truscott gives for abandoning grammar correction include:

e The teacher must realize there is an error and be able to understand what the student meant to say. This is not always clear or easy.

e Students often do not understand the corrections they receive, if they in fact even read over the corrections.

Some teachers may not be able to clearly give a metalinguistic explanation of what was wrong.

6: Language learners benefit from correction.

——

115

e Teachers are usually not systematic or consistent in

their choice of what to correct. Therefore, students receive correction on a large number of mistakes but usually not on all of the same types of mistakes. This may confuse students. e Even the best students rarely do more than make a mental note of corrections, and most do not use the corrections even on rewrites of the same material. It is

unlikely the corrections will have a long-term effect. Taken together, the argument is compelling. Truscott also noted that

for first language writing in English (writing in English by native speakers of English), there was an abundance of research and reviews of research that concluded that grammar correction was not useful. He

says, “It made no difference who the students were, how many mistakes were corrected, which mistakes were corrected, how detailed the comments were, or in what form they were presented” (Truscott, 1996,

330). Although first language acquisition is not the same as second, taken together with other evidence, Truscott’s arguments made sense to

some researchers. However, not all SLA researchers agreed with Truscott. In particular, Ferris (1999) argued that the research field was still too young to con-

clude that correction should not be undertaken at all. She admitted that it was tempting to stop correcting her students’ papers because it was so time-consuming. But Ferris believed that further research might still prove some correction was useful, especially if it was targeted to specific errors and was given consistently. Ferris also noted that most of the larger studies cited by Truscott had looked at correction in the context of a foreign language (such as American learners of German or Spanish) and few in ESL (English as a Second Language) contexts, which could be quite different. Ferris also noted that students frequently asked for feedback and felt frustrated if they didn’t get it. Hyland and Hyland (2006) also note that since the language acquisition process is slow, even attempting to test a direct relationship between written correction and improved grammatical accuracy in writing is over-simplistic. Thus,

116 ——

SLA Myths

there are also very good arguments for continuing to give students at

least some forms of corrective feedback, supplemented by in-class discussions of grammar. . Ferris (2011) notes that Truscott’s (1996) call for abandonment of written correction has stimulated research on written error correction

like nothing else in the field has. Fifteen years later, Ferris believes that there is enough new research to assert that students will improve in their ability to accurately write new pieces of work when they are given feedback about specific targeted structures. She also states that new studies have shown teachers to be fairly accurate and thorough when they provide comprehensive error feedback, contrary to what Truscott claimed. There is also some evidence according to Ferris (2011) that students do pay attention to the corrections they receive, and of course

this is much more likely if students are asked to revise their writing after receiving feedback. Another way of inducing students to become better editors of their own

work is noted by Hyland and Hyland

(2006), who say that students should be asked to invest some effort into noticing errors by being asked to look for certain types of errors within their own work before it is submitted for correction. There are no new studies that show that correcting all of the errors

in a piece of student writing is beneficial for the student, as such studies have been rare. However, Ferris (2011) believes that such comprehensive correction may be more beneficial to students than selective correction since writers need to learn how to write a polished piece of

work where all of their errors are corrected. The newer studies that have found that targeted and limited written correction has some positive effects, even two to ten months after the experiment, may be of only limited generalizability for writing teachers who have much more to concentrate on than just correcting discrete grammar points. Ferris (2011) makes the point that even if researchers have empirical evidence that corrective feedback is not effective, they will probably not be able to dissuade teachers from giving correction, and that what

is most needed is to find a way to help teachers give the most helpful types of feedback possible. Ferris’ (2011) book aims to accomplish this and provides much useful information about correction.

6: Language learners benefit from correction.

——

117

Within the SLA studies on the effectiveness of written grammar cor-

rection, many research studies that show positive effects for written correction may be confused with explicit grammar

correction.

For

example, Bitchener (2008) examined differences between groups who

received different types of feedback on one focused grammatical issue—use of the indefinite article a at the first mention of a noun and use of the definite article the for the second mention, as in the sentences I saw a movie last night. The movie made me sad. The participants

wrote a 30-minute essay in response to a picture prompt, but they only wrote at three different time periods—the pre-test, the immediate posttest, and the delayed post-test two months

later. The groups that

received direct correction of their errors, either with or without written metalinguistic feedback attached to the error and with or without a 30minute

information

session, all scored much

more

highly on the

immediate post-test than the control group who only received evaluative written feedback on their work. For the delayed post-test the control group did improve in accuracy about direct correction groups

maintained

10 percent, but all of the

a 15-20

percent improvement

rates even two months later. The Bitchener (2008) study illustrates that focused attention on error correction in written work can result in improvement in gram-

matical accuracy. As with the work on the usefulness of teaching grammar explicitly versus implicitly, focused correction seems able to result

in some gains in grammatical accuracy, but these effects have not been tested as to their long-term robustness.

Few long-term studies have

been done, but Robb, Ross, and Shortreed (1986) is such a study. It

examined

the effects of comprehensive writing feedback over the

course of two college semesters. In this study, participants had to revise

their papers according to the feedback they received, and groups were large, with 30-40 participants per group. However,

Robb, Ross, and

Shortreed (1986) found that students who received detailed feedback on all of their errors were not any more likely to be accurate in their grammar

than students who simply received their papers with the

number of errors per line marked in the margin.

118 ——

SLA Myths

For written grammar correction then, keep these things in mind: e Written feedback seems to help learners to improve

their grammar in subsequent writings if the feedback is given on a highly focused grammatical point that can be easily summarized as a rule. However, these types of errors may not matter as much as other errors that are more disruptive to accurately understanding what the writer wants to say, such as word choice errors or lack of cohesion within the writing. e It is unlikely that correcting all of the errors within a piece of writing is a good use of teachers’ time as students are not apt to put this information to good use.

e If you go to the trouble of making corrections, take action to make sure students notice these corrections,

such as asking them to rewrite based on corrections or

make a log of the types of errors they are making. In fact, it may be good practice to ask students to examine their writing for specific types of errors you want them to try to correct before they submit their work. This way you are helping them learn how to become more self-sufficient writers.

WhatWe Can Do ~ 1. Give correction consistently and over an extended period of time. Correction can be effective but has not been shown to be so when given randomly and inconsistently if the matter at hand is grammar. If correction is given in order to help students improve their grammar, it probably has the highest chance of helping students if teachers consistently and persistently correct the error over a period of time.

6: Language learners benefit from correction.

——

119

2. Use more explicit types of correction like prompts. Especially for lower-level students, implicit oral correction in the form of recasts is probably not noticed by a majority of the learners. To help lower-level students more, use correction that lets the student know there is a problem with their utterance.

3. Especially for lower-level learners, if you are going to correct, use more explicit types of correction that are more easily noticed. Explicit correction and prompts are about equally effective in the classroom

in terms of getting students to improve their grammar orally.

This example shows different types of corrective feedback that could be given to the student who made a mistake with the plural in English: Student: | have two brother and one sister.

Explicit metalinguistic correction: You need to put an s on a noun that is plural, so you say two brothers.

Explicit correction: No, not two brother; it's two brothers. Prompt (elicitation): What should the word be after two?

Prompt (metalinguistic cue): We use the plural form of

the noun after two. Prompt (repetition): Two BROTHER? (with rising intonation)

Prompt (clarification request): Could you say that again? The difference between explicit correction and prompts is that prompts do not give the student the correct form but ask the student to provide that information themselves.

120 ——

SLA Myths

4. For writing, correction of all errors is not an effective use of teacher time. Consider other options. If you are collecting writing from students in the context of a four-skills class, it is probably not an effective use of the teacher's time to correct all errors on student writing. It would be better to either target certain pervasive errors for an extended period of time or just concentrate on non-rule governed problems such as word choice or logical argumentation. If you are teaching an entire class on writing, focusing in on grammar errors that you are also explaining in class and for which you can provide clear rules seems to be effective. It certainly seems worthwhile to have students rewrite compositions using any corrections that you provide so areas needing correction will at least have to be noticed by students.

5. Help students learn to be more aware of their own grammar errors. We want to help students learn to be more self-sufficient in finding errors on their own. Correction may not be the best way of doing this. One suggestion for oral language is to have students tape themselves, transcribe their words, and check the transcription for problems (Swain & Lapkin, 1989). The teacher can then focus in on common student mistakes in class, along with metalinguistic explanations (keeping the explanation time short, perhaps 10 minutes at a maximum).

One idea for written

language is to ask students to check their papers for one type of mistake at a time (for example, checking nouns that are plural and making sure they contain plural endings).

VEY i

Individual differences are a major, perhaps the major, factor in SLA.

In the Real World This is Steve. When I was teaching in Sendai, Japan, my fellow students

in Japanese as a foreign language classes were other EFL teachers. For

the first year, we were all highly motivated newcomers who needed the basics. Perhaps three years later, I joined a friend in a semi-private les-

son. Both of us were head teachers (for rival language schools), and we wanted to work on business Japanese in order to participate more fully in the meetings that we had with prospective corporate clients. Our needs were congruent, and our learning styles, though different, meshed reasonably well. Still later, I joined another friend in a lesson. Though we shared the same approximate level of Japanese proficiency, our goals were at that point murky (“improvement” in our speaking) and, more important, our learning styles were dissimilar. My friend was a more kinesthetic learner than I, and he was quite conscious that he was that kind of learner; he enjoyed movement and, particularly, enjoyed learning songs. It is a good idea for foreigners in Japan to learn

121

122 ——

SLA Myths

to sing karaoke, and if you sing a traditional Japanese song, you certainly will be feted. However, that was not my goal at the time, nor was

the kinesthetic my style. We decided not to renew the lesson when the

term was over. We all have our individual differences in the ways we prefer to learn. Some of us are good language learners and others struggle. Some are anxious and others laid back. Some seek out contact and others wait to be contacted. Our learning styles clash with teacher styles, and with the styles of other learners when we work together in pairs or groups. Sometimes these mismatches lead to less than optimal learning. Students may be trying, but they may be trying in what the teacher or system sees as the wrong way. But just how important are individual differences to SLA? I've often heard it said by teachers that the success a student has in learning a second language ultimately comes down to individual differences, to learning styles, motivation, etc. We will look at a number of possible reasons that people learn languages differently (and with different results). The main areas we will survey are learning styles, personality, anxiety, aptitude, motivation, and willingness to communicate. Then we will look to the future of individual differences research. We will see that the results for the power of individual differences are rather mixed. Most of us want to believe that individual differences are important. I did when I began writing this chapter. It’s common sense that we're all different. Some researchers would ask, however, if it really makes sense that our brains work differently while our hearts and the rest of our body parts do not. Individual differences doubtless

exist at some level, but are they a major factor in language learning?

7: Individual differences are a major factor in SLA. ——

123

What the Research Says Cognitive Styles and Learning Styles Over the years, researchers have been concerned with finding the attitudes, styles, and behaviors that successful learners share. An early attempt to answer this question was Rubin (1975), who said that good language learners have seven characteristics in common:

e an ability and a willingness to guess ¢ a desire to communicate and an ability to use strategies

when communication is difficult a lack of inhibition ¢ aconcern for linguistic form a drive to practice

e an ability to monitor their speech and the speech of others

a concern for meaning (not just form) Though some have thought that there are optimal ways to learn, there has always been a realization that not everyone learns in the same way. Educational theorists talk a lot about the necessity for recog-

nizing that different learners get and process their information in different ways. They say that some

people are quite analytical, while

others think holistically. Some people learn aurally, and others visually. Styles are supposedly part of our makeup

and cannot

readily be

changed. The term styles itself has been a subject of some discussion in SLA research, as there has been confusion between cognitive styles and learning styles. Is one an aspect of the other? Basically, cognitive styles are the ways that people generally approach problem-solving, thinking,

and remembering.

Learning styles are the ways in which

people

approach learning situations (Cassidy, 2004). One cognitive style that has been long and rather extensively researched

in SLA is field independence

(FI) and field dependence

(FD). Field independence is the ability to separate a figure from the

124 —— SLA Myths ground surrounding it, to see the trees in the forest. Field dependence is

the ability to see the whole forest. Field independence has been associated with analytic approaches, introversion, and pattern detection, so

FI learners would be expected to do well at formal language learning and tests. Field dependence has been associated with seeing the whole picture and with people skills, so FD learners would be expected to do well in communicative

situations. You can see that such claims are

interesting to language researchers. However, research in field (in)dependence has been questioned from many angles, from its research methodology (testing the ability of subjects to find embedded figures in a complex larger figure, which has little to do with language) to its probable confusion with general language learning aptitude

and/or intelligence (Skehan, 1998; Chapelle & Green, 1992). This basic idea that learning styles divide between those who see wholes and those who see parts has remained influential over the

years. The psychologist Riding and his colleagues, for example, discusses cognitive style in two dimensions: the wholist-analytic and the verbaliser-imager. The wholist-analytic dimension measures the extent to which individuals see things as a whole or in parts, while the verbaliser-imager dimension

measures

whether individuals see

information in terms of words or pictures. Rayner and Riding (1997) then see learning style as comprised of cognitive style, as above, plus affective and motivational aspects of learning. Ehrman and Leaver (2003) view learning styles as a continuum between synopsis (preference for unconscious or preconscious learning and for seeing wholes) and ectasis (preference for conscious learning and for seeing things as composites). Arguably the best-known line of research on learning styles with direct application to ELT originated with Reid (1987). Reid developed a self-report questionnaire targeted for use with non-native speakers of English in intensive English programs.

It presented a series of state-

ments directed at finding preferences for visual, auditory, kinesthetic (experiential), and tactile (“hands on”) learning, as well as preferences for group and individual learning. (Some subsequent work has merged kinesthetic and tactile learning into one category, sometimes

called

7: Individual differences are a major factor in SLA. ——

125

“haptic.”) Reid found that the students she studied showed a strong preference for kinesthetic and tactile learning and did not enjoy group

learning. There were differences among language groups, as well as differences between genders and among major fields of study, level of education, and time spent in the United States, but, overall, the majority showed preferences for kinesthetic, tactile, and individual learning. Reid addressed the problems of teacher-student mismatch in styles (many teachers use the aural mode for information presentation) and called for teaching students how to recognize their styles. Reid’s questionnaire was submitted to scrutiny by Wintergerst, DeCapua, and Itzen (2001). They gave Reid’s questionnaire to 100 ESL students in New York City. Statistical analysis of the questionnaire found problems with Reid’s model. They found that the questions clustered into different themes or scales than Reid found. The learning styles scales were Group Activity Orientation, Individual Activity Orientation, and Project Orientation. No clear trends emerged that matched language groups and style preferences. This is not to say that Reid's ideas or the idea of perceptual differences in learning styles are invalid. It only says that her questionnaire could not be validated by this study. Wintergerst, DeCapua, and Verna (2003), using their Learning Styles Indicator, found preferences for group and project work among Russian EFL students and Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) ESL students. Indeed, both groups preferred working in groups while working on projects. The Russian ESL learners in the study preferred working in groups, but not necessarily while working on projects. These findings contradict Reid (1987), who found that no language groups preferred group work. Of course, some cultures are more collectivistic and others more individualistic, and we might expect this fact, as well as the increased use of, and thus student exposure to, group work in EFL, to have an influence on results. Despite many attempts at analyzing student learning preferences, the research in general leaves learning styles as a comparatively weak factor in language learning. As we have seen, this research generally uses a questionnaire to gather student learning preferences. Answers

126 ——

SLA Myths

within the questionnaire are grouped to find general patterns of preferences or styles. There are complex issues involved here. First of all, selfreport data is only as good as the person

who

reports it. Is the

respondent aware, answering truthfully, and taking the questions seriously? Second, though the attempt is to find individual differences,

these studies ultimately stereotype learners as members of larger communities. (For example, Japanese students don’t like pair work.) Third,

the studies are ultimately based on correlations, some more sophisticated than others (see the box below). We may indeed observe connections, but not always know what they mean or what to do with the results. What does it mean that some students like group work and others don’t? How attentive do we need to be to preferences, especially

if we know that there is evidence that group work is effective? cc

Correlation RS

When researchers want to report connections between two phenomena, they often, at the most basic level, report correlation. Correlation attempts to link one thing to another through measuring co-occurrence. A perfect positive correlation is +1.0. This means that for every measure one factor goes up, the other measure also increases. This can happen in reverse, leading to negative correlations up to —1.0. For example, high-aptitude scores (logically) correlate negatively with the length of time students need to reach a certain proficiency in language. A correlation coefficient of 0 means there is no relationship at all. In research, a correlation coefficient of | .30-.60 is usual, with .30 being relatively weak and .60 and above being relatively high. To get a better idea of what correlation coefficients measure, it is always helpful to square them. So, a correlation coefficient of .60 gives us 36 percent. That means that whatever factors we have found to be correlated explain 36 percent of the “variance,” which in turn means that the relationship between the two factors accounts for only 36 percent of everything that we are trying to explain.

7: Individual differences are a major factor in SLA. ——

127

TABLE 8: Cognitive/Learning Style Factors Wholistic/analytical vs. verbalizer/imager

Rayner & Riding (1997)

Synopsis/ectasis scale

Ehrman & Leaver (2003)

Visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile

Reid (1987)

group/individual learning Group activity, orientation, individual activity |Wintergerst, DeCapua, & Itzen (2001) orientation, project orientation

Wintergerst, DeCapua, & Verna (2003)

Part of the lack of definitiveness we see in studies of learning styles may have to do with what we might charitably call the elasticity of the definition of “style,” which has morphed to occasionally include preferences not only for group work but also for classroom environments (as in Bailey, Onwuegbuzie, & Daley, 2000). This leaves us some distance from the idea of a fixed, internalized style of learning. In fact, in a highly critical review of 13 learning style models, Coffield, Moseley, Hall, and Ecclestone (2004) suggest that the results of learning style instruments might be most useful as the topic for discussions between adult learners (their focus) and their teachers. These discussions might lead to self-awareness and improved metacognition (thinking about learning). The discussions may well provide a lexicon for learners to use to talk about their learning. However, Coffield et al. also say that there is little evidence that people actually change their preferred styles, which might render the discussions moot. Table 8 summarizes four models of cognitive/learning styles.

Personality Factors in Language Learning Another long-time factor of interest in SLA has been personality factors. Language learning is an intense, personal, often emotional experi-

ence. Individuals naturally bring their personalities to bear on their learning. Personality in psychology and in SLA research concerns itself with stable traits in a person, predispositions to approaching life in a certain way. In the early days of language research, factors such as inhibition, risk-taking, empathy, introversion/extroversion, and tolerance

128 ——

SLA Myths

of ambiguity were examined (Skehan, 1989; Dornyei, 2005). You can

see how each of these factors would be helpful to language learning. Uninhibited,

risk-taking, extroverted individuals probably would be

very good at getting input, at picking up language from talking with people. Empathy is the ability to take someone else’s perspective, so it too would be valuable in naturalistic language learning. Introverts

might do well in the classroom. Tolerance of ambiguity can be defined as the capacity to avoid worrying about new situations or situations in which there are mixed messages. To be a good language learner, you obviously need a certain capacity to get past initial anxiety at these sit-

uations. Unfortunately, again, the results are mixed and the evidence is thin. An important study of personality factors in language acquisition is MacIntyre and Charos (1996). Students in adult evening French classes in Canada were asked to complete questionnaires about their learning attitudes and motivations, their language learning contexts, and their personalities. When the data were subjected to analysis, twelve of fifteen factors were found to be significantly related to each other and to frequency of L2 communication. The researchers suggest that communication in L2, in this bilingual situation at least, is facilitated by learners being motivated, willing to engage other people, having opportunities for contact, and being confident in their communicative abilities. Personality was implicated to the extent only that it can contribute to attitudes toward and motivation for language learning, including anxiety and the willingness to communicate. Thus, personality was related to communication, not to acquisition. Personality is in this case best considered a secondary factor in acquisition. The assumption is that personality leads to interaction, which leads to acquisition.

Ehrman and Oxford (1995) found quite small effects for personality factors, though they argued, with relatively slight evidence, that tolerance of ambiguity and a skeptical approach to learning were potentially important. Verhoeven and Vermeer (2002) found that the aspects of personal-

ity most correlated with attainment of communicative competence in

7: Individual differences are a major factor in SLA. ——

129

TABLE 9: Personality Factors Personality factors are tied to attitudes, motivation, anxiety, willingness to communicate.

Macintyre & Charos (1996)

Tolerance of ambiguity and a skeptical approach to learning are important.

Ehrman & Oxford (1995)

Openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, and extroversion are important in elementary school.

Verhoeven & Vermeer (2002)

sixth graders, both L1 Dutch and L2 Dutch (of Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds), were openness to experience, agreeableness, emotional stability, conscientiousness, and extraversion. Among the L2 Dutch learners, openness to experience and, less so, conscientiousness, were central to the acquisition of communicative skills. Table 9 presents current personality factors of interest. Personality factors like openness to experience, conscientiousness, tolerance of ambiguity, and extroversion remain intriguing factors for study, though all probably have more to say about naturalistic language learning than classroom learning. However, the evidence is not strong that any of these factors plays a deciding role in SLA.

Emotions Emotions are another interesting factor, a situational one rather than an innate one. MacIntyre (2002) recognizes language learning as a

highly emotional endeavor. Emotions are tied to attitudes and motivation. In fact, emotions are the triggers that get people moving from goals and orientations to action, or the triggers that stop action. MacIntyre argues for more attention to emotions as a significant factor in individual differences. He names anxiety as a fundamental emotion. Horwitz and her colleagues (Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope, 1986) posited a situation-specific Foreign Language Anxiety, measurable on the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS). Responses to the FLCAS by U.S. university foreign language learners revealed that one-third

of students were

frightened by not understanding

the

130 ——

SLA Myths

teacher. More than one-third of the students sampled worried that other students were superior language learners. Almost two-thirds of students worried about making mistakes. Thirty-eight percent felt more nervous in their language class than any other class (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986, 130). This paper launched a series of studies over the years. While initial reports focused on listening/speaking, later studies

looked at anxiety in reading and writing classes (Horwitz, 2010). It may be that anxiety is different in the classrooms of different cultures. Yan and Horwitz (2008) interviewed EFL learners in China about what made them anxious when studying languages. Factors such as comparison with peers, learning strategies, and learning interest/moti-

vation influenced the Chinese students’ anxiety directly. Issues like regional differences in learner origins, test types, gender, class arrangements, teacher characteristics, parental influence, and language aptitude were more indirect factors, related to comparison with peers and language learning strategies in the model. Thus, there are a multitude

of factors to consider when thinking about anxiety, and some of these factors are sociocultural. The study of how emotions impact language learning is intriguing,

but it remains in its infancy.

Aptitude Aptitude is what allows people to learn easily and quickly. Researchers have shown that language aptitude is related to language learning achievement. The correlation between

between

aptitude and achievement is

.4 and .6 in most studies, moderately strong correlations

explaining 16-36 percent of the variance (Carroll, 1981, 93). Though

many researchers believe that aptitude is an important variable, it is also widely believed that aptitude is closely related to intelligence, and perhaps also to working memory (Skehan, 1998; Grigorenko, Sternberg, and Ehrman, 2000). That is, there may be complex relationships among all three factors that necessitate caution in pronouncing aptitude unambiguously responsible for achievement.

7: Individual differences are a major factor in SLA.

——

131

Much effort has been expended on conceptualizing the factors that

make

up language

learning aptitude.

John Carroll

(1981,

1990)

devised the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT). It has been very

effective at predicting success in formal settings. According to Carroll, language aptitude has four factors or aspects. The first is phonemic coding ability, the ability to associate sound and symbols. In alphabetic languages, this is the ability to spell well. The second is grammatical sensitivity, being good at or aware

of grammar.

The third is

inductive language-learning ability, the ability to notice patterns and relationships, and the ability to extrapolate from examples. The fourth is rote-learning ability, the ability, for example, to learn lists quickly and easily. Skehan (1998) later saw language ability as consisting of

auditory ability, linguistic ability, and memory ability. A major question revolves around the relationship of L1 and L2

language aptitude. Is someone who is especially skilled in his or her own language, who is a good speaker or writer, and who has a large vocabulary more inclined to do well in a foreign language than someone less skilled in L1? Early work by Skehan

(1990) found a link

between L1 development and foreign language aptitude in British adolescents, suggesting that those who were skilled users of their native

language would do well in foreign language classes. Sparks and Ganschow (2001) believe that L1 ability has an effect on L2 development beyond all other factors. Their Linguistic Coding Differences Hypothesis says that problems in L1 literacy skills, like difficulties with spelling and single word recognition, correlate with problems in L2 learning. They say that foreign language learners who have stronger skills in their first language are more successful and ultimately more proficient than those with weaker L1 skills. Many researchers have suggested that aptitude in both first and second languages is related to phonological memory. Phonological memory is what allows us to process and briefly retain information that we hear; it is an aspect of working memory, and has been implicated in strong reading and vocabulary skills. (See Juffs and Harrington, 2011, for an overview of working memory.)

132 —— SLA Myths In a longitudinal study of first to third grade Finnish EFL students (Dufva and Voeten, 1999), the strongest predictor of L2 English proficiency was speed of recognition of L1 words. L1 comprehension skills and phonological memory made almost equal, but lesser, contributions. Together, the three factors contributed 58 percent of the variance

in English language proficiency among the children. Thus, children

with good first language skills learned a second language effectively. Finally, it may be that aptitude is not one thing but many. Robinson (2007) argues for the idea of aptitude complexes, bundles of abilities that may work differently with different techniques or in different contexts, such as during recasts, listening to oral input, doing written work, and explicit rule-learning. Let's look at his example of the aptitudes useful for learning from recasts. To benefit from a recast, a learner must have the ability to notice the gap between the recast and what she said. This is linked to memory for contingent speech (sufficient memory to allow the comparison). These two abilities are in turn

based on what Robinson calls “primary abilities” (274). These are perceptual speed and pattern recognition for notice the gap and phonolog-

ical working memory capacity (PWM) and speed of PWM for memory for contingent speech. This is a very interesting direction that Robinson will doubtless expand on and refine in the future.

Among the individual differences addressed so far, aptitude has a relatively long history of showing that it is a potentially important factor in SLA. Several factors have been hypothesized as comprising aptitude (see Table 10). More research needs to be done to answer the TABLE 10: Factors in Aptitude Intelligence, working memory

Skehan (1998)

Phonemic coding ability, grammatical sensitivity, inductive language learning ability, rote learning ability

Carroll (1981, 1990)

Aural, linguistic, and memory abilities

Skehan (1998)

L2 language aptitude tied to L1 aptitude (word processing abilities)

Aptitude complexes: Abilities work in concert and are situation-specific

|

Sparks & Ganschow (2002); Dufva & Voeten (1999)

Robinson (2007)

7: Individual differences are a major factor in SLA.

——

133

question if aptitiude is a unified construct, or a bundle of constructs. We also need to disentangle aptitide from general intelligence, working memory, and native language abilities.

Motivation CLASSIC VIEWS

OF MOTIVATION

The study of motivation has been yet another long-time concern in SLA, one that has made a good argument for its relevance to language acquisition. Gardner's socio-educational model (Gardner & Lambert, 1972; Masgoret & Gardner, 2003) was long the theory of motivation

used in SLA. The socio-educational model sees achievement in language learning as being linked to five factors. The first is integrativeness—openness to and favorable attitudes toward other groups, as well

as interest in foreign languages. Second is attitudes toward the language learning situation, the teacher, and the class. Third is motivation:

effort, goals, and reactions to success or failure. Fourth is integrative orientation, a desire to join the target language group in some way.

Fifth is instrumental orientation, an approach to learning that focuses

on external reasons for study, like grades or exams. Scores on these factors are based on the ATMB (Attitude/Motivation Test Battery), a series of statements regarding language learning to which learners respond by agreeing or disagreeing. The problem with these studies is that they tend to be based on self-report questionnaires. We never see the actual

effort. Nevertheless, Gardner and other associates have accumulated a large number of studies that have correlated achievement in language learning with motivation. Though they find that all five factors in the

socio-educational model are correlated with achievement, Masgoret and Gardner (2003) calculate that motivation is more powerful than the other factors, accounting for 8-16 percent of the variance. They

also say the results of their meta-analysis support the finding that integrative motivation leads to success in language learning. The traditional view has been that integrative motivation reflects a desire to become part of the second language speech community while

134 ——

SLA Myths

instrumental motivation comes from the need to pass a test or learn a

language for a job. Some factors in integrative motivation

might

include attitudes toward L2 speakers; interest in foreign languages; atti-

tudes toward courses and teachers; and desire to learn the L2. Integrative motivation has traditionally been seen as more powerful than instrumental motivation. Actually, integrative motivation may simply be the more researched type of motivation, and there may be more to instrumental motivation than we know (Gardner and Tremblay, 1994). Also, it is important to note that Gardner has more frequently spoken of an integrative orientation than motivation per se.

Orientation, as it is involved in the selection of goals, is a sort of precursor to motivation. MOTIVATION

IS SITUATED

Nevertheless, the concept of integrative motivation may not be applicable in the majority of foreign language learning situations. (The Gardner studies were done in bilingual Canada.) A person learning Japanese in

Ohio or English in rural Japan has limited possibilities for becoming part of the target language community. In foreign language learning situations, students not studying for instrumental reasons may largely be

studying the language to travel, participate in the target culture through media, or to talk with friends, either face-to-face or electronically. Motivation may then be situated, varying across societies and cultures. Societies may have specific needs for (often specific) languages, or sociohistorical conditions may influence attitudes toward language learning. Chen, Warden, and Chang (2005) argue that motivation is not universal. In a study of motivation in Tawian, learners were oriented to requirements and test preparation and integrativeness played no part. Kouritzin, Piquemal, and Renaud (2009) surveyed a large number of university students in France, Japan, and Canada about their motivations for language learning and found differences. Students in France reported a variety of motivations. Travel, culture, and better knowing people from other countries were top motivators. In Japan, respondents gave reasons that stressed the social value of language learning: the education system supports it, it is natural to know

7: Individual differences are a major factor in SLA. ——

135

more than one language, and foreign language is an important school subject. In Canada, students more than in the other countries stressed

that learning languages brought social, educational, and economic opportunities. They also saw the value of languages for travel and cultural understanding. Lamb

(2004) argues that globalization may have lessened the

desire to integrate. Instead, learners may be aspiring to bicultural identities, an English-speaking global self and an L1-speaking local self. EVOLVING Motivation

VIEWS

OF MOTIVATION

may be situated in contexts smaller than societies. For

example, Dornyei (2003) urges us to consider the effects of motivation on learners from courses, teachers, peer groups, and tasks. Dornyei (2003) further argues that motivation is a dynamic process, subject to fluctuation, and to starts and stops. He sees three main stages in motivation. First of all, motivation must be generated and goals selected. Then, motivation must be maintained over time. Finally, motivation

needs to be evaluated by the learner. From a practical pedagogical standpoint, this entails creating the necessary conditions for students

to be motivated (a good classroom atmosphere, for example); generating student motivation (for example, making materials relevant); sus-

taining motivation (creating a positive, challenging environment); and

encouraging an atmosphere in which students can evaluate their efforts (positive feedback, motivating rewards). Another way to conceptualize motivation is through SelfDetermination Theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000; Noels, Pelletier, Clement, and Vallerand, 2003), which is concerned with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation happens when someone does something for its inherent satisfaction. The task is fun, challenging, novel, or aesthetically pleasing. Intrinsic motivation requires competence and autonomy, feelings of self-worth, and self-determination. Punishments and rewards undermine intrinsically motivated activities. Extrinsic motivation involves tasks done for instrumental reasons; even tasks that are self-assigned may not be intrinsically motivated if they are done out of a sense of obligation. However, it may be that tasks origi-

136 —— SLA Myths TABLE

11: Factors in Motivation

Integrativeness, attitudes, motivation, integrative orientation, instrumental orientation

Gardner and colleagues—e.g., Masgoret &

Requirements and test preparation

Chen, Warden, & Chang (2005)

Travel, culture, knowing people from other

Kouritzin, Piquemal, & Renaud (2009)

Gardner (2003), Gardner & Tremblay (1994)

countries, social value, and economic, social

and educational opportunities Global identity

Lamb (2004)

Intrinsic/extrinsic motivation

Ryan & Deci (2000); Noels, Pelletier, Clément, & Vallerand (2003)

nally undertaken with an extrinsic motivation may become intrinsi-

cally motivated. For example, someone forced to study piano may realize that she actually loves playing. Motivation, like aptitude, has a long history in SLA. It is also being

reconceptualized, with a number of factors being discussed (see Table 11). It remains to be seen just how powerful new models of motivation will be in explaining success, or lack of it, in language learning.

Willingness to Communicate Even if learners are motivated, possess high aptitude, and have factors

like personality and learning styles working in their favor, they still need to make the choice to communicate (MacIntyre, 2007). The concept of Willingness to Communicate (WTC) has thus become an intriguing factor to research. WTC means just what it says: the degree to which a student is ready to communicate to a certain person at a particular time, perhaps simply to raise a hand to answer a teacher's

question. While WTC in L1 has been largely conceived of as a personality trait, one that is related to factors such as introversion/extroversion, self-esteem, and perceived competence in communication, WIC in L2 has been conceived as a mix ofsituational factors and predispositions. MacIntyre, Clément, and Dornyei (1998) offer a layered model of WIC. Their situational factors include an opportunity, a

7: Individual differences are a major factor in SLA. ——

137

desire and a plan to communicate, along with the self-confidence to do so. Stable factors include motivation, attitudes, self-confidence in second language communicative competence, and personality, among others. The WIC model continues to be refined. Wen and Clément (2003) suggest that cultural factors such as teacher-student and intragroup factors, as well as societal norms for communication, might be important to consider in a model of WTC. Yashima (2002) found that an “international posture” contributed to WIC among Japanese students. Students who were more international in their outlook were more willing to communicate in English.

The Future of Individual Differences Research Thinking about individual differences has changed over time from a focus on individual differences as traits to what might be called individual differences as situated or even individual differences in use. While aptitude was once thought to be fixed, we now see it as linked to different learning situations (Robinson, 2007). Motivation is seen as a dynamic process (Dérnyei, 2005). Process thus seems to be the over-riding concern of early twentyfirst century theorizing about individual differences. Dérnyei (2009a) thinks this is a problem. He says, “If we take a situated and process-oriented perspective of SLA, we cannot fail to realize that the various learner attributes display a considerable amount of variation from time

to time and from situation to situation” (Dérnyei, 2009a, 232). Those attributes were supposed to be fixed, unchanging. If the attributes actually change, the model itself needs to change. For me, a process approach would seem to necessitate metacognitive skills on the learner’s part. Learners need to be able to think about their own learning: how to plan for it, how to structure it, and how to

evaluate it (recognize when it’s being effective or ineffective). Meta-cognition is not itself a trait but rather something that can be taught (though, as with anything that can be taught, some people are better at it than others). Meta-cognition is to some degree related to learner

138 —— SLA Myths beliefs, the store of information that students accumulate about language learning and classrooms over time. These beliefs might be helpful (it’s a good idea to use flash cards to study vocabulary) or unhelpful (listening is difficult and it makes me anxious). Dérnyei (2009b) goes farther, speaking of “the individual differences myth.” He makes many excellent points, but I'll mention three here. First, what he calls “three other personality facets—emotions, interests, and general knowledge” might be just as important as some of the other traditional individual difference factors. Second, individual difference research has rarely been about individuals; the purpose has been to lump people together and label traits. Third, cognition, motivation,

affect, and the environment

all have an effect on

each

other. As N. Ellis and Larsen-Freeman (2006, 563) put it, “To attribute causality to any variable (or even a constellation of variables) without

taking time and context into account is misguided. The fact is the effect of variables waxes and wanes.” Dornyei and Ellis and Larsen-Freeman argue for a Dynamic System Theory approach to SLA. They feel that such an approach would best capture the constantly changing system that is language. Research in this approach is steadily gaining ground. MacIntyre and Legatto (2011), for example, have begun to re-conceptualize Willingness to Communicate from a Dynamic System perspective and offer a qualitative method

for capturing real-time changes in WTC

that might be

applied to other affective variables such as anxiety. The future of individual differences research is at this point somewhat murky. We are starting to see new ways of thinking about individual differences, but it will take some time for a clearer picture to emerge. The new challenges to individual differences research may well be answered. However, overall, individual differences, at least at this point in time, cannot be unambiguously said to be a deciding factor in SLA.

7: Individual differences are a major factor in SLA. ——

139

What Can We Do? Whether individual differences research ultimately changes directions or even disappears, teachers are faced with the reality that some people have more natural abilities than others. I’m not claiming that what follows does anything more than respond to teachers’ needs to differenti-

ate instruction. Differentiating instruction is still a possible strategy. I would say we should not put all our energies into it.

1. Consider individualizing instruction and/or teaching strategies. The standard response to the fact of individual differences has been to

prescribe one of two approaches: the self-directed language-learning model or the language learner strategy model (Wenden, 2002). The self-directed language-learning model

is also known

as self-

access learning (Gardner & Miller, 1999) and is tied strongly to the concepts of learner autonomy

and the learner-centered

curriculum

(Nunan, 1988). It usually involves needs analysis, the determination of

what learners need to know (as opposed to beginning with a set syllabus) and individualized materials, or at least an opportunity for stu-

dents to choose from among a variety of tasks and materials. A crucial part of self-directed language learning is a component

that teaches

learners how to learn: how to plan, monitor, and assess their own

learning. Some nods to learner autonomy are regularly seen in classrooms: choice in reading materials like graded readers and listening stations with a variety of tasks come immediately to mind. However,

self-access learning is not easy to set up or implement. It requires a tremendous

commitment,

certainly

of time

and

frequently

of

resources. It also, at least on the surface, flies in the face of trends in the United States toward high-stakes testing, rigidly imposed performance objectives, and the desire that everyone follow the same curriculum because “it will be on the test.” That's not to say that teachers should

140 ——

SLA Myths

ignore the principles of learner autonomy; it's only to say that following those principles can be difficult for the average teacher.

More common

is learner strategy training. Strategies “are specific

actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferrable to new

situations” (Oxford, 1990, 8). Strategy training can take different forms, but usually involves explicit teaching of language learning and language use strategies as well as an effort to integrate those strategies

into language learning. Typical strategies that are taught and practiced are guessing words in context when reading and various strategies for

learning and remembering new words. Probably the most common

framework for teaching strategies is that of O’Malley and Chamot (1990). They divide strategies into meta-cognitive,

cognitive, and

social/affective. Meta-cognitive strategies are those that learners use to plan and

monitor their own learning. Examples are previewing the material—for example, skimming a reading to get a general idea of what it contains. Students may decide where to direct their attention; for example, in a

listening passage, they may read the instructions and listen selectively to the parts of the passage that seem most important. When listening

or reading, successful learners will self-monitor to make sure that their understanding of the text is holding together. Successful learners will also self-evaluate after completing tasks to make sure that their goals

were met and to plan further learning. Cognitive strategies include using reference materials like dictionaries and grammars; repetition for practice; making use of prior knowledge to understand new information; and elaborating by relating parts of new information to old or to other parts of new information. Social/affective strategies include cooperating with other learners, asking clarification questions, and putting oneself in a position to get useful input. More recently, Hsiao and Oxford (2002) have argued that six cate-

gories more accurately describe the notion of strategies. They would divide O'Malley and Chamot's cognitive category into memory, cognitive, and compensation strategies and their social/affective strategies

7: Individual differences are a major factor in SLA. ——

in two. This would category.

141

leave meta-cognitive strategies as a separate

Hsiao and Oxford’s grouping raises the important issue of differentiating strategies for learning from strategies for use or compensation. Compensatory strategies are those used to make up for gaps in knowledge, like guessing words in context or circumlocution, coining new

words when one doesn’t know the proper one (air ball for balloon, for example). They are part of language use rather than language learning (though, of course, use can lead to learning). Many textbooks and most teachers have incorporated some version of strategy training into classrooms. Strategies are certainly a necessary

part—not the whole answer, but a necessary part—of language learning. Strategies are necessary because they offer students a chance to take control of their own learning, either proactively or in terms of compensation for difficulties they are experiencing. (For an extensive listing of strategies aimed at the teacher, see Oxford, 1990.) However, strategy training has been criticized, often fairly, as the presentation of decontextualized lists of possible actions. Here is a list of five strategies. Let’s practice and apply them. Then let’s do the next

five. The problem is: How are students supposed to select the appropriate strategy at the appropriate time, once they leave the classroom? For me,

it makes

sense to limit the number

of strategies chosen

and to

focus our efforts clearly on meta-cognitive strategies, and, in fact, on the larger idea of meta-cognition. I have already spoken of meta-cognition as being an emerging theme in SLA, but the field is lagging behind a larger trend in education. In a meta-review of variables related to

effective learning in U.S. schools, the most important student factor was meta-cognition: “comprehension monitoring, use of self-regulatory, self-control strategies, and the use of strategies to facilitate generalization of concepts” (Wang, Haertel, & Walberg, 1990, 37). The authors call for wider training in meta-cognition to help students learn more effectively. Among the three “key findings” of a report on PK-12 education by the National Research Council in the United States (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000) is a call for a meta-cognitive approach to instruction (see Table 12).

142 —— SLA Myths TABLE 12: Key Findings of Bransford, Brown, & Cocking (2000) 1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught . . . (pp. 14-15)

2. To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must: (a) have a deep founda-

tion of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.

(p. 16) 3. A “metacognitive” approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them.

(p. 18)

In SLA research, Goh (2008) argues for the necessity of meta-cognitive knowledge (person knowledge, how you best learn), task knowledge (what the task is and what it requires), and meta-cognitive strategies (planning and monitoring the performance of tasks). A newer, but as yet not fully developed approach, is to focus not on strategies or their use, but on learners’ self-regulatory capacities (Tseng, Dornyei, & Schmitt, 2006). Self-regulation is what drives the learner to search for optimal ways to learn, ways that ultimately need to be selfdirected, personal, and appropriate to given situations. This includes strategy use but also includes self-evaluation and self-motivation. Of course the obvious questions are: Do students already do this, and, if they don’t, where do students learn to do this? It remains to be seen how we can alert students to the need for self-regulation and encourage its development. Can that even be done? Is the possession of this desire to succeed itself something innate?

2. Try to provide something for everyone. Self-access learning and strategy training are well established in lan-

guage learning. The specific acknowledgement of learning styles in the classroom is perhaps more controversial as a teaching strategy, as the research base is too thin. Tight (2010), in fact, says that tasks using a

7: Individual differences are a major factor in SLA. ——

143

mix of modalities, rather than those matching instruction to individual learner styles, offer optimal learning, at least for vocabulary. Though matching learners to activities in their preferred styles did lead to gains in learning and retaining vocabulary over not matching styles, the mixed-modality condition led to the most gains in learning, both on

immediate and delayed post-tests. Willingham (2009), a cognitive psychologist, points out that while teachers need to treat students differently, learning-style theories apply best to content, not students. The lesson plan may dictate that one thing (a song, for instance) might need to be experienced aurally and

something else (a textile, for example) might have to be experienced kinesthetically. That’s different from saying that individuals will retain the information

differently based on learning styles. Willingham

argues that an important way to think about learning styles is that

change in delivery (visual vs. aural, for example) promotes attention, which leads to learning. Of course, it’s always good to vary the classroom. John Fanselow has argued for years that we should carefully observe our classrooms and then break the rules and habits we fall into. If you always stand in the front of the classroom, stand in the back and see what it looks like from there. If you always call the roll, give the task to a student (Fanselow, 1987).

3. Motivate and lower anxiety. My mentor, Christina Paulston, once said that she could quickly gauge a teacher by how much that teacher knew about her students. That's always struck me as a good measure of the classroom atmosphere, particularly if we extend the question to how much the students know about each other. Krashen (see Myth 3) has urged us to lower the affective filter for years. He has been criticized because no one can actually point to the filter and because the idea is vague enough that no one can test the affective filter hypothesis directly. But as a metaphor, the affective filter is a powerful thing. Research on motivation, anxiety, and willingness to communicate would seem to suggest that we take classroom atmosphere seriously. We've all had good classes and not-so-

144 ——

SLA Myths

good classes. Heraclitus said that you don’t step in the same river twice. You certainly don’t teach the same class twice. Embracing the uniqueness of each class, and starting from scratch to build (horrible cliché, I know) a community of learners that is focused and willing to go along for the ride is one of the best things we can do. (Teachers might want to read Dornyei and Csizér [1998] on motivation. I offer my list in Table 13, which shares some elements of theirs.) TABLE 13: Elements of a Motivating Classroom Atmosphere The class is clearly structured through stated objectives and clear purposes for activities. Lessons are connected to students’ lives. There is a real exchange of information in activities.

Learners are encouraged to use the language outside of class (through interaction, movies, the Internet, etc.). Strategies and models are provided to help students complete activities fluently and with minimal frustration. Cooperative learning is promoted. Students think of themselves as a team. The teacher is a person.

MYTH

Language acquisition is the individual acquisition of grammar.

In the Real World This is Steve. When

I was teaching at the University of Pittsburgh

English Language Institute Japan Program, a student would often disappear from class and upon her return explain her absence by saying, “I've been busy studying for TOEFL®.” No matter how many times I

explained that good proficiency tests really can’t be studied for, students refused to believe me. As we saw in Myth 5, students see language learning as a piling up of discrete bits of information about language. It sometimes seems many researchers also see language learning as an accumulation of bits of grammar (and sometimes vocabulary). The reasons for this are complex, no doubt, but two factors have

played a part in reinforcing student beliefs. The first is the sort of education system that many of our students were raised in. In many coun-

tries, communicative language teaching has made only a small dent in the grammar-translation approach where the focus is on making sure

145

146 —— SLA Myths students are able to translate sentences from one language to another.

The reason that is often given is the second factor—many countries rely on university entrance exams that are objective tests of decontextual-

ized grammar. People need to teach the bits that will be on the test.

And, of course, it has really only been relatively recently that the large test-making companies in the U.K. and U.S. have attempted to con-

struct more communicative exams. Thus, students frequently have had a utilitarian reason to prefer grammar instruction to other types.

In terms of research and teaching, grammar (morphosyntax) has had a prominent place in the training of applied linguists. Chomsky’s theory of grammar in particular has had an important place in linguis-

tics for more than 50 years. Most research has looked at instructed language learning. There is a difference between instructed and naturalistic language development.

Schmidt's (1983) case study of Wes, a Japanese immigrant to Hawaii, shows how a person living in a country can pick up language that is adequate for communication, even though the language is not grammatically correct. Wes’s purpose for learning English was to communi-

cate with friends and clients (he was an artist), and he was quite successful at communicating. Here is a description of a burglary: Anyway/June twenty six I come back here many bad happening/ but not my business/and someone take my jewelry/and camera/ clothes/everything/anyway I’m so bad/but now

is OK every-

thing/I’m fine (Schmidt, 1983, 157)

Did Wes know English? If you gave him a grammar test, you would probably say no. As Schmidt (1983, 137) said, “SLA has virtually been

defined (implicitly in most cases) as the acquisition of linguistic forms, structures, and rules.” Yet Wes had friends and lived a full life in Hawaii, speaking English in a wide variety of circumstances. Schmidt was ultimately pessimistic that adults can acquire grammar through

naturalistic means, through interaction alone without awareness (see Myth 4).

8: Language acquisition is the acquisition of grammar.

——

147

The purpose of this final chapter is to go beyond the sorts of studies we have looked at thus far, which have mostly focused on cognition and the acquisition of grammar. In a sense, we are saying those sudies have the status of myth, a myth that SLA is synonymous with individuals’s acquisition of morphosyntax. I would argue that, first of all, there are many aspects of language that are acquired in SLA, from new sounds to grammar to how to communicate appropriately with others who speak the language. Second, while admitting that it is the individual who ultimately learns, I would argue that language acquisition exists in context,

and that social context, looking beyond the individual, is important. First of all, we take a quick look at some themes we have already addressed, but review one theme (explicit/implicit learning) through pragmatics

research,

one

of the many

other things that learners

acquire. We use pragmatics because we want to keep a social theme. Obviously, more aspects of language than grammar and pragmatics are acquired; we have talked about vocabulary acquisition at certain points. We then survey the emergentist family of theories, which is

both allied with a different grammatical paradigm than most of the research we have seen, and sees language learning as the development

of a complex system that arises in social context. Finally, we survey three approaches that directly consider SLA not as an individual phenomenon, but a social one—Sociocultural Theory, language socialization, and identity.

What the Research Says Acquisition of Pragmatic Competence Learners acquire many aspects of a language, including sounds, words,

and the ability to communicate in a socioculturally appropriate manner. Pragmatics is “the study of communicative action in its sociocultu-

ral context” (Kasper & Rose, 2001, 2). Many aspects of pragmatics are universal. For example, no matter the language or culture, people in

148 ——

SLA Myths

conversation take turns speaking and generally expect their partners to contribute in timely and relevant ways to the conversation.

On the

other hand, many things do not transfer exactly, and instruction may be needed because the forms of and clues to pragmatic meaning are subtle and may not be noticed by learners. Furthermore, the classroom does not reflect the real world in terms of its pragmatic requirements,

so we cannot necessarily expect instructed learners to learn pragmatics implicitly.

Kasper and Rose (2002), in their overview of L2 pragmatic development, sum up the role ofinstruction in this way: Pragmatics is teachable. Learners who have opportunities for exposure to L2 and to its natural use can acquire pragmatic competence implicitly without instruction (although it takes a long time). However, instruction does make a difference in acquisition.

Explicit instruction plus lots of

opportunities for practice lead to the greatest gains.

Jeon and Kaya (2006), in a meta-analysis of thirteen studies, found that direct instruction in pragmatics was better than no instruction, but their findings on explicit and implicit learning of pragmatics were not as clear. Long-term instruction, defined as longer than five hours, was

more likely than short-term instruction to have a large effect.

One way pragmatics is taught is through noticing. Liddicoat and Crozet (2001) taught a small number of Australian second-year French

students

about

the differences

between

French

and

Australian

responses to the question T’as passé un bon week-end? (Did you have a

good weekend?). For English-speaking Australians, this is part of a Monday ritual and requires a simple Yes. How about you? I did too. What did you do? response, equivalent to the U.S. How are you? French speakers take this as a genuine question and engage in longer exchanges with their own rules. Liddicoat and Crozet (2001) show that direct instruction in these

kinds of conversations was effective. The content of the role plays done after instruction was appropriate. However, the forms the students used

were not as appropriate. Learners used a relatively narrow range of

feedback devices like Ah when addressing their partners. There was also less overlap than there would be in a French native speaker conversa-

8: Language acquisition is the acquisition of grammar.

——

149

tion. One year later, the learners had retained the appropriate content, but fewer of the forms.

Takimoto (2007) tested the relative effectiveness of three input tasks: structured input with explicit information; problem solving (with some input enhancement as well); and structured input without explicit information (as in VanPatten & Oikennon, 1996). The target was downgraders, which are used to soften speech acts like requests. These were sentences like I wonder if you could come here? Generally, all three groups equally outperformed the control group on several different tasks, with the odd exception of a postponed listening task, on

which the structured-input-plus-explicit-information group did worse than the other two groups. Takimoto admits that ultimately all groups probably got some explicit knowledge; the problem-solving and struc-

tured-input only groups might have discovered the information themselves though induction. Explicit instruction in pragmatic structures is not always unambiguously successful.

Koike and Pearson

(2005) compared

explicit/

implicit instruction with explicit/implicit feedback. The target was the

language of suggestions in Spanish. The explicit instruction was a list of ways to suggest and respond to suggestions, coupled with instructor

comments. All learners had a chance to read and hear dialogues, then answered

questions

drawing their attention to the targets.

(Thus

implicit learning may occur.) Explicit feedback was providing the correct answers to the tests and adding a comment on why the answer was

appropriate. Implicit feedback was either Yes if the answer was correct or

What?/I

don’t

understand

if the

answer

was

incorrect.

The

explicit/explicit group performed best at choosing the appropriate answers on the multiple choice items, but the implicit/implicit group

was most effective on the open-ended production responses.

Tateyama (2001) also did not find differences between explicit and implicit learning, in this case of English speakers learning the Japanese word sumimasen, which can be equivalent to both I’m sorry and Thank you in English. However, Tateyama questioned whether the groups were truly equivalent. Members of the explicit group had little contact with Japanese native speakers outside of class, while several members of the

150 ——

SLA Myths

implicit group reported regularly speaking Japanese outside of class. The implicit group also had overall higher academic achievement. Tateyama

also noted that students

differed in motivation.

Several

exhibited high levels of motivation, which suggests that any kind of instruction might have worked for them. Pragmatics is a complex area requiring its own

book, but what

we've seen here is the need to investigate areas beyond grammar to get at some of the core questions of SLA.

Constructing a Language: Emergentism, Cognitive Linguistics, Connectionism Emergentism is allied with cognitive linguistics (Robinson & N. Ellis, 2008) and both are built on a somewhat

different base than the

research we have seen so far. Researchers in the emergentist paradigm characterize language as a complex adaptive system. Language, like other complex systems (the weather, ecosystems, economies) emerges over time through the interactions of many people, and of interactions between cognitive and neural systems specialized for different pur-

poses. Languages are socially constructed and changed by use (N. Ellis & Larsen-Freeman,

2006). Language is learned through the same

processes that other things are learned. Learning is an exemplar-based process of strengthening associations between various kinds of linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge. That is, we hear lots of examples, and regularities are extracted from the input, implicitly. However, not all

SLA is implicit. There is a role for noticing the constructions (chunks of language) in input, because L2 learners must overcome L1 processing habits through explicit learning. That learning occurs through exemplars in input is a cornerstone of the psychological theory of Connectionism. Connectionist models of

language use computer simulations that mimic neurons, connected in parallel, acting on input. Input strengthens connections between nodes in the model and, sometimes, generalizations can be made. One of the

first modern

connectionist models was reported in Rumelhart and

8: Language acquisition is the acquisition of grammar.

——

151

McClelland (1986). Their computer simulation learned the formation of past tense in English. It paired roots and the proper endings. It did so by examining a large number of exemplars. The simulation, in fact, replicated the behavior of children learning L1 English. The characteristic pattern is that children begin learning irregular past tense verbs as chunks (went), and then realize that there are regularities and produce forms like goed, before finally reverting to the correct form. N. Ellis and Larsen-Freeman (2006) say that language is organized by constructions that tie forms to meanings. Constructions are chunks of language: I want to X, Give me the X. We have learned these patterns through hearing and using them. Ellis also makes the point that we use our knowledge of the relative probability of a construction being used in a given place in an utterance to process speech (in this case, recognize words) quickly. Though one and won sound the same, the topic

and context matter. If a person is talking about a race, we expect won. If a lecturer is making a list, we expect one. Constructions are not only words and phrases but can be grammatical patterns as well. For exam-

ple, there is the s added to the ends of nouns that signals plurality. The grammar knowledge we have in our minds is built from constructions. N. Ellis (2002) claims a developmental sequence from formulas through what he calls low-scope patterns to constructions.

Bardovi-

Harlig (2002) tested this conjecture by looking at data from a larger longitudinal study. The speech and writing of sixteen students from four different languages were analyzed, with a focus on the future expressions will and going to. Will emerges quite early as the preferred

form. Bardovi-Harlig found that five of the sixteen students used the formula I am going to write (about) in their essays. In their cases, this

formula broke down into going to. Different persons and numbers (you, they) were added. Verbs different than write began to be used. Use was limited, but this suggests that formulas may indeed form constructions and become part of the learner’s grammatical knowledge. Cognitive linguistics is interested in how language is grounded in the world. Basic sentences encode basic life experiences: possessing, moving, or something causing something else to move. N. Ellis and Ferreira-Junior (2009) analyzed data from a corpus of speech by

152 —— SLA Myths English learners in Europe. They were interested in three constructions: VL (subject-verb-location, Mary went home); VOL (subject-verb-object-

location, Mary put the letter on the table); and VOO

(subject-verb-

object1-object2, Mary gave John a present). Among the data from the native English speaker (NES) interview-

ers, there was, as predicted, one exemplar that dominated all the other verbs in each construction. For VL, it was go; for VOL, it was put; for VOO, it was give (as in the examples). For the non-native English speakers, the same results held, with different percentages,

but the

same distribution. In each case, the distribution follows Zipfs law (cited in Ellis & Ferreira-Junior, 2009): The frequency of use of each verb was proportional to its rank in frequency among those verbs that could fill that particular slot. The most

frequent verbs are the most

commonly

selected for use. Additionally, the fewer types per construction (possible answers, if you will), the higher percentage the lead examplar took. For example, learners only used nine verbs in the V-O-O construction, and give was used 64 percent of the time; NESs used twelve types and

used give 53 percent of the time. Since the corpus came from a long-term study, the researchers could see that the learners began with a central verb and added verbs to the core construction. Are these central verbs prototypical? That is, are they the best examples of their type? For example, a sparrow is a proto-

typical bird, but a penguin is not. Five NESs rated the prototypicality of a number of verbs. Other verbs were rated more or equally prototypical than go, put, and give, but those three verbs are more generic than the others. For example, walk, move, run, and travel were rated more prototypical, but go has a more general meaning. It is unclear just how generalizable these findings are. Do high-frequency exemplars that are

prototypical but also generic drive learning? Year and Gordon (2009) taught the English ditransitive (V-O-O: Mary gave John a gift) construction to first-year middle-school students in a rural

area of Korea. Students had no opportunities to learn or to be exposed to English outside of class. Five real ditransitive verbs were taught: give, pass, sell, throw, and toss. Five nonditransitive verbs were also taught (ungram-

8: Language acquisition is the acquisition of grammar.

——

153

matical in the VOO construction, but used with to): move, drive, donate, carry, and push. Students were also taught eight novel (made-up) verbs. Give was taught in the skewed frequency condition. It occurred 24 times in the ditransitive construction. The other ditransitive verbs

occurred four times each. In the balanced condition, each of the five verbs occurred eight times each. Students were taught the verbs through video clips illustrating them. Would give drive learning?

Both the skewed and balanced conditions were effective, and equally so, in improving learner knowledge of the ditransitive construction on tests and on the ability to transfer the construction to

novel verbs. The balanced group was superior in producing more ditransitive sentences with both real and novel verbs, and in retaining

that ability on a delayed ity on the post-test. This important; what matters In this section, we've

post-test. The skewed group actually lost abilseems to show that prototypicality is not so is hearing many examples. seen studies that focus on grammar acquisi-

tion, but use a different model

of grammar,

one that is being used

increasingly frequently in SLA studies. We have seen an emphasis on

general learning capabilities and that there are sufficient clues in the input to sustain a good deal of learning.

SLA as a Social Phenomenon We have looked at two strands of SLA research that put language learning in social context. We now consider three more—Sociocultural Theory, language socialization, and identity research. SOCIOCULTURAL

THEORY

Perhaps the fundamental tenent of Sociocultural Theory (SCT) is that learning is not individual, but social. SCT has evolved (and is evolving) from the ideas of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978, 1986). SCT is a complex theory with many strands, so there is space for only a few of its ideas. (For a very readable introduction, see Swain, Kinnear, & Steinman, 2011.) Recent thought in SCT aligns with cognitive linguistics and emergent grammars (Lantolf, 2011).

154 ——

SLA Myths

Platt and Brooks (1994, 507) offered a critique of input/interactionist SLA research by noting that learning environments

are “con-

structed and constituted by the speech activity that learners produce.” Joint activity between students is not just information transfer, but rather the co-construction of the task as they do it. By taking an input or interactionist perspective we are missing mediation,

perhaps the

central idea of SCT. Mediation brings together the world and the individual, and it does so by material and symbolic tools. All mental activity is mediated by tools. Language is a symbolic tool for shaping and organizing thought. A textbook is a tool that mediates learning through rules and examples. The teacher, in turn, mediates the textbook and the learners. The goal of language learning is to internalize L2-as a tool for mediation.

Vygotsky said that consciousness begins as activity between individuals and then becomes individual. Even when alone, we need tools

to mediate mental activity. We use social speech we have engaged in or heard and turn it into private speech. Using private speech, we may talk through a problem to ourselves, or offer silent encouragement to ourselves. Swain, Kinnear, and Steinman (2011) say that we can see exam-

ples of private speech in the collaborative dialogue that learners engage in when working on problems together. They say it is difficult to separate private and social speech at times, that one learner may in essence

be talking something through more to gain control over her thoughts than to share them. Languaging is the term that they assign to the social and private language

(spoken or written) that mediates

thought

processes. When learners work together on a task, languaging mediates

the joint problem-solving that goes on and the knowledge they are building (Swain, 2000). Swain, Lapkin, Knouzi, Suzuki, and Brooks (2009) and Knouzi, Swain, Lapkin, and Brooks (2010) investigate languaging in the processes of learning French voice (active, passive, middle). The first study looks at nine learners, while the second two of the group, the highest and lowest scorers. voice through the learners’ dominant language, explicitly and metalinguistically. Students read

more closely examines The researchers taught English, and taught it a series of statements

8: Language acquisition is the acquisition of grammar.

——

155

and saw two diagrams about voice sequenced on cards. The students were to read the card aloud and explain it to themselves or comment on it. A pre-test that required descriptions of verbs in a text determined

that the learners had little awareness of voice, and when asked to explain it, their explanations were largely incomplete and unclear. An immediate post-test asked learners to explain the voice of each verb in a text. A delayed post-test asked them to provide the correct form of the verb, and explain why they used it. All students learned something about voice. Those who made high use of languaging performed more accurately and demonstrated

a deeper understanding of voice, com-

pared to low users, on the delayed post-test. Results for mid-range users

were less clear. A greater quantity of languaging seemed to have a positive effect on the ability to identify and provide voice, to explain why it was used, and to provide conceptual definitions of voice. By verbaliz-

ing thoughts, students came to know what they did and didn’t know, and what they needed to know. Notice there was no practice, but that it could in principle be added. Those who used a lot of languaging used a balance of types. The

researchers identified inferencing, analyzing, self-assessing, and reread-

ing as forms of languaging. Inferencing included integration, in which the student applied information on previous cards to new information;

elaborating, in which students went beyond what was on the cards, for example, comparing and contrasting; and hypothesis testing.

Knouzi, Swain, Lapkin, and Brooks (2010) show how Heidi, the highest user of languaging, scaffolded herself. She was able to first develop a satisfactory understanding, then add new information as it arose on the cards, gradually incorporating that information to deepen

her understanding. She was also able to self-motivate. Knouzi et al. liken the way Heidi was able to organize her learning to the way a teacher would make a lesson plan. The student who used languaging least, Lisa, made no effort to relate new information to old. She often

was silent and had to be prompted by the research assistant to vocalize

her understanding. She hesitated to say what she thought and seemed to want to apply her memorized language rules, but couldn't integrate them.

156 —— SLA Myths We have seen learners using private speech to develop their language. Within interactions, we sometimes

see learners helping each

other develop. This has been called scaffolding and it has also been called “the Zone of Proximal Development” (ZPD). The ZPD is defined by Swain, Kinnear, & Steinman (2011) as an activity during which a learner can achieve more with a partner than she could alone. (As the old expression has it, Two heads are better than one.) There are a number of varying perspectives on the ZPD, the classic one being that it involves a teacher or other expert working one-on-one with a student. Donato

(1994) showed,

however,

that a group of three university

French learners, all of relatively equal abilities and all novices, were

able to collectively scaffold and advance each other's language. Guk and Kellogg (2007) investigated the ZPD in the context of Korean elementary school EFL classes. There were differences between teacher-student

and student-student

interactions.

To begin with, the

T-S interactions used proportionally more English, while the S-S inter-

actions used proportionally more Korean (though S-S had a higher absolute number of utterances in English). S-S talk was less accurate but tended to have longer turns. The nature of the assistance was some-

what different also. Though both types of interaction included talk about language, the types of talk differed. S-S problem-solving saw a

lot of inquires about and confirming of word meaning, a lot of negotiation. In T-S talk, the teacher initiated solutions and demonstrated correct forms. Guk and Kellogg conclude that there is one classroom ZPD,

with different elements. Notice this is a place metaphor for the ZPD, as opposed to the Swain, Kinnear, & Steinman (2011) activity metaphor. LANGUAGE

SOCIALIZATION

The next strand of research to highlight is that which studies language socialization. Language socialization is the process by which a newcomer to a community or culture becomes part of that group. This includes learning communicative competence, broadly understood (Duff, 2007). While our L1 socialization proceeds relatively smoothly, L2 socialization may present issues of access to or acceptance by the local community. Those already inside the community may not be sup-

8: Language acquisition is the acquisition of grammar.

——

157

portive of newcomers, or those being socialized may not want to be fully assimilated if it means being alienated from their home culture. Duff (2002) shows the complexity of these issues through an ethnography of language use and language socialization in a Canadian secondary social studies classroom in which more than half the stu-

dents were ESL students (both local and ESL groups were heterogeneous). Duff shows how the ESL students were caught between silence and possible humiliation. Because ESL students feared being laughed at for their English, many remained silent. Conversely, their lack of participation violated local norms for classroom participation. Though the teacher tried to draw the newcomers in by asking them to make connections between the classroom and their backgrounds,

most did not

take the opportunity to do so. Instead, local students took the oppor-

tunity to talk about difference. Finally, however, the ESL students seemed satisfied with their participation and found their identity in their own communities (the Chinese-speaking students had a large local community). Duff (2002, 314) says that these students had multiple “repertoires, literacies, expertise, and identities to draw on and use in the multiple discourse communities they belonged to locally and

internationally.” The local students had fewer resources to draw on. IDENTITY

The last research strand, identity, has become an important issue in

SLA since Bonny Norton Peirce’s (1995) call for a reconceptualization

of the individual in SLA to include the concept of social identity as multiple and changeable. She also spoke of the need to focus on investment rather than motivation when speaking of the relationship between learner and target language. There has always been skepticism among the cognitive scientists in SLA about concepts like socialization and identity, but if one takes a social approach, both are central. Block (2007) reviews a number of studies of identity in naturalistic, instructed, and study-abroad environments. We have looked at some of the more prominent social approaches to SLA in the context of addressing the myth that SLA is solely the individual acquisition of grammar. We have seen that SLA is not synony-

158 —— SLA Myths mous with grammar acquisition and that social aspects as well as individual

ones

must

be addressed.

There

are other ways

in which

social/sociolinguistic concepts apply to SLA. They include how variability in language use plays out in SLA; how settings (naturalistic and instructed SLA, second and foreign language environments) influence acquisition; and how social class and gender impact learning. As stated in the introduction, this is a first book in SLA. We hope you will dig

deeper into theories such as those presented in this chapter as your teaching situation dictates.

1. Remember that communicative competence goes beyond grammar. It is understandable that teachers need to teach grammar. Remember

that it’s not the whole story. We cannot lose sight of the multi-faceted nature of language. Canale and Swain (1980) developed a model of communicative competence that had three parts: © grammatical competence: lexical items, morphology, syntax, phonology, sentence-level semantics ¢ sociolinguistic competence: sociolinguistic rules of use

and rules of discourse e strategic competence: communication strategies that

repair breakdowns in communication

Canale (1983) subdivided the second part into discourse competence and sociolinguistic competence. He also expanded the notion of strategic competence.

8: Language acquisition is the acquisition of grammar.

——

159

2. Develop the social part of the classroom through regular use of group work. We have seen that learning needs to be active in order to be effective. Group work makes learning active and has the further benefit, from

one perspective, of increasing the negotiation of meaning and aiding acquisition. Group work, if done right, with the exchange of real information, brings interpersonal relationships, and the language used to encode them, into the classroom.

3. Investigate virtual communities and service learning. The Internet has afforded students opportunities to talk with others

throughout the world. There are a number of forums online, or you could partner with a friend in another country for a classroom-to-classroom exchange. Dave's ESL Café has a page of forums you might want to investigate. It’s at http://forums.eslcafe.com/student/. For programs in second language contexts, service learning may be appropriate. Service learning takes students outside of the classroom to

volunteer on local projects. See John Minor’s good how-to guide for service learning (2001).

Aree % wihiiegma ets o 1eSepo va

ite es Dal

invigoasale

lb

1A7

a

iy

a

.

Te

eee

abd ae

Sire

a

yee

aon

itelsy i

ra

Ly ameeat

s

a

z

a

aniciasl +i icintaa ebiteeasesryerahelypiy siagit is

Th

a

poe atte Baan andWee

esisSs veer htoue. ero Gein Me bse

7

Oe:

PERC rites rie: € Mh ders

tio’ TON

eoeet

J 7

a

:

,

m,

4

en

7 =e

_

:

a

Oy

]

»

a

Oa NWSE

24. er

hy

te

egy

Gr.

a

aor

nn4| or:

amen -

-

_ :

i

“ao bales ae

7

*

Opry

¢

»

Ny

7

b

‘eT

7

“rpnligs

rae eit

~ /

ex

a

taladyee

el

eles irae

oe al

*

ass in .t

sal he : Wi ie

_

x

aj' nits

aa

o

oa

ty aA j

:

is i. a4 gino, eal yl hel pee

hae

han

btnie 7

Me.