Second Language
Acquisition
Yayuk
Fitriani – 2201410004
Rega
Giyang Girana Z – 2201410088
Annisa
Mustikanthi – 2201410094
CHAPTER
6
Psycholinguistic
aspect of interlanguage
L1 transfer
The learner’s L1 is one of the sources of error in
learner language. This influence is reffered to as negative transfer. However, in some cases, the learner’s L1 can
facilitate L2 acquisition. For example, French learners of English are much
less likely to make errors of this kind”
The man whom I spoke to him is a millionaire.
than
Arabic learners because French does not permit resumptive pronouns (like ’him’)
in relative clauses whereas Arabic does. The type of effect is known as positive transfer.
L1
transfer refers to the influence that the learner’s L1 exerts over the
acquisition of an L2.
• The
learner’s L1 is one of the sources of error in learner language (negative
transfer)
• The
learner’s L1 can facilitate L2 acquisition (positive transfer)
Errors
were largely the result of interference (another term for negative transfer) in
the heyday of behaviourism.
Behaviourist
theories led to two developments:
• Some
theorist, espousing strong mentalist accounts of L2 acquisition, sought to play
down the role of the L1.
• Reconceptualize
transfer within a cognitive framework.
Transfer
errors do not always occur when they are predicted to occur. Differences
between the target and native language do not always result in learning
difficulty.
According
to Eric Kellerman, learners treat some linguistic features as potentially
transferable and non-transferable. Kellerman found that advanced Dutch learners
of English had clear perceptions about which meanings of ‘breken’ (‘break’)
were basic in their L1. He also found that they were prepared to translate a
sentence like:
Hij brak zijin been. (He
broke his leg.)
Directly
into English, using ‘broke’ for ‘brak’ but were not prepared to give a
direct translation of a sentence like:
Het ondergrondse verset
werd gebroken. (the underground resistance was
broken.)
Other
researchers have found that the transfer of some L1grammatical features is tied
to the learners of English.
When
language transfer takes place there is usually no loss of L1 knowledge. This
obvious fact has led to the suggestion that a better term for referring to the
effects of the L1 might be ‘cross-linguistic influence.’
The role of consciousness in L2 acquisition
Adults
seem to have work hard and to study the language consciously in order to succeed
when they acquire L2. in contrast, children seem to do so without conscious
effort when they acquire their L1.
Two opposing position can be
identified. Stephen Krashen has argued the need to distinguish ‘acquired’ L2
knowledge (i.e. implicite knowledge of language) and ‘learned’ L2 knowledge
(i.e. explicit knowledge about language). Krashen’s claim that the two
knowledge system are entirely independent of one another and that ‘learned’
knowledge can never be converted into ‘aquired’ knowledge. This contradicts
skill building theories of L2 acquisition according to which learners can
achieve grammatical accuracy by authomatizing ‘learned’ knowledge through
practice.
Richard Schmidt has poinyed out that the term ‘consciousness’ is
often used very loosely in SLA and argues that there is a need to
standardize the concept that underlie
its use. For example, he distinguihes between consciousness as ‘intentionality’
and consciousness as ‘attantion’. ‘Intentionality’ that refers to whether a
learner makes an conscious and deliberate decition to learn some L2 knowledge.
He failed to recognize that ‘incidental’ acquisition might in fact still
involving some degree of conscious ‘attention’ to input. In the other words,
learning incidentally is not the same as learning without conscious attention.
Irrespective of whether learners
learn implicitly or explicitly, it is widely accepted that they can acquire
different kind of knowledge. Explicit knowledge may help learners to move from
intake to acquisition by helping to notice the gap between what they have
observed in the input and the current state of their interlanguage as
manifested in their own output.
Another way of identifying the
processes responsible for interlanguage development is to deduce the operations
that learners perform from a close inspection of their output. We shall examine
two of them here; operating prinsiples and processing constrains.
Operating principles is the study of
the L1 acquisition of many different language has led to the identification of
a number of general strategies which children use to extract and segment
linguistic information from the language they hear.
Processing constrains sought to
account for both why learners acquire the grammar of a language in a definite
order and also why some learners only develop very simple interlanguage
grammar.
To
account for progress along the developmental axis a number of processing
constraints have been proposed. These govern when it is possible for a learner
to move from one stage to another. Later they develop the
‘initialization/finalization strategy’ which enables them to move elements at
the end of a structure to the beginning and vice versa but prevents them moving
elements within a structure.
Later,
learners achieve access to the ‘subordinate clause strategy’, which premits
movement of elements within main clauses but blocks them in subordinate
clauses.
Communication strategies
In
order to overcome this problem learners resort to various kinds of
communication strategies. If learners do not know a word in the target language
they may ‘borrow’a word from their L1 or use another target-language word that
is approximate in meaning, or try to paraphrase the meaning of the word, or
even constructan entirely new word.
Communication
strategies are seen as part of the planning phase. They are called upon when
learners experience some kind of problem with an initial plan which prevents
them from executing it. They can either abandon the initial plan and develop an
entirely different one by means of a reducation strategy or try to maintain
their original communicative goal by adopting some kind of achievement
strategy.
We
might expect, therefore, that the choice of communication strategies will
reflect the learners’ stage of development. For example, learners might be
expected strategies as their knowledge of the L2 develops. It would also be
interesting to discover whether the use of communication strategies has any
effect on L2 acquisition.
Two types of computational model
One
type involves the idea of ‘serial processing’. That is, information is
processed in a series of sequential step and results in the representation of
what has been learned as some kind of ‘rule’ or ‘strategy’.
The
alternative type of apparatus involves the idea of parallel distributed
processing. This credits the learner with the ability to perform a number of mental
tasks at the same thing. Models based on paralled distributed processing reject
the whole notion of ‘rule’.
