Big Questions in ELT
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Song, S. and Kellogg, D. (2011) ‘Word meaning as a palimpsest: a defence of sociocultural theory’, The Modern Language Journal, 95, 4.
Ushakova, T. N. (1994) ‘Inner speech and second language acquisition: a experimental-theoretic approach’, in Lantolf, J.P. and Appel, G. (eds), Vygotskian Approaches to Second Language Research, Hillsdale, NJ: Ablex.
To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to
http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/g-is-for-grammar-translation/
and
http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/t-is-for-translation/
5 Where do errors come from?
According to a website for EFL teachers, the following errors are supposedly typical of English language learners who share a common first language (L1). Do you know what that language is?
I’ll wait my friend.
I went to home last night.
I asked to him to help me.
We really enjoyed.
I went to the store for buying some food.
You are forgiven if you find the task difficult. While the language in question is Turkish, these would all seem to be errors that any number of different English learners might make, whether their first language was Spanish, Arabic, or Japanese. That is to say, the errors are not necessarily an effect of transfer from Turkish. So, where do these errors come from?
There are at least three possible sources. It might be that indeed the errors are caused by transfer from the L1, and this is because these languages all share (with Turkish) grammatical features that English does not have. Alternatively, they may be a surface manifestation of the deep structure of a universal grammar, as posited by Chomskyan linguistics. Or maybe they derive from some inherent cognitive processes of simplification, over-generalization, redundancy, etc., and are indicators of the way the human mind adapts to the demands of a new and complex linguistic ‘ecology’.
The transfer hypothesis is, for many people, the ‘default’ theory. ‘It’s self-evident,’ wrote an MA student of mine recently, ‘that most learner errors are caused by mother tongue interference’. Is it really self-evident? It was certainly self-evident in the mid-twentieth century, as encapsulated in this statement by Lado (1957: 58-9): ‘We know from the observation of many cases that the grammatical structure of the native language tends to be transferred to the foreign language ... We have here the major source of difficulty or ease in learning a foreign language ... Those structures that are different will be difficult.’
More recently, it has been shown that it is not difference, but similarity, that causes the problem. According to Swan and Smith (2001: xi), the more similar two languages are (as in the case of English and French, for example), the more likely the learner will be tempted to transfer from one to the other, while ‘speakers of unrelated languages such as Chinese or Arabic have fewer problems with transfer, and correspondingly more which arise from the intrinsic difficulty of the English structures themselves.’
However, the fact that – as I argued above – many errors seem to be universally shared, whether or not the L1 is similar to English or not, suggested to researchers in the 1980s that errors may have a developmental origin. Developmental errors, according to Dulay et al. (1982: 165) ‘are errors similar to those made by children learning the target language as their first language’. They then claim that ‘all the investigations conducted to date have reached the same general conclusion: the majority of errors made by second language learners are not interlingual, but developmental’ (ibid.: 173).
In fact, the developmental view had been argued much earlier than the 1980s. In a book called Common Errors in English: Their Cause, Prevention and Cure, F.G. French (1949: 6) states his case thus:
The argument here presented is that if errors are due … to cross-association, then the Japanese form of error should be one thing and the Bantu form quite another ... But that is not the case. ... The collection of ‘common errors’ … proves that the errors which exasperate teachers of English are indeed ‘common’.
French adds (ibid.: 7): ‘In seeking the source of error in the vernacular [i.e. the L1], the teacher is searching in the wrong field. The fact that the errors are common indicates that they have a common cause.’
Nowadays, as ever, the pendulum has started to swing back to a more balanced view, where multiple causes of error are acknowledged. Lightbown and Spada (2006: 187), for example, accept that ‘the transfer of patterns from the native language is one of the major sources of errors in learner language’, but they qualify this position by adding that there are also errors that learners from different language backgrounds not only share but are surprisingly similar to the kinds of errors made by first language learners:
In such cases, second language errors are evidence of the learners’ efforts to discover the structure of the target language itself rather than attempts to transfer patterns from the first language.
More recently, scholars have used computers to model how the brain’s neural networks behave. These show that, when the condition of child bilingualism is modelled (where two languages are being acquired more or less simultaneously), the network is able to separate out the vocabularies of each language quite comfortably. However, where a second language is overlaid on top of an existing one, there is much less separation. It’s as if the first language ‘blocks’ or ‘overshadows’ the independent establishment of the second. Nick Ellis (2006: 185) sums up the findings: ‘Adult second language simulations show relatively little L1–L2 separation at a local level and maximal transfer and interference.’ This tends to confirm the view that, as one writer put it, ‘second language is looking into the windows cut out by the first language’ (Ushakova 1994: 154).
Of course, any discussion of error assumes that there is a ‘gold standard’ by which errors can be judged, an error being any deviation from the standard. But what is that standard? Even ignoring the diversity of English varieties in the world, is it fair to judge a learner’s interlanguage by the standards of a native speaker? After all, as Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008: 141) point out, if we view language as a complex dynamic system, there is no ‘final state’, and hence there will never be complete convergence between the learner’s L2 and a notional target language. The two systems run on different tracks.
Maybe it is time to banish the term ‘error’ – with its negative connotations – once and for all, and talk instead of ‘interlanguage forms’.
Questions for discussion
1. Can you think of some errors that are very clearly those of a particular language group? Are the errors mainly grammatical or lexical?
2. Why do you think it’s self-evident that errors are caused by L1 interference?
3. Errors may be caused by ‘processes of simplification, over-generalization, redundancy’. Can you think of examples of errors in any of these categories?
4. In your own experience, either as a teacher or a learner, do you feel that, the closer two languages are, the more likely there will be interference? Or the opposite?
5. Most of the discussion has been about grammar errors. In the case of vocabulary or pronunciation, is there a stronger or weaker case for the influence of the L1?
6. ‘Second language is looking into the windows cut out by the first language.’ What exactly does this mean, and do you think it is true? Can you ever ‘escape’ your first language?
7. Given the spread of English as an International Language (EIL), is it fair to say that there is no longer a ‘gold standard’ for English? If so, how should teachers treat error?
8. What are the implications, do you think, of substituting ‘interlanguage form’ for the term ‘error’? Would this be a good idea?
References
Dulay, H., Burt, M. and Krashen, S. (1982) Language Two, New York, Oxford University Press.
Ellis, N. (2006) ‘Selective attention and transfer phenomena in L2 acquisition: contingency, cue competition, salience, interference, o
vershadowing, blocking, and perceptual learning’, Applied Linguistics, 27, 2, 164.
French, F.G. (1949) Common Errors in English: Their Cause, Prevention and Cure, London: Oxford University Press.
Lado, R. (1957) Linguistics across Cultures, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Larsen-Freeman, D. and Cameron, L. (2008) Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lightbown, P. and Spada, N. (2006) How Languages are Learned (3rd ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Swan, M. and Smith, B. (eds) (2001) Learner English: A Teacher’s Guide to Interference and Other Problems (2nd ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ushakova, T.N. (1994) ‘Inner speech and second language acquisition: an experimental-theoretical approach’, in Lantolf, J.P. and Appel, G. (eds) Vygotskian Approaches to Second Language Research, Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to
http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/e-is-for-error/
6 Is language learning all in the mind?
Words come out of the mouth and go into the ear. But they are stored in the mind. And retrieved from the mind. And understood in the mind. They are also learned in the mind.
That, at least, is the conventional wisdom – especially from the point of view of cognitive psychology. ‘Language is instantiated in the minds and therefore the brains of language users, so that linguistics is to be regarded as a branch of psychology.’ Thus argues Ray Jackendoff (2002: xiv). Theories of second language acquisition follow suit: ‘Language learning, like any other learning, is ultimately a matter of change in an individual’s internal mental state. As such, research on SLA is increasingly viewed as a branch of cognitive science’ (Doughty and Long 2003: 4). Anything else, such as the social contexts in which language is used, or the physical stuff of the brain itself, or even the body in which the mind/brain is housed, are considered marginal, messy, uninteresting – mere noise.
Chomsky, of course, took this view to an extreme: the observable messiness of language in use (or performance) ‘surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics’ (1965: 4). Rather, ‘linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality (or competence) underlying such behaviour’ (ibid.).
Of course, such a view has a sort of intuitive attraction. Language, obviously, is in the mind. Where else could it be? Not in the body, surely?
Not in the body, perhaps, but maybe of the body. Some cognitive linguists have broken rank and taken issue with the stark mind-body separation that others like Chomsky insist on. Mark Johnson (1987: xiii), for example, argues that ‘the body is in the mind’ and that ‘any adequate account of meaning and rationality must give a central place to embodied and imaginative structures of understanding by which we grasp our world’.
Take this text as an example of what he is getting at:
English is on the up at the moment, an up that is probably unprecedented in world history. But world history is full of languages that have dominated for a long time, yet there aren’t too many of them around now. (Interview with Nicholas Ostler, Guardian Weekly, 12 November 2010)
There are at least two examples here of what Johnson calls ‘the experiential embodied nature of human rationality’ (1987: 100): (1) English is on the up and (2) history is full of languages.
The use of the word up to denote increase, in the sense that MORE IS UP, emerges, according to Johnson (ibid.: xiv) ‘from a tendency to employ an UP-DOWN orientation in picking out meaningful structures of our experience. We grasp the structure of verticality repeatedly in thousands of perceptions and activities we experience every day, such as perceiving a tree, our felt sense of standing upright, the activity of climbing stairs …’.
Likewise, the idea that history is a container, and hence can be full of languages, is an extension of our own embodied sense of physical containment. According to Johnson (ibid.: 21), ‘our encounter with containment and boundedness is one of the most pervasive features of our bodily experience’.
Johnson argues that such experientially-based ‘image schemata’ are integral to meaning and rationality – and, of course, language. The way that language is, the way we use language, and the way that language is learned, are all structured and shaped by the fact that ‘the body is in the mind’.
One fairly obvious manifestation of this is the way we choose particles for phrasal verbs. We fill up the tank, the future is looking up, and children both grow up, and are brought up. Likewise, notions of boundedness and containment are intrinsic, not only to the semantics of the noun phrase in many languages (think of countable and uncountable nouns), but also to verb aspect, as in the difference between the ‘bounded’ I work, and the ‘unbounded’ I am working.
What are the implications for language learning? On the assumption that bringing such relationships to conscious awareness may help learning, a number of researchers have investigated the mnemonic potential of unpacking the image schemata that ‘motivate’ common idioms and phrasal verbs. Others, such as Randal Holme (2009: 48) argue the case for using an enactment and movement (E&M) based pedagogy, thereby ‘building a bridge between movement, imagination and recollection’. Thus, Lindstromberg and Boers (2005), drawing on research into L1 vocabulary learning that shows that acting out word meanings helps children increase their vocabularies, demonstrated that learners remember verbs better not only when they enact them, but when they watch their classmates enact them. As Holme (ibid.) puts it: ‘The body can be rethought as the expressive instrument of the language that must be learned.’
Other scholars take the notion of embodied cognition a step further, and go so far as to situate thought – and, by extension, language – not only in the body, but ‘in the world’, on the grounds that, as Churchill et al. (2010: 237) argue, ‘brains are in bodies, bodies are in the world, and meaningful action in these worlds is in large part socially constructed and conducted’.
In the same vein, Dwight Atkinson (2010) explores the way an extended, embodied view of cognition might affect second language acquisition. He suggests that language learning, rather than being an intellectual process of internalization, is a socially-situated, adaptive behaviour, a process ‘of continuously and progressively fitting oneself to one’s environment, often with the help of guides’ (ibid.: 611). Language is not just cognition; it is also behaviour.
To demonstrate how this might be realized in practice, he traces, in minute detail, the interaction a Japanese schoolgirl has with her aunt, an English teacher, as they work through a homework exercise together: an intricate meshing of language, gesture, gaze, and laughter, inseparable from the experience of learning itself, and bringing to mind these lines of Yeats:
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
(from ‘Among School Children’, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, Macmillan, 1950)
Questions for discussion
1. In your experience as a language learner, in what ways was your learning ‘embodied’?
2. Can you think of parallels, in other languages, for the up-down orientation, and for boundedness?
3. Have you used movement in your teaching? How?
4. Total Physical Response (TPR) was popular a few years ago. Is it time to revive it, maybe adapting it to a more communicative view of learning?
5. Language is ‘in the world’? Apart from enactment and movement, what other implications might this view have for second language learning?
6. Unpacking the ‘image schemata’ of phrasal verbs and idioms: what does this mean in practice, do you think?
7. Atkinson (2010: 610) says that ‘learning is more discovering how to align with the world than extracting knowledge from it’. What implications might this view have on the role of the teacher?
8. One obvious way in which language is ‘in the body’ is pronunciation. What technique
s might make the teaching of pronunciation more physical?
References
Atkinson, D. (2010) ‘Extended, embodied cognition and second language acquisition’, Applied Linguistics, 31, 5.
Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press.
Churchill, E., Okada, H., Nishino, T. and Atkinson, D. (2010) ‘Symbiotic gesture and the sociocognitive visibility of grammar in second language acquisition’, The Modern Language Journal, 94, 2.
Doughty, C. and Long, M. (eds) (2003) The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, Oxford: Blackwell.
Holme, R. (2009) Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Teaching, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jackendoff, R. (2002) Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, M. (1987) The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Lindstromberg, S. and Boers, F. (2005) ‘From movement to metaphor with manner-of-movement verbs’, Applied Linguistics, 26, 2.
To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to
http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/b-is-for-body/
7 What is the best age to start?
What is the optimal age to start learning an additional language? Popular thinking, and much of current educational policy (in Europe at least), suggests that the younger, the better. Everyone has a story of a child who moved from one country to another and, lo and behold, was speaking the local language within months, if not sooner. Why not capitalize on this apparently effortless capacity, the thinking goes, and introduce a second language at primary school?
However, evidence is starting to emerge that casts some doubt on the wisdom of such a policy, especially if its implementation involves only an hour or so of instruction a week. And an hour or so a week seems to be the norm. Data from the European Commission’s Eurydice website (http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/education/eurydice/index_en.php) shows that the time devoted to foreign language teaching in primary schools remains limited, in general less than ten percent of total class time, and varies considerably between countries, not only in terms of the number of hours, but also in terms of the starting age. For example, by Grade 7, children in Portugal will have had just 162 hours (they start in Grade 5) while children in Bulgaria, who start in Grade 2, will have had 343 hours. Spain is nearer the higher end, with 386 hours accumulated by the time children are in Grade 7, but since they start in Grade 1, this represents, on average, only 64 hours a year.