Transcript Slide 1

Current trends in L2 research
Najnowsze tendencje w badaniach nad nabywaniem jêzyka obcego/drugiego
MICHAEL A. SHARWOOD SMITH
M A Y 1 8 TH, 2 0 1 3 1 2 . 0 0 - 1 3 . 3 0 .
Lecture Overview
1. What is “SLA”?
2. The Main Questions.
3. Differing Points of View
It’s NOT about Teaching!!
SLA (or L2A) is about how
people acquire two (or more)
languages at any age and under
any circumstances
Simultaneous L2A
Young children fully acquiring
more than one language in the
home or in the community or
both.
A ‘heritage’ language
Young children fully acquiring
one language spoken widely in
the community and...
partially acquiring another
language at home (heritage
language) up to near-native
levels
Sequential L2A
Children acquiring another
language in the community
after gaining native levels in
their first
 For example, when the family moves
to another country and the children
are between 4 and 18
Sequential L2A
Children acquiring another
language (at primary or
secondary school) OR adults
after gaining native levels in
their first
 Sometimes called ‘foreign language
acquisition’ (FLA) or ‘instructed SLA’
Summarising...
L2A is about learners at any age
and in any kind of learning
situation.
It is not about
instruction/language planning
Logically...
Instruction/language planning
methodology should be
informed by research on the
relevant type of L2A.
In reality,...
it is often is not informed by the
latest SLA research
Sometimes it is not informed by
any SLA research at all!
The Basics of Language
Acquisition
]
Early L1/2 Acqisition
]
What is actually happening
during LA?
]
Language is a mental system,
that humans in a given
situation are able somehow to
construct in their heads.
Basic Characteristics of Child Language
Acquisition
The Miracle
 Children master a very complex mental system..
 before they can read and write
 before they can analyse what they are doing
 Spontaneously, without serious thought.
 Without their grammar being corrected. (Parents
know this isn’t needed!)
Stages in First Language (L1) Learning
 Between five and seven months, babies begin to play




with sounds and their vocal noises begin to sound
like consonants and vowels.
Between seven and eight months they begin to
babble in real syllables.
Around their first birthday, they begin to understand
and produce words.
By four they have become little native speakers.
What remains is a process of literacy (language
enrichment)
Basic Characteristics of sequential
‘SECOND’ Language Acquisition
Two fundamental points of view
 L2A is fundamentally different from L1A

Selinker [1972]; later: Bley-Vroman, Tsimpli
 L2A is fundamentally

the same as L1A
Dulay, Burt [1973], Krashen [1976]; later: White, Schwartz
Interlanguage Theory
(
LARRY SELINKER
 His paper ‘Interlanguage’ came out in 1972
 IL is: an emerging L2 system.
 How do we recognise it?
 By the systematic behaviour of L2 learners
LARRY SELINKER
 IMPORTANT:
 Interlanguage is not the same as
‘errors’.
 INTERLANGUAGE (IL) is everything
that is systematic whether or not it
conforms to native speaker norms.
 IL is by definition a NON-NATIVE
SYSTEM.
LARRY SELINKER
 Aspects of learner performance that are
incidental, not revealing any system, are not
part of interlanguage.
 INTERLANGUAGE (IL) is everything that
is systematic whether or not it conforms to
native speaker norms.
LARRY SELINKER claimed that..
 An L2 learner’s mind was not the same as the one
that learned L1.
 And the evidence for this?
 Only 5% gain anything like native like abilty in L2.
 The end of Lenneberg's critical period for L1
acquisition also signals a critical period for any
other, later learned language.
 After this our mind/brain is no longer the same!
Analyse L2 production! What processes explain
systematic features of IL?
 IL PROCESSES:
 FOSSILISATION. Features not changing? Despite
repeated exposure and practice some or all of the
system remains IL. More input no longer leads to
intake!
 LANGUAGE TRANSFER: Some IL rules are ones
that derive from L1
 OVERGENERALISATION: Some IL rules are
regularisations of rules derived from L2
LARRY SELINKER
 also:
 TRANSFER OF TRAINING. Unintended effects of
teacher focus: overuse of certain ‘difficult’
structures
 STRATEGIES OF COMMUNICATION:
simplification: dropping articles, only simple
vocabulary, emphatic style
 STRATEGIES OF LEARNING: Rote memorisation
IL as an emerging L2 system
INEVITABLE
FOSSILISATION
AT SOME STAGE
IL1
IL2
IL3
IL4
IL5
NATIVE
SPEAKER
SYSTEM
An emerging L2 system
INEVITABLE
FOSSILISATION
AT SOME STAGE
IL1
IL2
IL3
IL4
IL5
NATIVE
SPEAKER
SYSTEM
An emerging L2 system
Central IL processes result in
recurring patterns:
IL1
• X% carried over from L1 (LT)
• X% as in L2
IL5
IL3
IL2
IL4
• X% non-native,
based on L2
(OG)
• X% caused by teaching (TofT)
•Plus
• X% for easy communication (CS)
• X% from attempts to learn (LS)
NATIVE
SPEAKER
SYSTEM
Example 1
Central IL processes result in
recurring patterns:
IL1
• 40% carried over from L1 (LT)
• 10% as in L2
IL5(OG)
IL3
IL2
IL4
• 45% non-native,
based on L2
• 2% caused by teaching (TofT)
•Plus
• 2% for easy communication (CS)
• 1% from attempts to learn (LS)
NATIVE
SPEAKER
SYSTEM
Example 2
Central IL processes result in
recurring patterns:
IL1
• 20% carried over from L1 (LT)
• 35% as in L2
IL5(OG)
IL3
IL2
IL4
• 35% non-native,
based on L2
• 2% caused by teaching (TofT)
•Plus
• 3% for easy communication (CS)
• 0% from attempts to learn (LS)
NATIVE
SPEAKER
SYSTEM
Creative Construction:
early challenges to Selinker’s
theory
First,
ideas that many SLA researchers still share.
 There seems to be information in the outside
world.
 Somehow it has come inside the learner’s heads
(minds)
Growing, Developing, Learning
 Crazy and less crazy statements that we make about
‘learning’
 “I can’t get it into my head’
 “She tried to hammer her point home”
 “Nothing seemed to penetrate his thick skull”
Language
and other
‘facts’
ODPORNY
NA WIEDZĘ
Growing, Developing, Learning
 A better way of looking at learning is in terms of
 GROWTH or DEVELOPMENT
 Take the analogy of a plant.
 If it has access to nutrients in the soil and is
exposed to sunshine (warmth) and water, it ‘grows’
 The sun, water or what nutrients there are in the
earth do not determne how the plant will grow
(how many leaves, what colour flowers etc.)
how many leaves, what colour flowers etc
(determined inside!)
 If language is not something that enters our heads
and stays and decides what is inside then:
 How does language ‘grow’ inside the learner?
 So we need to have better idea of what, in
LANGUAGE learning is the equivalent of the soil
nutrient, sun and the water etc.
Language?
Conclusion SO FAR..
 The learner is exposed to language information




available in the outside world.
Watching how language grows INSIDE the learner:
it is plain to see that learners must need that
information (for language to grow inside them)
Not all that information has an impact on the growth
of the language
The arguments are about why that is so.
DISAGREEMENT
 Selinker claims that SECOND language learning
mechanism cannot do the job as the now absent
FIRST language mechanisms.
 That’s why L2 grammars ‘fossilise’.
 Grammatical growth almost always must stop
before native like ability emerges
DISAGREEMENT
 Another school of thought claims that FIRST
language learning mechanisms do not disappear
and are ALSO used in SECOND language learning.
 Grammatical growth may stop but it doesn’t have
to. It does not stop because it can’t go on growing!
Interlanguage
Theory:
IL1
IL2
IL3
IL4
IL5
Native!!!
 Burt and Dulay experimented on
L2 learners and concluded that L2
grammatical growth more or less
followed the same pattern as L1
growth.
 Grammars grow following some
inbuilt sequence!
‘8’
Native!!!
RECREATED NOT RECONSTRUCTED
 They took the radical line and claimed that,
L2 acquisition was driven by the same
processes as L1 acquisition.
 this they called
 CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION
 The language is built anew in the learner’s
mind.
 Recreated from the L2 input
 Not reconstructed from the L1.
 The learner REcreates the L2 from the
beginning
 subconsciously
 without the need for correction
 They even told teachers not to teach syntax:
Dulay, H. C., & Burt, M. K. (1973). Should we teach children syntax?
Language Learning, 23, 245-258
 Dulay and Burt denied the validity
of the ‘Critical Period for L2’ and
hence also the basis for Selinker's
theory.
 Their evidence was drawn from immigrants
in California (Spanish and Chinese
speaking)
 They were interested whether the sequence
of learning English revealed by L1 studies
could be replicated with L2 learners
irrespective of their L1 background!
BURT & DULAY
 Shortcut: order of difficulty predicts order of
actual acquisition.
 Rather than painstakingly follow through
individual learners (like Roger Brown’s Adam,
Eve and Sarah) over a period of time they
opted for a cross-sectional approach:
 You take a groups of learners at one time and
look at the percentage of errors with specially
selected structures .
BURT & DULAY
 The reasoning was that the order of
Missing contractible
copula ‘s :
error-causing structures should also
She’s here
He’s my brother
reflect the order in which those
structures would actually be acquired
always less frequent
so that, in the experimental results, the
than:
Missing possessive
form that always caused fewer errors
‘s
relative to the others, would be fully
acquired earlier..and so on.
Mary’s car
John’s Ipad.
BURT & DULAY
 Some research into L1 acquisition
suggested that this was a safe
assumption.
BURT & DULAY’s 90% CRITERION
 How did they decide that structure was acquired?
 Answer: they opted for figure like 90% correct in
contexts where that form would be expected in
native speech.
 As soon as a form was not supplied in just 10% of
those contexts, it was regarded as ‘officially’
“acquired”.
 Note: It is assumed here that even natives do not
score 100% all the time!
BURT & DULAY
 Which structures did they decide to
investigate?
 They chose structures that had already been
investigated in child language(L1), i.e.,
grammatical morphemes
 You could guarantee these would turn up
very frequently in spontaneous everyday
speech
 Examples: the, a(n), ‘s’ plural, 3rd person
‘s’, irregular past tense
BURT & DULAY
WHAT DID THEY FIND?
BURT, DULAY
 They found an interesting similarity between the L1
and L2 English orders
 Not identical but similar.
 More to the point, all learners showed the same order
of difficulty and were thus assumed also to be
acquiring things in the same order
Fixed morpheme orders (90%)
Fixed morpheme orders (90%)
Other fixed orders
BURT, DULAY
 'Interference' or 'developmental‘ errors?
 They associated transfer explanations with (despised)
behaviourism so..
 What was Dulay and Burt's reaction to 'errors' than
looked as though they were caused by L1 Interference?
Example ‘I no can come' (from Spanish
BURT, DULAY

THEY SAID 2 THINGS:
1.
Errors can often seem like L1-based but turn
out to be equally explainable as
'developmental' because children learning L1
English produce the same construction
The same orders revealed by our experiments
with learners with different language
backgrounds suggest that we first look for
developmental explanations where possible.
2.
BURT, DULAY
THEIR CONCLUSION:
 Grammatical interference was much less
important than previously thought!
 Some L1 like errors were not interference
 Others were simply performance strategies and
did not reflect the learner system but ambitioud
ways to communicate when the current L2
system fails.
KRASHEN’S CONTRIBITION
 Conscious learning of grammar had no impact on
the growth of the ‘acquired’ L2 system
 It can however affect performance under certain
circumstances.
CONSCIOUS Monitor
thinking , analysing..
Explicit knowledge about
grammar
100% subconscious
L2 Grammar
ACQUIRED SO FAR
OUTPUT
‘Natural’ Spontaneous
Speech or Writing
OUTPUT
Correction
From
‘Corrected’
‘outside’
Speech
&
Writing
0
Milliseconds
Test people NOW
and you get a
measure of ONLY
their acquired
knowledge
C
O
M
P
A
R
E
WAIT & test
people NOW
and you may get a
measure of :
a mixture (acquired
plus learned
knowledge)
KRASHEN’S FIVE HYPOTHESES
 (1) The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis.
 adults have two distinctive ways of developing
competences in second languages ..
acquisition, that is by using language for real
communication ... learning .. "knowing about"
language‘
 (2) The Monitor Hypothesis
 'conscious learning ... can only be used as a
Monitor or an editor‘
 (This expresses a development of the idea behind the original Monitor
Model)
Monitor use:
NOW three conditions not one.
SLOW LIMITED
CONSCIOUS
MONITOR
?
Acquired
grammar
subconscious
Now not 1 but 3 limitations:
1. TIME NEEDED but also:
2. SIMPLE RULES ONLY
3. WILLINGNESS TO
MONITOR (individual
learners vary here)
 (4) The Input Hypothesis.
 'humans acquire language in only one way - by
understanding messages or by receiving
"comprehensible input
 (5) The Affective Filter Hypothesis.
 a mental block, caused by affective factors ...
that prevents input from reaching the language
acquisition device'
The Creative Construction
one explanation for ‘apparent’ fossilisation.
Affective Filter
Emotional block
O
R
G
Reduced sensitivity to input
?
A
N
input
I
Z
E
R
Later Developments in SLA
TWO AREAS OF FOCUS
1. The properties of learner systems
at given points in time (T1,T2,T3)
2. Processing: the relationship
between knowledge and how
knowledge is processed on-line
Vast increase in linguistic sophistication
 The same fundamental questions could be asked:
 1)
Must older L2 learners develop L2
grammatical knowledge without access to
the limitations and help supplied by UG?
 2) Do older L2 learners still have
some/complete access to UG?
Predictions
older L2 learners develop L2 grammatical
knowledge without access to UG, then:
 1) the L2 systems they develop using general
 IF
problem solving mechanisms may well have
properties are not possible in natural languages.
 2) they will need grammatical correction.
 3) their L2 grammar will never become native.
Predictions
older L2 learners still have
some/complete access to UG, then:
 1) the L2 systems they develop will have only
 IF
properties are possible in natural languages.
 2) they will not need grammatical correction but
will be even be able to acquaire subtle aspects of
the L2 they have no conscious knowledge of.
 3) their L2 grammar may become native given
sufficient and adequate exposure to the language.
The properties of learner
systems at given points in
time (T1,T2,T3)
THE ‘UG’
GROUP
Processing: the relationship
between knowledge and how
knowledge is processed on-line
•L 2 P R O C E S S I N G D U R I N G P R O D U C T I O N
•L 2 P R O C E S S I N G D U R I N G C O M P R E H E N S I O N
•L 2 P R O C E S S I N G D U R I N G A C Q U I S I T I O N
L2 Processing during production
Manfred Pieneman
0
Explaining L2 Performance
 Up to this point, L2 performance had been used to
support two different positions
 Selinker says it shows L2 learners possess their
own systems and these systems (ILs) remain
non-native. LAD not working so:
 L1A not =L2A
 Burt, Dulay & Krashen say that evidence of fixed
orders show that LAD is still working so:
 L1A=L2A (essentially at least)
Explaining Stages of Acquisition
 B, D & K’s explanation?
 No explanation yet. Mysterious operations
of the L1/L2 Organiser (LAD).
 There are fixed stages.
 Source of evidence?
 Development of grammatical morphemes
Explaining Stages of Acquisition
Pienemann’s explanation?
1. Moving from easily processed structures to
less easily processed structures.
2. Some constructions follow a fixed order.
3. Some do not.
Explaining Stages of Acquisition
 Source of evidence?
 Development of syntax (word order &
lawful combinations of words)
 Pienemann’s first explanation was called:
 The MULTIDIMENSIONAL
MODEL
ZISA project
(Zweitspracherwerb italienischer, portugiesischer und spanischer Arbeiter)
 Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann (1981)
 The major result from the ZISA research was
the well known developmental sequence in
the L2 acquisition of German word order
 LARGE quantity of data (cf. BDK’s)
ZISA project
(Zweitspracherwerb italienischer, portugiesischer und spanischer Arbeiter)
 German word order is quite strict especially
with regard to VERB order:
 The finite verb must come second in main
clauses/simple sentences (‘Often saw I John’)
 Complex verb forms (‘have seen John’)
separate and the non-finite form goes to the
end (‘have John seen’) .
German main clauses/simple sentences
[literal translations into English used as examples]
Verb second
I
see
 Often see
 Stars see
stars.
[Also OK in English]
I stars.
[NOT OK in English]
I
often. [NOT OK in English]
translations into English
V2
Verb final position (in main clauses/simple sentences)
 Complex verb forms separate and the non-finite
form goes to the end.
 *I
have stars
seen
 *Often have I stars
seen
 *Stars I have
often seen
NONfinite
Form
FINAL
POSITION
main clauses/simple sentences
 Another example with modal auxiliary can:
 *I
can stars
 *Often can I stars
 *Stars I can
often
see
see
see
NONFINITE
Verb Form
in
FINAL
POSITION
Subclauses in complex sentences
Learners only use simple sentences at the beginning. Later on,
after first copying in subordinate clauses the order they have
already acquired, L2 learners are finally able to go and apply
Verb Final position to ALL verbs in subordinate clauses :
1. (I said) that I stars saw
2. (I said) that I stars seen have
German Basic Word Order stages
summarised
00
H Stage 1: Canonical Word Order (SVO)
H Stage 2: Adverb pre/postposing (A SVO
A)
H Stage 3: Verb Separation (SVOv)
H Verb 2nd (AVSO, OVS..)
H Verb final (in subclauses) (---,SOvV)
German Word Order:
Examples (adapted)
1. SVO
KINDER SPIELEN MIM BALL
‘Children play
with (the) ball)
2. SVO KEPT [NO SUBJECT VERB INVERSION when adverb optionally added]
DA
KINDER SPIELEN
‘THERE children play’
3. NON-FINITE VERBS NOW GO TO THE END
ALLE KINDER MUSS DIE PAUSE MACHEN
‘All children MUST the break HAVE’
4.
VERB GOES TO OBLIG. VERB 2nd POSITION FORCING SUBJ. AND VERB TO INVERT
DAN HAT SIE WIEDER DIE KNOCH GEBRINGT
‘Then HAVE THEY again
the bone
bringed’
5. FINITE VERBS GO TO THE END OF A SUBCLAUSE (AFTER ANY NON-FINITE VERB)
ER ZAGTE DASS ER NACH HAUSE KOMT
‘He said
that HE to
house COMES’
12m
Pienemann then asked:
Is everything in the L2 grammar acquired
in a fixed order?
H ANSWER: NO
H
Developmental Features
H Some aspects of grammar develop in a fixed
order according to their current processability.
H Here, learners differ in their speed (rate) of
learning grammatical features but follow the
same order
H These features are called “developmental
features”
H Individuals CANNOT follow different paths in
acquiring these features: the order cannot be
influenced in any way
Variational features
H Some aspects of grammar vary according to
learning situation sand the individual
H grammatical features may IN PRINCIPLE be
acquired in any order
H these are called “variational features’ (like?
prepositions, different types of article, adverb)
H Individuals may follow different paths in
acquiring these features.
More comparisons with DBK research
H Subects Italian & Spanish migrant workers
learning L2 German
H Much larger body of data (compare with
creative construction data)
H Major traditional area of syntax (compare with
the morpheme order)
Description vs Explanation
 The developmental (fixed) sequence is actually
provided with an “explanation” (compare with
Creative Construction model)
 ‘Explanation’ is different from ‘description’!!
 P.’s explanation has to do with EASE OF
PROCESSING
 Easily processed constructions acquired first
Processability: the general
idea
 Canonical Word Order (SVO) is the most
“processable” order of elements
Processability: the general
idea
 Placing things at the beginning and end is next
“preserving the canonical order”
Processability: the general
idea
 Then comes moving things from inside to
outside and vice versa
“disrupting the canonical order”
Processability:
the general idea as first conceived
 Switching things round inside the sentence is
the least processable
“disrupting the canonical order”
‘EMERGENCE’
•Pienemann later introduced a new criterion
for acquisition called the EMERGENCE
criterion.
Important: A New Definition of ‘Acquisition’!
when the the new feature “emerges”
this emergence criterion
for acquisition implies
only a few spontaneous occurrences of the
new features (4 or 5x)
this contrasts sharply with the Brown L1/ D,B &
K 90% criterion of acquisition
We now have two alternative definitions of ‘acquired’!
“Acquired” implies a particular
construction/form:
A) ‘regularly appears in learner production’ (BDK)
OR
B) has spontaneously appeared a few times in
learner production
(Pienemann)
Developments in P’S theory
 He turned to TWO sources to expand his model
 Levelt’s speech production model
 Lexical Functional Grammar
 RESULT: an considerable enrichment of his model
AND A NEW NAME:
 PROCESSABILITY THEORY
Teachability Hypothesis
•Teaching cannot force a new developmental
stage to appear.
•Compare this to Krashen’s approach to
grammar teaching
Just don’t teach grammar!)
 PT is a theory of second language acquisition
centered on the premise that the ability to produce
speech in a second language is limited by the one-byone acquisition of five speech processing procedures,
all of which are the same procedures by which a
mature speaker generates grammatical utterances.
The main claim of PT
 The main claim of PT is that learnability is
restricted by computational constraints of
the language processor: as such, learning a
language requires the gradual acquisition of
language-specific processing procedures
based on Levelt’s (1989) speaking model
(Pienemann, 2005, p. 2).
The main claim of PT
 This view of language performance is
complimented by a theory of grammar; PT is
based on Lexical-functional grammar [LFG]
(Kaplan & Bresnan, 1982) a model of
grammar that reflects many of the
psycholinguistic principles prominent in
Levelt’s (1989) theory of production.
Stages of Acquisition
 Stages of Acquisition Predicted by
Processability Theory.
 Processability Theory predicts a universal order of
acquisition of five processing procedures illustrated
by five stages.
Stage 1
 First, at Stage 1, learners are limited to producing
lemma, i.e. words or formulaic expressions. No
exchange of information is possible, and thus no
feature matching, or unification..
Stage 2
 At Stage 2, category procedure, the ability to
assign a category to the lemma, develops. An
example of a category is the feature
‘plurality’; in Spanish, for example, the
plural -s would emerge here as the learner
becomes able to add ‘s’ to lemmas to indicate
plurality.
Stage 2
 In terms of syntax, at Stage 2, learners begin to
produce strings based on canonical word order,
which involves a prototypical mapping of the most
prominent thematic role, i.e. agent, to the initial
position in c-structure, i.e. subject (The Unmarked
Alignment Hypothesis; Pienemann, Di Biase, and
Kawaguchi, 2005, p.229).
 This is possible because it is assumed that learners are able
to define categories such as ‘verb’ and ‘subject’, but
mapping is restricted by the inability to unify features.
Stage 3
 At Stage 3, phrasal procedure emerges, which
involves the ability to merge features as well as the
ability to determine “positions” in terms of phrases
instead of just words (Pienemann, 2005, p.27). At
this point, in terms of morphology, features such
as plurality can be matched across other elements
within the same constituent, i.e. noun phrase
agreement.
Stage 4
 At Stage 4, s-procedure develops: that is, at this
stage, the function of the phrase is determined
through appointment rules and sent to sprocedure, where the information is stored as the
sentence is developed.
 Through s-procedure, information can be
exchanged across constituent boundaries, and
more target-like word order phenomena are found
based on language-specific syntactic rules.
Stage 4
 In terms of morphology, inter-phrasal
information can be exchanged, which
involves the exchange of information across
constituent boundaries, e.g. subject-verb
agreement in English.
Stage 5
 At the final stage, Stage 5, s-procedure
is able to call ‘S’ as a procedure, which
means that subordinate clauses can be
formed.
Conclusion
PIENEMANN’S EXPERIMENTATION
AND THEORISING PROVIDE AN
INTERESTING ALTERNATIVE TO THE
OTHER PROPOSALS
PROCESSABILITY AND
TEACHABILITY ARE THE MAIN IDEAS
AT THE VERY LEAST, AN
EXPLANATION IS PROVIDED FOR
FIXED ORDERS OF DEVELOPMENT IN
PRODUCTION
L2 Processing during comprehension
Bill VanPatten
0
Input processing (VanPatten)
 How learners make connections
between form in the input and
meaning
 His theory is based on
processing so….
 Is this like Pienemann?
Input processing (VanPatten)
 No. This is about
input
processing
 It is not about learner
production (output)
Input processing (VanPatten)
 VanPatten’s approach is
all about what learners
NOTICE in the input
 What do they PAY ATTENTION
TO as they are trying to
understand L2 utterances?
Assumption:
 Input processing capacity of L2
learners is limited
 Only certain features will receive
attention during input processing.
What becomes INTAKE?
 When learners process input, they
filter the input
 Everyone agrees that input is
reduced and modified into a new
entity called ‘intake’
It suggests that there are biases and
constraints in input processing behaviour
Primacy of Meaning Principle
 Because of working memory constraints and
because they are paying attention to meaningbearing prosodic cues are only able to:
 process input for meaning before they can
process it for form.
 This he calls the Primacy of Meaning Principle
The Primacy of Meaning
Principle comprises of subprinciples:
The Primacy of Content Words Principle
going to, chicken, the, kitchen, who,
nasty, beauty, when, well, as, and, have
(as in ‘I have finished’), have (as in ‘I
have three chairs’), her
The Primacy of Content Words
1. Content Words are in white, below)
going to, chicken, the, kitchen, who,
nasty, beauty, when, well, as, and, have
(as in ‘I have finished’), have (as in ‘I
have three chairs’), her
The Lexical Preference Principle
 Learners will tend to rely on lexical items, not
grammatical form, to get meaning when both
encode the same semantic information.
I will go tomorrow (future time)
Two houses (plurality)
John avoids Halina (third person singular)
The Lexical Preference Principle
 Learners will tend to rely on lexical items, not
grammatical forms, to get meaning when both
encode the same semantic information.
I will go tomorrow (future time)
Two houses (plurality)
John avoids Halina (third person singular)
Consequence?
Question: When will you go?
Answer? I ..... go tomorrow
Question: What does John do?
Answer? He avoid.. Halina
The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle
 Learners are more likely to process nonredundant
meaningful grammatical form before they process
redundant
 meaningful grammatical forms
 My cat sleeps ten hours everyday
The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle
 Learners are more likely to process nonredundant
meaningful grammatical form before they process
redundant
 meaningful forms
 My cat sleep ten hour everyday
The Availability of Resources Principle
The Sentence Location Principle
 Learners tend to process items in sentence initial
position before those in final position and those in
medial position
1
3
3
2
The First Noun Principle
 Learners tend to interpret the first
noun as the
Agent/Subject.
 Example: learners of L2 Polish will first tends to
interpret Kota
przystraszyl pies as:

The cat frightened the dog.
 They do not at first pay attention to the
morphology of kot signallin OBJECT status!
Developments in P’S theory
 He turned to TWO sources to expand his model
 Levelt’s speech production model
 Lexical Functional Grammar
 RESULT: an considerable enrichment of his model
AND A NEW NAME:
 PROCESSABILITY THEORY
VanPatten summarised
VANPATTEN’S EXPERIMENTATION
AND THEORISING PROVIDE AN
INTERESTING ALTERNATIVE TO THE
OTHER PROPOSALS
HE PROVIDES NO NEW
EXPLANATIONS FOR FIXED ORDERS
OF DEVELOPMENT BUT RATHER
PRINCIPLES TO EXPLAIN HOW L2
FORMS IN THE INPUT GET NOTICED
Implications for teaching
UG group
Pienemann
VanPatten
UG group and teaching.
•UG researchers had no special interest in
pedagogical implications.
•It was clear to them that if L2 learners
maintained access to UG, they need to acquire
the L2 ‘naturally’ as suggested by Dulay, Burt
and Krashen
•If they have no access and if pushed to talk
about pedagogy, they might say that, then
traditional teaching methods should be applied.
Pienemann’s Teachability Hypothesis
•Teaching cannot force a new developmental
stage to appear.
•Compare this to Krashen’s approach to
grammar teaching
Just don’t teach grammar!)
Teachability Hypothesis
•Variational features can be taught
•Developmental features cannot be
taught
•“An L2 structure can be learnt from
instruction only if the learner's IL is
close to the point when this structure is
acquired in the natural setting"
(Pienemann 1984:201) [my italics].
Teachability Hypothesis
•QuestionS:
1. What does ‘close to the point when
this structure is acquired in the
natural setting’ mean?
2. How do you know when that point
has arrived?
Pienemann’s Teachability Hypothesis
•The feature must emerge independently in
the learner’s spontaneous production (a few
times)
•Practising a developmental feature in class
once it has emerged can help the learner to
get through to the next stage faster.
Teachers must wait until it appears.
VanPatten’s Processing Instruction (PI) approach
•Focus on processing L2 INPUT and not on
producing L2 utterances.
•It’s all about noticing.
VanPatten’s Processing Instruction (PI) approach
•Techniques can be applied to help learners
process input.
•These techniques must exploit the leaner’s
instinctive preference for extracting
meaning (and related strategies)
•They must make certain forms and syntactic
structures easier to notice and process.
Just one example
•Learner’s follow First Noun Principle
•Many languages allow first noun to be an
OBJECT.
•English learners of Spanish will initially not
notice object markers and process the first
noun as a subject/agent.
•An exercise might take the following form:
Picture
showing Juan
calling Maria
A
Picture
showing Maria
calling John
B
Question: match the following sentence to the right picture:
A Maria la llama Juan
Object
marker
Object
marker
Many, many other developments in L2 theory
 Different approaches
 Different areas of the language
 Different aspects of L2 systems
(properties/processing/transition)
 New techniques (eye-tracking, brainimaging)
CONCLUSION
 From a new field of research which
branched from the applied linguistics of
language teaching
 SLA has become a fully-fledged
independent area of theoretical and
experimental research
The End