Week 7: Learner language

     This week we dealt with learner language.  First conceived as interlanguage (Selinker, 1972), defined later as an interim competence constrained from the L1 and L2 grammar,  it has drawn many researchers scrutinizing its nature and the mental representations of L2 speakers. The findings have been revealing in many respects: cross-linguistically, there exist a systematicity in its developmental sequences, morpheme orders, negation, and relative clauses, for instance. To know where learners are most likely to make errors cross-linguistically would give pedagogical implication to practitioners, be it in the ESL, or EFL context.  By instruction practitioners would be able to facilitate and foster the learning processes, though special care has to be taken of when learners are developmentally ready and what area of language development is being dealt with.  

     On Thursday, we zeroed in on F on F, F on FS, and F on Meaning, along with the concepts of implicit teaching and explicit teaching.  Well-founded upon the previously-earned knowledge of the nature of  interlanguage, we ascertained that instruction can function positively for the betterment of L2 learners, though it may hugely depend upon how you go about the instruction.  The study conducted by Doughty & Varela (1998) revealed that it is more effective and productive when pedagogical provision is made and incorporated in facilitating learners than otherwise.  On the meaning-based classroom, recast can effectively be implemented as one way of Focus on Form.  

     Coincidentally, after the class, we could hear HELP instructors sharing their content-based teaching at the institution.  I was impressed by the young and ambitious teachers trying to bring about a change in their teaching, though I felt a sense of doubt about the method.  Most practitioners in my country share the same thought that ALTs  have not accomplished much in the sense that they were expected to.  Communicative teaching (CT) have failed and many institutions are not actually conducting classes, totally meaning-based instruction any longer; they would have to spend many hours preparing materials for meaning-based classes because of the dearth of materials.  

     I had happened to visit the very institution to observe one of the content-based classes the day before that day.  The teacher, one of my classmates, was energetically engaged in teaching a class.  He prepared a variety of materials for content-based purpose, while I was looking on somewhat unmotivated learners.  I intuitively sensed that students had never learned the language, paying attention to linguistic elements throughout their learning experiences.  

     I question the validity of the content-based teaching.  One professor also inquired what it was that made them decide to shift from skill-based to the presently on-going content-based teaching, though I assumed he might have meant the total retreat to F on FS.   As Daughty & Verela (1998) point out, "the feasibility and effectiveness of incorporating a relatively implicit FonF technique into a content-based and, therefore, communicative language classroom" (p. 137) needs to be reconsidered once again by stakeholders, so that learners will benefit more from the classes and flourish in whatever paths they may tread in the future.   

Week 6 IRB & ethics

This week we talked about ethical issues in research involving human participants. An IRB approval should be obtained for any research which is going to involve participants.

Research in second language field usually goes to the category of “Exempt”. To apply for an IRB approval, you can go to the website http://www.hawaii.edu/irb/ to download the application forms. The application package includes: a. Declaration of Exemption Forms; b. Application for New Approval; c. Consent Forms; and d. any appendix, such as tests or questionnaires.

The form of Application for New Approval provides IRBs necessary information in the format they are familiar with. There are three tips in preparing the form: a. You can put “as soon as approved” as the start date. If you want to give a specific date, please allow at least two weeks for IRBs to work on your application. b. Never go beyond the space on the application forms. Keep it short and simple. c. It is important to mention benefit. No one wants to waste time on research without any benefits to your participants or your society in general.

The consent form should be written in a language comprehensible and simple enough to be understood by participants. It is important to emphasize voluntary participation. Participants may choose to accept or refuse the invitation to participate in research and they can withdraw anytime without any consequences. It is also important to ensure confidentiality of the participants. Avoid mentioning the name of the program where you collect data, because people may be able to know who your participants are. You can also change the detailed description of your participants as long as it will not affect your study.

An IRB approval should be obtained before you start to recruit your participants. Different universities may have different requirements for IRB. If you plan to collect data from universities other than UH, please double check with the local authorization to see whether they have additional requirements.

Ethnic issues are something we should always keep in mind when we are planning research involving human participants. The process of IRB application helps us to ensure that necessary steps have been taken to protect our participants. In addition, it helps us to think through and plan out the steps involved in research design.

Week 5 Cognition

We examined second language acquisition from a cognitive perspective this week. On Tuesday, we separated into four groups. Each group worked on a topic and had a brief report to the class afterward. The topics that were introduced under the framework of cognition included: information processing and skill acquisition theory, memory and language learning, the role of attention in language learning, and finally the imminent trend of emergentism.
Grounding on information processing theories, skill acquisition theory defines L2 learning as the gradual transformation of performance from controlled to automatic. Controlled processing takes more efforts and resources than automatic processing does. Through practice over many trials, learners are expected to be able to convert their explicit knowledge into implicit-procedural knowledge, which allows learners to use their L2 automatically. Note that automaticity does not simply equate to speedy behavior. The qualitative changes in the knowledge representation, such as making the stored knowledge become more elaborated, specified, and analyzed, are essential in proceduralization as well.

The idea of knowledge representation is related to the studies on long-term memory. A well-studied area is how L2 vocabulary knowledge is stored and represented in long-term memory. However, memory is not just about passively recording things. The other type of memory is called working memory, which allows us to manipulate information as we hold it in our minds. Researchers have concluded that working memory capacity is smaller in the L2 than the L1, possibly due to the reason that processing of L2 materials costs more cognitive resources than that of L1. The working memory capacity, as pointed out by Randall Engle, is not directly about memory, but about the ability to control attention to maintain information in an active, quickly retrievable state. Specifically, attention heightens the activation level of input and thus makes it available for entering long-term memory. However, the quality of attention required for L2 learning is still under debate. SLA researchers have investigated whether L2 learning is possible without intention (i.e. incidental learning), without attention (i.e. implicit learning), and without rules. Supporting the idea of learning without rules, emergentists view L2 acquisition as an associative, probabilistic, rational, usage-based, and grounded learning process. Such interpretations have guided us to reconsider the nature of L2 acquisition.

Centering on the issue of awareness, we examined Rosa and O’Neill’s study on Thursday. Rosa and O’Neill’s clever research designs tackled the questions about: a) how explicit and implicit learning influence what is intaken, b) whether different levels of awareness have a differential effect on intake, and c) whether the above two factors (explicit/implicit leaning vs. levels of awareness) interact. The results supported Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis—more awareness leads to more learning. Explicit formal instruction associated with high-level awareness (understanding) and was superior to implicit learning. Also, the surprising performance of the treatment-only group demonstrated that task essentialness was important. A good task design could lead to a similar effect as what formal instruction could achieve.

The study of cognition has important implications for L2 acquisition. It not only provides us with another perspective to study how people acquire L2, but also shed lights on classroom teaching. Learners go through successive stages of cognitive analysis and representation of the input. Aware of the findings in cognitive science, teachers can adjust their teaching methods and designs of activity and curriculum to better meet learners’ needs. For instance, as demonstrated in Rosa and O’Neill’s investigation, immediate task-essential feedback can contribute to learning as well as explicit rule explanation. Teacher may also organize the content in ways that facilitate information retrieval and integration. By activating learners’ existing knowledge that is related to the new content, teachers can start a lesson from what the learners have known to help them make connections between old and new information. Besides, teachers need to draw students’ attention to the target structures in order to help learners to convert input to intake.

Week 3 The Linguistic Environment

The theme of the week is “the linguistic environment,” focusing on the relationship between the learning environment and human cognition from a cognitive-interactionist approach. We discuss the five influential hypotheses mostly initiated in the 1980s—Acculturation Model (Schumann, 1976), Comprehensible Input Hypothesis (Krashen, 1985), Pushed Output Hypothesis (1985), Interaction Hypothesis (Long, 1996), and Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt, 1995)—with the former two hypotheses seriously challenged by the latter ones.

Firstly, Acculturation Model hypostasizes that the less a learner acculturates or assimilates into the target language group, socially and psychologically, the less likely one will acquire the target language, and vice versa. Nevertheless, this model has been refuted by Schmidt’s study on Wes’ English language development (1983). Wes is a Japanese artist immigrating to Hawaii. Enjoying a rather high socio-economic status, along with a sociable personality, Wes is expected to acquire English well based on the acculturation model. Surprisingly, with his little attention or care for grammatical accuracy, Wes has progressed very little in grammatical competence and sociolinguistic repertoires marked by grammatical forms throughout the 3-year observation period, despite the fact that he has advanced significantly in sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence. Schmidt later concludes that grammar acquisition cannot be successful without sensitivity to form.

Secondly, same as the acculturation model, the Input Hypothesis has been proven untenable in guaranteeing successful language acquisition. According to Krashen, L2 learners are believed to acquire the target language naturally like L1 learners if an abundant amount of comprehensible input (i+1) is provided. Yet, counter examples from French immersion school have proven that input is a necessary but not sufficient factor(Swain, 1985; Sato, 1990). Swain then proposes that output can raise learners’ attention to their language use, such as sentence construction (i.e. syntactic processing). Another strand of research complementing the Input Hypothesis is Long’s Interaction Hypothesis, which lays greater emphasis on modified input through interaction. According to Long, during the communication, a two-way process, learners are enabled to focus on both meaning and form.

Following Long’s work, researchers like Swain, Loschky, and Pica, try to establish the link between interaction and acquisition. Supportive and counter examples are both found. One of the possible reasons is the presence of another variable--‘the design of the task’-- in the empirical research. Seemingly, it is not easy to design a task that requires both meaning negotiation and close attention to structure for task completion. Later research on interaction addresses more specific issues related to different types of negotiations of form and the role of negative feedback during negotiation in classroom settings.

From the ample studies reviewed in the reading, one controversial issue centering our classroom discussion this week is: How can teachers adjust the degree of explicitness in form instruction in response to the change of classroom setting? It seems that in ESL setting, the trend goes from 'focusing on meaning' to 'focusing on form' whereas in EFL setting, there is a move going from focusing on ‘forms’ to focusing on ‘form.’ Given that the effectiveness of form-focused instruction has been established, the next challenge posed is: How do teachers design tasks that engage learners in both meaning and form negotiations, which are saliently enough to raise learners’ meta-linguistic awareness? This is a challenge to both SLA researchers and frontline teachers.

After this week’s discussion, one thing that really pops into my mind is the danger of adopting a hypothesis without appropriating it. When I was a teacher back home, I focused so much on implementing communicative language teaching that the grammatical points in class were not highlighted saliently enough for learners to notice or identify. (I did not know about Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis back then.) One of the students I tutored turned out to be one neither good at fluency nor accuracy. Now, as I learn about the historical development of each hypothesis, I realize how each hypothesis has undergone a lot of revision and replaced by later research findings. Indeed, the process of second language acquisition involves so many variables that instructors need to learn how to appropriate and synthesis different research findings to suit their own teaching contexts.

Week 2: Crosslinguistic Influences

This week we investigated the evidence of crosslinguistic influences in language learning. For Tuesday, we read chapter 3 in Ortega’s Understanding SLA. Some of the things we talked about in class are: “error” vs. “transfer solution”, our own experiences with crosslinguistic influences, and L1 transfer vs. UG. L1 can speed up or slow L2 learning down, so there can be both positive and negative effects of transfer. Positive transfer is typically less-studied because positive transfer is difficult to pinpoint.

Early researchers thought that most mistakes in L2 were directly related to the learner ‘leaning on’ the grammar of the L1. We now know that this is sometimes the case but it is not a given. Therefore, in researching this phenomenon we focus on the nature of the cognitive processes in the mind and the systematic grammar rules that language learners tend to make, the learner’s perceptions of the relationship between the L1 and L2, and the learner’s proficiency level.

Learners tend to acquire language in a pattern. For example, they tend to acquire question forms in a certain order. The L1 can put learners on the fast track or slow track to learning the L2, depending on how marked the L1’s form is versus the markedness of the L2 form. Learners also tend to learn in a U-shaped pattern, performing well when unaware of grammar structure, making more errors when becoming aware, and improving after learning the form. When learners learn three or more languages, they will tend to transfer patterns from the language that is more typologically similar.

On Thursday, we discussed the Spada and Lightbown study of francophone children in an intensive English program in Canada. We began by discussing the stages of question acquisition. Each stage builds upon the other, adding to the repertoire of question forms that the learner can use. It seems that only when learners use a certain stage (around stage 5) a domino effect can occur, so if the learner acquires that stage first, the other stages will naturally be acquired.

In this study, the researchers used the “input flood” treatment in the classroom. Most of the treatment was input related, while only some was in eliciting the target form. In the testing, two of the tasks were input related, and two were production related.

They found that the learners improved more on written production tasks than oral production tasks. They were also surprised to find that there seemed to be a sub-stage in the acquisition pattern related to the inversion of the noun phrase. They infer that this is due to L1 transfer because French has this rule and English does not. However, as they note at the end, this conclusion cannot be reached unless there is more proof that learners from different L1 backgrounds do not make the same transfer error.