concept, goal and universal grammar theory second language of acqusition

CHAPTER I

OPENING

1.      BACKGROUND

In the first part of this work, the learnability issue has been considered from primary language perspective. The 'logical problem of acquisition' and the 'poverty of stimulus' argument lead to the well-known idea of an innate language faculty at work.

Second language acquisition as the process of learning another language after the basic of the first have been acquired, starting at about five years of age and thereafter. Sometime researchers refer to this process as sequential language acquisition to differentiate it from bilingual ac quistion, which is the acquision of two languages simulataneously from infancy. Apparently, when a young child learns two language at the some time, the principles which govern monolingual first language acquisition apply to the acquisition of both language.

Second language acquisition includes learning a new language in a foreign language context. Second language refer to both foreign and host language and the learning priciple discussed apply to the acquisition of both. Target language refer to the language being learned or taught.

Some arguments in support of the existence of the language faculty in primary acquisition can be usefully employed in second language acquisition research; on the other hand, first and second language acquisition present several differences in several respects, which makes a comparison between the two processes an arduous task. The first step in trying to make explicit the relationship between L1 and L2 processes is to restate the issue in UG terms.

CHAPTER II

EXPLANATION

1.      Concept of sla

a.       Direct negative evidence

It is reasonable to assume that most second language acquisition occurs in presence of direct negative evidence. There are two sources of direct negative evidence, namely, explicit correction of ungrammatical forms and explanation of grammatical rules Both types of evidence are more likely to occur in guided learning than in spontaneous learning, where they are limited or even unavailable. There is agreement among linguists that negative evidence is provided to adult learners, at least in classroom environment in the form of correction or explanation of grammar rules, though there is less consensus on the role they assume in the acquisition process. Moreover, the effective use of this type of data in second language grammar construction "it has been observed that the provision of negative feedback (i.e. corrections) does not appear to lead to more accurate performance, at least not immediately. Even when the negative feedback is provided in the course of ordinary conversation (i.e. in the form of expansions and paraphrases serving as confirmation checks and requests for clarification), there is still no evidence to suggest that learner amend his hypothesis immediately" (Ellis, 1985: 174).

Second language learners do not appear to have control over their mistakes, nor can they make use of correction in grammar construction. Furthermore, a comparison between guided and spontaneous learning demonstrates that in both contexts second language learners will follow a common route of development irrespective of the type of input they receive (Ellis: 1985: 202). In other words, correction of ungrammatical forms does not seem to alter in any way the process of acquisition nor does it seem to rule out the role of UG in second language acquisition. On the other hand, the fact that empirical studies on the efficacy of correction have not proved conclusive, "do not mean that correction plays no role in language learning" and that one may expect that further research "may also uncover specific situations in which error correction may be effective". (Dulay, Burt and Krashen, 1982: 36). The role of 'explanatory evidence' is another questionable source of grammar construction in second language acquisition. The nature of grammar rules involved in formal instruction is greatlydissimilar from the type of unconscious language knowledge which characterizes UG.

b.       Indirect negative evidence

If certain types of unmarked sentence structures construction fail to occur in the input data when they are expected to appear, this may constitute indirect evidence of the existence of a marked property in the target language grammar. Schwartz (1987: 282) considers this type of data as the relevant one in second language grammar construction. In fact, whereas direct negative data "imputes to the language faculty the questionable capacities of comparing grammatical with ungrammatical sentences or simply making use of metalinguistic knowledge in its computations, indirect negative evidence does not". In other words, if UG plays a role in second language acquisition, indirect rather than direct negative evidence is the proper type of data second language learners rely on.

c.        Simplified registers

The direct counterpart to motherese in second language acquisition is 'teacher-talk' or 'foreigner-talk', depending on the situational and environmental context in which they appear. Although simplified, these two forms of adjusted input are used, respectively, by teachers and natives. Crucially, they do not contain ungrammatical simplifications, but they share some common surface properties: slow speech rate, shorter utterances, preference of co-ordination over subordination, use of recurrent forms. Their main function is to facilitate communication and comprehension with foreign language learners. However, as opposed to motherese, which contributes to the developement of grammar knowledge, "no direct causal relation between teacher- and foreigner-talk and L2 grammatical knowledge exists" (Schwartz, 1987: 199). Additional sources of positive input are normally provided in guided learning, namely, sample reading and classroom lectures among others.

at least at syntax level. The difference between successful and unsuccessful learners rests precisely on the fact that, whereas the former receive some perfect (i.e. grammatically correct) L2 input, the latter are submitted to a greater amount of degenerated input in the form of interlanguage talk. Some linguists point out that, actually, first language learners sometimes get degenerated input as well. Recent studies in child language acquisition demonstrate just the opposite: motherese isnot a form of degenerate input.

2.      the goal of sla

Second language acquisition – naturalistic, instructed, or both – has long been a common activity for a majority of the human species and is becoming ever more vital as second languages themselves increase in importance. In manyparts of the world, monolingualism, not bilingualism or multi lingualism, is the marked case. The 300–400 million people whose native language is English, for example, are greatly outnumbered by the 1–2 billion people for whom it is an official second language. Countless children grow up in societies where they are exposed to one language in the home, sometimes two, another when they travel to a nearby town to attend primary or secondary school, and a third or fourth if they move to a larger city or another province for tertiary education or for work.

3.      The Language Acquisition Device

Earlier theories of language acquisition regarded language acquisition as a process of imitation and reinforcement, a kind of 'habit formation'. According to this view, the child would learn linguistic forms by a process of analogy with other forms. The last decades have marked the decline of this concept of language acquisition. Many observations and studies indicate that the child cannot proceed in the acquisition of language by relying only on a process of analogy. By no means, in fact, can such a process account for the richness of language, creativity and for the complexity of language, given the limitations of data actually available to the child.

Later formulations of grammar acquisition in the context of generativism postulate the existence of some kind of cognitive mechanism governing and permitting the acquisition of language,the 'language acquisition device' (henceforth LAD). It is undeniable that the environment affects L1 learners. In order to learn a language, children need the incoming data, but also something that allows them to process the data they are exposed to. In the following passage, Chomsky postulates the existence of LAD: "Having some knowledge of the characteristics of the acquired grammars and the limitations on the available data, we can formulate quite reasonable and fairly strong empirical hypotheses regarding the internal structure of the language-acquisition device that constructs the postulated grammars from the given data" (Chomsky, 1968: 113). According to this view, the content of LAD is a system of universal principles and parameters fixed through the available data.

There is agreement among linguists that the process of acquiring a language is very peculiar and complex. There is, however, not much consensus about the nature of the mechanism which governs it. In particular, various proposals have been made about the nature of the LAD and its psychological basis.

4.      Universal Grammar theory

a)      Principles and parameters

According to Chomsky (1981b: 7), UG "is taken to be a characterization of the child's pre-linguistic initial state". It consists of "a system of principles with parameters to be fixed,along with a periphery of marked exceptions" (Chomsky, 1986a: 150 - 151). The "core grammar" entails a set of universal principles, which apply in all languages, and a set of parameters which may vary from language to language. By contrast, the "peripheral grammar" is made up of quirks and irregularities of language. The theory of UG must observe two conditions: "on the one hand, it must be compatible with the diversity of existing (indeed possible) grammars. At the same time, UG must be sufficiently constrained and restrictive in the options it permits so as to account for the fact that each of these grammars develops in the mind on the basis of quite limited evidence...[i.e. thelogical problem]. What we expect to find, then, is a highly structured theory of UG based on a number of fundamental principles that sharply restrict the class of attainable grammars and narrowly constrain their form, but with parameters that have to be fixed by experience" (Chomsky, ib.: 3-4).

On the role of parameters in syntactic theory Wexler and Manzini (1987) remark: "parameters have been introduced into linguistic theory as a solution to the fundamental problem of linguistics: the tension between the existing variety of natural languages and the necessity of explaining how c hildrencan actually learn the grammars of their particular languages".

The parameters being part of a 'higher' principle, the set of principles is not increased by their presence (modularity of the model). In this sense, parameters permit the description and explanation of linguistic phenomena, which otherwise would have to be explained by a number of redundant rules; furthermore, the introduction of parameters accounts and limits the range oflinguistic variation across languages.

b)      Subtheories of grammar

The explanation of linguistic phenomena is not the outcome of one single principle but rather the result of the interaction of several principles and parameters. A recent development in syntactic theory which underlies UG is 'Government-Binding Syntax' (Chomsky, 1981b, 1986). The name 'Government-Binding' (henceforth GB) originates from two primary aspects of the overall theory: "bounding theory poses locality conditions on certain processes and related items. The central notion of government theory is the relation between the head of a construction and categories dependent on it. θ-theory is concerned with the assignment of thematic roles such as agent-of-action, etc. [...] Binding theory is concerned with relations of anaphors, pronoun, names and variables to possible antecedents. Case theory deals with assignment of abstract Case and its morphological realization. Control theory determines the potential for reference of the abstract pronominal element PRO" (Chomsky, 1981b: 6).

 Each 'module' of the theory is a subcomponent of the general theory: the theory of government deals with the assignment of cases together with the case theory, or it accounts for the referential possibilities in the sentence together with the binding theory; bounding theory limits the distance that an item may move. The range of variation across languages is defined by parameters which can be fixed either to the negative or the positive value of each single language. UG theory is closely linked to the learnability issue. In order to have an idea of what UG may consist of and the relevance for language acquisition, some of its meaningful principles and parameters formulated by linguists will be mentioned.

c)      Structure-dependence

Structure-dependence is a universal principle holding across all syntactic categories of language. There is no language in the world which contravenes this principle: "grammatical transformations are necessarily structuredependent, in that they manipulate substrings only in terms of their assignment to categories" (Chomsky, 1965:55).

CHAPTER III

CLOSING

A.    CONLUSION

All in all, despite the differences between first and second acquisition processes, the consideration of the poverty of stimulus argument seems to hold true in second language acquisition process as well. On the reasonably fair assumption that much L2 knowledge is underdetermined, two equally possible solutions to the logical problem of second language acquisition can be formulated, which correspond to the Fundamental Difference

Hypothesis and Fundamental Identity Hypothesis:

1)      UG is no longer available to adult second language learners, though they may tap first language competence in second language grammar construction. Second language acquisition is the product of some general problem-solving mechanism which proceeds on a basis of trial and error. This view is supported, among others, by Bley-Vroman (1989: 53)

2)      adult second language learners do have (partial) access to UG, namely, they still use actively the language faculty in second language acquisition. Furthermore, they are also supposed to have access to first language abstract properties of language (Flynn, 1988: 179; Clahsen and Muysken, 1989:23).

In the following chapters the second solution is supported. In fact, implicit in the parameter-setting view of second language acquisition is the idea that UG principles and (perhaps) parameters are still an active force, though reduced, in second language grammar construction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dulay, Heidi. 1982. Language Two. New York: Oxford University Press