This is yet
another book that I read for professional development.
The edition
of the book that I have (the second edition) was published in 2004, so I assume
it contains much of the latest research.
It is
designed to be used as an introductory textbook on second language learning, and
so it overlaps heavily with the previous textbook I read on the same subject: Understanding Second Language Acquisition by Lourdes Ortega. And yet at
the same time, each book contains some information not in the other, and
occasionally each book will come at something from a slightly different angle,
so I’m glad I read both. (Also, since my memory is so terrible, it was also good for me to review the
overlapping material.)
Much of
what I said in my review of Lourdes Ortega’s book holds here as well. At this moment in time, exactly how the brain
processes language is still mostly a mystery to science. Linguists can observe behavior and make
inferences about cognitive processes, but we’re still unsure of how people
learn a first language, much less a second language.
Anecdotally,
everyone observes that a second language is usually learned with much less
success than a first language, but no one is sure exactly why this is.
The authors
lay out the possible range of theories in the beginning of the book:
“These phenomena of incomplete success and
fossilization are also significant ‘facts’ about the process of SLL [Second
Language Learning], which any serious
theory must eventually explain. As we will see, explanations of two basic types
have been offered. The first group of
explanations are psycholinguistic:
the language-specific mechanisms available to the young child simply cease to
work for older learners, at least partly, and no amount of study and effort can
recreate them. The second group of explanations are sociolinguistic: older second language learners do not have the
social opportunities, or the motivation, to identify completely with the native
speaker community, but may instead value their distinctive identity as learners
or as members of an identifiable minority group” (p. 18-19).
In other
words, no one really knows for sure why you struggle to learn second languages.
As with
Lourdes Ortega’s book, the authors can not provide any certainty to the major
questions of SSL, but they do a very good job of exploring the range of current
theories. The book is incredibly systematic
in its approach—the scope of SSL research is outlined in the first few
chapters, and then once the field has been surveyed, the remaining chapters
systematically break down each area of inquiry, and say what the relevant
research has shown.
The authors
state that: “This book is intended as an
introduction to the field, for students without a substantial prior background
in linguistics” (p.2), and it is, for the most part, highly readable for the
novice like myself.
For the
most part, I say, because some chapters were more readable than others. And there were a few paragraphs that
completely lost me. For example from
page 86, here’s an example of a paragraph that really threw me for a loop:
“A similar approach is that of Eubank (1996)
and is called the Valueless Features hypothesis. In this view, both lexical and functional
categories are transferred early on (with a short stage in which only lexical projections
are present), but functional categories lack values such as tense, agreement,
etc., and are present as syntactic markers only (i.e. inflections may be
lacking, but the syntactic operations linked to these categories will be in
place).”
I know I
took that paragraph out of context, but speaking as someone who was carefully
reading this book all the way through, even when I got to it in context, I
still couldn’t figure it out.
And there
were a few more incomprehensible paragraphs like that scattered throughout the
book.
But still,
those exceptions aside, it is over-all highly readable.
Universal Grammar
A co-worker of mine had already
read this book, and before I started reading I asked him how it was.
“It’s okay,”
he said, and then he grimaced slightly and added, “it was very heavy on Chomsky’s
theories though.”
Actually to
be fair to this book, the authors divide the different SSL theories very
clearly into different sections, and there’s very little Chomsky in the sociolinguistic sections.
But roughly
the first third of the book does explore the implications of Noam Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar on second language learning.
(To get a
good introduction to Universal Grammar, the best general introduction to Noam
Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics that I have encountered is The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker. Ideally, I would recommend reading Pinker’s
book before this one.)
It was
interesting for me to read about Universal Grammar being applied to second
language learning, because in my previous applied linguistics degree Universal
Grammar had not been given much emphasis.
I had assumed Universal Grammar did not apply to adult second languages
learners, mostly because of “the commonsense
observation that immigrant children generally become native-like speakers of
their second language, whereas their parents rarely do” (from p.84, where
the authors are describing common reasons for supposing that adult learners
have no access to Universal Grammar.)
But the
authors make a case that Universal Grammar may still be operating in adult
learners. Even though adult learners may
not learn native-speaker norms of the target grammar, they still “do not seem to produce ‘wild’ grammars, that
is, grammars that would not be constrained by Universal Grammar” (p.
84). For example, adult second language
learners still seem to have an intuitive sense of noun and verb phrases, and
sense that all the words that go with the noun must be inside the noun phrase.
This is a
perspective I had not been exposed to before, so I found it interesting to consider
just how much of a factor Universal Grammar might be in second language
learning.
Connections with
other Books I’ve Read
I mentioned Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct before, and
actually one of the examples of first language acquisition from Pinker’s book
is cited in this book.
Also Rod Ellis’s book SLA Research and LanguageTeaching is also cited in
this book (near the end, when the authors are discussing what relevance SLL research
has for language teachers).
As a
sidenote, after reading this book’s description of cognitive approaches to
second language learning, I’m beginning to realize that my description of
cognitive processes in my review of Rod Ellis’s book was vastly
oversimplified.
and From Slate.com David Brooks’ Polluted “Moral Ecology” (A very well written article, but also caught my eye for being written by a friend of a friend. The author is a friend of Phil.)
No comments:
Post a Comment