Tuesday, January 07, 2014

Second Language Learning Theories by Rosamond Mitchell and Florence Myles [Second Edition]


            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.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky and Bart Gellman at Engaging Data
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.)

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