Understanding Second Language Acquisition by Lourdes Ortega

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

          This book was assigned reading for the Master’s Course in applied linguistics that I did two years ago.

            At the time, I did my best to be diligent with my readings, and I read most of the book.  However some weeks the amount of assigned readings could be overwhelming, and I would have to resort to skimming and scanning strategies to get the main idea out of certain chapters without reading every word.

            (Because I’m a bit anal retentive about this book review project, I only review books which I have read cover to cover, and so consequently I never blogged this book at that time.)

            However recently I decided to re-read this book—both because I was worried I was starting to forget what I had learned in graduate school, and for my own professional development.  And this time I did it cover to cover.

The Review

          This was not an easy read for me, and I really struggled with sections of this book, but I’m glad I read it.

            But let’s be clear—this book is not supposed to be pleasure reading.  It is specifically designed to be a textbook for graduate level linguistics courses, and it reads accordingly.

            One of things I discovered in graduate school was that all of the assigned articles were written in a highly technical vocabulary and dense style that made them very difficult to read.  (My first week, before I learned to just skim over anything I didn’t understand, I spent an hour in the study room just trying to get through one paragraph from an article in a linguistics journal.)

            Arguably academics shouldn’t cultivate such an inaccessible writing style, but that’s another debate for another time.  The fact is that they do, and so if you want to read and write in academic circles you have to learn to be able to decode this.

            In that respect, this book was good training for me.  It represents a middle ground between the more accessible English prose that I am used to, and the more difficult style of the academic journal articles.  I struggled a lot with this book, but I think it got easier as I kept reading. 

            If, like me, you’re hoping to use this book as training to read more dense academic prose, one of the benefits of the book is the way Lourdes Ortega starts out with a technical definition and then goes on to explain it in simpler language.  She will typically introduce a topic using highly academic language that made my head spin, but then she will go on to clarify what she means in language much easier to understand.  I think this was good training for me because I got practice in how to use the academic language, but was also able to understand the meaning.

            Here is an example from her discussion on Markedness.  First she starts out with the academic language (page 37).

            Markedness is another important source of universal influence when learning human languages that is known to interact with L1 influences. The term has been used by linguists in a number of different ways (Batistella, 1996). In SLA, it has been used to denote a closed set of possibilities within a linguistic system, where the given possibilities rank from simplest and most frequent across languages of the world, or unmarked, to most complex and most rare, or marked. In addition, a special characteristic of many but not all markedness sets is that each marked member presupposes the existence of the less marked members, and never the other way around (in other words, the markedness relationship is implicational and unidirectional).

            Okay, so I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of that my first time reading through. But then Ortega goes on to clarify what she means in much simpler language:

            Linguists have found markedness hierarchies across the world’s languages in a number of key areas of morphology, phonology and syntax. A good example is relative clauses, which we will examine in Chapter 6, section 6.11. Another good case concerns the distinction between voiced and voiceless stops. If you touch your Adam’s apple while pressing and releasing your lips to produces a clean /b/, you will feel a vibration through your fingertip, because /b/ is a voiced consonant.  By contrast, if you now do the same thing while trying to pronounce a clean /p/, you should feel no vibration at all, because /p/ is a voiceless consonant.  Voicing is the main feature distinguishing the two sounds, otherwise /b/ and /p/ are pronounced using the same articulation features of place (both lips) and manner (a sudden obstruction of air followed by a release accompanied by aspiration).  Voiced stops (as in the sounds /b/, /d/ and /g/ in ‘tab’, ‘seed’ and ‘bag’) are more marked than voiceless (as in the sounds /p/, /t/ and /k/ in ‘tap’, ‘seat’, and ‘back’). The evidence comes from multiple sources. All languages of the world have some voiceless stops, but only some have voiceless and voiced ones, and no language exists that has only voiced stops without also having voiceless ones. Children learning an L1 that has both voiceless and voiced stops will acquire the former before the latter. There is also a natural phonetic process operating in human languages called devoicing, by which voiced stops can be pronounced as voiceless in certain positions, so that a marked feature (voiced) becomes neutralized and the unmarked one (voiceless) is used instead.

            Now, if you go back and re-read the first paragraph, it makes much more sense.  So I think this type of textbook is good training for reading academic articles, even if it did cause me a lot of frustration at times.

            (There were a couple of sentences in this book that I never did succeed in making sense of, despite re-reading them several times.  But only a couple of sentences out of 254 pages.  And the fault may well be mine.)

            When I was actually in graduate school, the stress of weekly assignments and weekly readings would often cause my brain to freeze up and I had a difficult time concentrating on the readings.  But now that I’m finished with school, I was able to re-read this book at a much more leisurely pace (I made a goal of reading a minimum of only 10 pages a day) and I was able to make it through the whole book easily in a month.

            The end of every chapter has a summary of the important points.  This is classic textbook stuff (the mere words chapter summary conjure up images of dry academic textbooks) but I actually did find it quite useful to have the important points highlighted for me at the end of the chapter, and it helped me to consolidate my knowledge.

            I plan to re-read this book a couple more times to help me internalize all the information that is in here, but I think this book has given me a good basis for understanding the field of second language acquisition.

Interesting Things I Learned From This Book

          As someone who struggled for many years to acquire one language (Japanese) and teach another (English), I entered into my Master’s program hoping to learn all the secrets of second language acquisition, only to discover that there was no store of secret knowledge, only areas of inquiry.  When it comes to learning second languages, scholars disagree on just about everyone it is possible to disagree about. 

            This is partly because, as Ortega explains in her book, Second Language Acquisition as a formal field of academic study is relatively new—only since the 1970s.  Also I got the impression (although nobody told me this in as many words) that we just don’t know enough about how the human brain works yet, and so consequently can’t yet fully understand how the human brain processes languages.

            Through this mess, Ortega does an excellent job of conveying exactly what we do know about second language acquisition so far, where the areas of disagreements lie, and what questions are ripe for future research.

            A few interesting things that caught my eye as I read this book:

* I had always thought that after early childhood it is impossible to fluently learn a second language.  I had assumed this was common knowledge.

            For the most part, this appears to be true, but researchers have trouble explaining why.  Some researches think it is a result of some biological clock operating in our brain, other researches think the first language is interfering with the acquisition of the second.  (Again, it appears we just don’t know enough yet about how the human brain works.)

            And more surprisingly, there are exceptions which are hard to explain and keep messing up any consistent theory about age and language learning.  In some rare exceptional cases, adult learners of a second language learn the second language completely fluently to the point that they are indistinguishable from native speakers.    These type of exceptional learners may be “as much as 5 per cent to 25 percent of learners who are given a ‘fair chance of success’ (Birdsong, 1999b, pp. 14-15)” (p. 19)

* Contrary to popular wisdom, adults actually pick up foreign languages faster than children—at least initially.  In naturalistic settings, children will catch up and surpass adults after about a year, but adults still have the initial advantage.

             However in foreign language classroom settings, older children and adults have an advantage over younger children that appears to never go away.  Even after 5 years of instruction, the advantage for older learners still persists.

            (This stuck with me, because I am currently teaching younger children.  I complained to a colleague of mine that the textbook introduced too many grammar points too quickly, and he replied that it was okay because they were younger so they could absorb this information quicker.  But because of this book, I now know younger children actually learn slower in a classroom.  Since then I’ve been arguing for a slower paced learning in the Young Learners program.)

* Something else which had a direct effect on my teaching was that learners discussing in groups can sometimes better learn a new form if they discuss it together in their native language than if they discuss it in the target language (from section 4.10 LEARNER-INITIATED NEGOTIATION OF FORM.)  This has caused me to be less dogmatic about English-only in my classroom.

* As someone with an active interest in blogging, I really enjoyed the section about social media and how English learners were able to gain confidence and find identity through writing and posting stuff online.  (It made me think about how I might use this in my own classroom.  I’m not in a position to do this now, but if I were ever in a situation where I had the complete freedom to create a curriculum for a more advanced class, I would love to experiment with getting English learners to create their own book and movie review blogs.)

* The scholarly work of Stephen Pinker is cited briefly.  (I enjoyed the non-scholarly work of Stephen Pinker—TheLanguage Instinct, a fascinating book about how language works that he wrote for the general public.)

* And, speaking of scholars I am familiar with, from page 77: “In addition, negative and even confrontational interaction patterns can occur in learner-learner work as well, as shown in the work of Neomy Storch at the University of Melbourne (eg. Storch, 2002). 

            I never actually had a class with professor Storch, but she guest lectured in one of my courses on this very topic of leaner-learner interaction, and even showed us some of the learner conversations that seemed to indicate conflict.

Japanese Connections

            Finally, as someone who spent 8 years in Japan, the sections referencing Japanese learners of English, or foreigners learning Japanese, were both especially interesting to me.

From page 231:

            Similarly, the identity of speakers as ‘native’ or ‘non-native’ and as ‘novice language learners’ or ‘expert language learners’ cannot be taken as fixed, as CA [Conversation Analysis] has demonstrated how such categories may be relevant in one interaction event and irrelevant in the next.  This was shown by Yuri Hosoda (2006) in her analysis of 15 video- and audio-taped casual conversations involving 15 L2 Japanese speakers, who had been living in Japan between 6 and 20 years, and their L1 Japanese friends or acquaintances. She captured witnessable evidence supporting the interpretation that, on occasion, the L2 speakers ‘orient to themselves as a “novice” in the language spoken in the interaction while they treat their interlocutors, at that moment, as a language expert’ (p.33).  This occurred when an L2 speaker invited their L1 friend to correct or help with certain lexical items.  These invitations were recognizable because they were performed via overt signals such as sound lengthening, rising intonation, explicit expressions of ignorance, gaze, raised eyebrows, and so on.

            This may be true of all L1-L2 interaction, but I have specific memories of this happening to me in Japan.  When I didn’t know the Japanese word for something, I would often have to invent it by putting other words together (for example, “the smell of sweat” instead of “body odor”.)  Instead of giving me the correct Japanese word, my Japanese interlocutor would often adopt themselves to my vocabulary, and re-use the word that I had invented.

* Japanese speakers tend to add a lot of extra vowels to the ends of words when speaking English.  But interestingly, Ortega cites some research that shows this isn’t purely just because of linguistic incompetence.  Rather, when speaking English, Japanese people will often use an extra vowel at the end of an utterance to show that they’re not done speaking yet, and they have more to say on the topic (and to prevent another speaker from taking the floor.)

            I would never have picked this up on my own, but once I read it, I decided it does resonate with my experience of Japanese English.  Rethinking some of their speech patterns, I think maybe they do in fact often emphasize the vowel sounds to show that they’re not done speaking.

* This is something I found funny:

            In Japan, women will often use high pitched voices to sound cute.  (Or, as Ortega puts in a way that is characteristic of her academic writing style “the contention that in Japanese a high-pitched voice is a recognizable marker of femininity” (page 246).)

            Western females learning Japanese will often fail to add the high pitch to their voice, but it isn’t because they are ignorant of how pitch works in Japanese.  On the contrary, they are often “acutely aware of the cultural significance of pitch” (p.246). They just refused to do it.  From the data, one Western female says:

            “Sometimes it would really disgust me, seeing those Japanese girls, they were not even girls, some of them were in their late twenties, but they would use those really high voices to try to impress and make themselves look real cute for men. I decided that there was no way I wanted to do that.” (p. 246)

* At one point in the book it is theorized that the reason foreigners seldom learn polite speech and Japanese honorifics properly is because of the Japanese reluctance to correct foreign speakers.  From page 247:

            Siegal suggested that this response may have been motivated in the Japanese nationalist discourse of the henna gaijin or ‘strange foreigner’, which construes Japanese as a difficult language that foreigners cannot and need not master; it would be only an oddity for foreigners to learn Japanese things too well or become too Japanese.

           

            This is often true.  Of course, from a foreigner’s perspective, it’s not always a bad thing.  It means that in interactions between foreigners and Japanese, even within Japan itself, the Japanese person considers it their responsibility to adopt themselves to the foreigners’ language and customs.  So even within their own country, a Japanese person will seldom demand that the foreigner speak Japanese, but instead apologize for their own limited English.  (Contrast this with the American attitude, if you will.)

            Of course when it comes to correcting a foreigner’s speech, another equally important factor may be the Japanese concern with politeness, and their concern that they will cause the foreigner to lose face if they overtly offer correction.

            (Although actually now that I’m thinking about it, when I’m outside of the classroom I don’t go around correcting the grammar of everyone I talk to either.  If a Japanese person or Cambodian person is talking to me in English, and I can understand the meaning, I don’t offer correction on their grammar unless I’m explicitly invited to.  Maybe instead of just assuming this is a Japanese thing, it would be interesting to do comparative studies on how often native speakers of other languages offer unsolicited correction.)

Link of the Day

Noam Chomsky in conversation with Jonathan Freedland

Understanding Second Language Acquisition by Lourdes Ortega: Review