On-site links :
Comments or questions to tmason@timothyjpmason.com
Thunk 2
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 06:44:55 +0200
From: Timothy Mason To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum FLTEACH@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU
If language acquisition is powered by a specific program, and if this program is innate, we would expect all language acquirers to move along the same pathway to mastery. There would be a predictable and necessary sequence of acquisition. Furthermore, if the LAD remains available to adult learners, the acquisition process will be the same as it is for children, and adults learning English as an L2 would, all things being equal, follow the same pathway as children.
This leads us to what Stephen Krashen calls The Natural Order Hypothesis When Chomsky's work first emerged, it offered some very exciting possibilities to psychologists and those interested in child development. People began looking to the way children acquire language to see if they could find any confirmation of Chomsky's ideas. One of those who worked in this field was the psychologist, Roger Brown. Brown recorded the utterances of children at several stages in their development, and examined the speech, looking for regularities. He found them ; in particular, he found regularities in the order of acquisition of a number of 'grammatical morphemes'.
Grammatical morphemes are those like 'the', 'of', or 'is', and the 's' of the genitive, the plural, and the 3PS. At first, children tend to leave them out, using only the lexical morphemes to produce sentences such as : 'Here bed', or ''Not dada' What Brown discovered was that when the children he studied did acquire these items, they appeared in the same order in all cases. This appeared to lend some credence to the idea that children are programmed to learn language.
If we turn to SLA, then we find that something similar occurs ; work carried out by Dulay and Burt, and by Krashen himself, suggests that there is an order of acquisition for a number of grammatical morphemes which all learners of EFL follow, whatever their language of origin. Thus, for example, the 's' of the third person singular of verbs in the present tense is acquired late, whereas the 's' of plural nouns is acquired early. (The order of acquisition for EFL is similar but not exactly identical to the order of acquisition for English as mother tongue).
The results here seem pretty robust, although they have not remained uncriticized. One point that has been made is that whereas Brown studied the same children and followed them through time, the SLA studies simply took groups of learners at different levels of acquisition and compared their production - so we have no way of knowing whether individual learners actually acquired the morphemes one after the other. Another point is that there appears to be no particular relationship between the different morphemes, and that the results are theoretically uninteresting. A third point is that there may be other reasons than pre-programming to account for the order : it could be that the 's' of the 3PS is far more often redundant than is the 's' of the plural noun. It is certainly the case that irregular verbs - the past tense of which is acquired before the regular past - are more phonologically marked than is the 'ed' ending.
However, there are other reasons for believing that there may be something of a natural order. If we look at certain grammatical structures - the negation is a case in point - we can see that both children and adult learners of English seem to pass through a series of stages in their acquisition. First of all, they produce single-word utterances, consisting simply of the negative word - 'No' or 'not'. Then they produce two-word and three-word utterances, with the negative word as the beginning - 'No car', 'No Mummy come'. Later, they place the negative word inside the utterance - 'Daddy not here'. And so on. Adult learners of EFL seem to follow roughly the same pathway as children do, although the speed with which they travel may differ according to the extent to which their mother-tongue differs from English.
Now, one corollary of the Natural Order is that correction of errors is, in most cases, something of a waste of time. This certainly appears to be the case in so far as children are concerned. Here is a dialogue reported by Martin Brain, and cited in Pinker's 'The Language Instinct'. A father - a linguist - is talking to his daughter.
Child : Want other one spoon, Daddy.
Father : You mean, you want THE OTHER SPOON.
Child : Yes, I want other one spoon, please Daddy.
Father : Can you say "the other spoon"?
Child : Other ... one ... spoon.
Father : Say "other".
Child : Other.
Father : "Spoon".
Child : Spoon.
Father "Other ... spoon."
Child : "Other ... spoon. Now give me other one spoon?
I suspect that many of you language teachers out there will find food for thought in the above. Note, by the way, how modelling the language after an error does not have the desired effect : the child misinterprets the father's intervention as a reminder to use 'please' when making a request, and simply does not hear the difference between her own utterance and that of her father. A couple of days ago, one of my students persisted in placing an unnecessary 'h' at the head of all words beginning with a vowel. The class worked with her on this for about two minutes, at the end of which it emerged that she had no idea that she had made an error, and had not identified any difference between her own utterance and my reformulation or those of other class-members.
In this view, correcting an error, or giving grammatical instruction, will only have an effect if the learner is actually at the stage when that specific piece of information is pertinent, and then only if she is receptive to outside help. Obviously, in a class of 35 students there is little chance that they will all need instruction on the same grammatical point at the same time. So there is not much point in lock-step grammar instruction - although Stephen Krashen does allow that it will be of some use to those learners who demand it if it is given comprehensibly in the Target Language - for then it will be motivated CI.
On this point, there does seem to be a fair degree of agreement among SLA researchers. Krashen's position is particularly radical, but I think very few of the experts today see grammar teaching as crucial to language acquisition. It may help people get through the stages more quickly, but will not change the order of acquisition, and needs to be delivered at the right moment for it to be useful. How do we know what the right moment is?
By the way, my own deepest disagreement with Ron Sheen is on the utility of instruction in grammar. But I do not found my objections to grammar-teaching on the argument from the LAD - which is, to my mind, a mythical beastie of Jabberwockian proportions - but because the grammar taught in schools is wrong and misleading, and cannot be otherwise.
regards
timothy mason
tmason@timothyjpmason.com
iufm de versailles
Université de Paris 8
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.