Developmental Sequences in Second Language Learning

Presenters: Jacqueline dos Anjos, Hanna Heseker, Dana Meyer

Second Language Acquisition

Let‘s assume...

Table of Contents 1. Background: Influences in SLA 2. Grammatical Morphemes 3. Stages of Development

3.1 Negations 3.2 Questions

3.2.1 Activities 3.3 Relative Clauses

4. Movement through Developmental Sequences 5. More about First Language Influence 6. Conclusion

Background: Influences in SLA

High level of cognitive development Mental lexicon of real-world concepts Knowledge of L1 structures Different learning environments and

conditions

→ Learners develop an interlanguage: Various levels of success in their L2 acquisition

Grammatical Morphemes

Concept of Grammatical Morphemes

What is a morpheme?“smallest meaningful segment of a

language“

What is a grammatical morpheme?“a word that functions to specify the

relationship between one lexical morpheme and another“

Obligatory Contexts

“Obligatory contexts“ in which specific grammatical morphemes must occur:

‘Yesterday I listened to that song

three times.‘

irregular past

regular past –edthird person singular –s

possessive ‘s

-ing (progressive)plural

copula (‘to be’)

auxiliary (progressive as in ‘He is going’)

article

Stephen Krashen‘s Natural Order Hypothesis

Source: Lightbrown, Patsy M. and Nina Spada. How Languages are Learned. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 84.

Reception of Accuracy Order

learners may only use morphemes correctly in certain contexts

Morphemes placed in wrong positions not taken into considerations

Results may depend on task construction

What this means for L2 acquisition...

developmental sequences identified in L2 acquisition are similar to those in L1 acquisition

Similarities in L2 acquisition of learners cannot be traced back exclusively to L1 transfer

Questions

Questions

1st stage Dog? Four Children?

Single words, formulae, or sentence fragments 2nd stage

It’s a monster in the right corner? Declarative word order, no inversion, no fronting

with rising intonation3rd stage

Where the children are playing? Does in this picture there is four astronauts?

Fronting: do-fronting; wh-fronting, no inversion; other fronting

Questions4th stage

Where is the sun? Is there a fish in the water?

Inversion in wh- + copula; yes/no questions with other auxiliaries

5th stage How do you say proche? What’s the boy doing?

Inversion in wh-questions with both an auxiliary and a main verb

6th Stage Question tag: It’s better, isn’t it? Negative question: Why can’t you go? Embedded question: Can you tell me what the date is

today?

Questions

1st Stage Single words, formulae, or sentence fragments 

2nd Stage Declarative word order, no inversion, no fronting with rising

intonation

3rd Stage Fronting: do-fronting; wh-fronting, no inversion; other fronting

4th Stage Inversion in wh- + copula; yes/no questions with other auxiliaries

5th Stage Inversion in wh-questions with both an auxiliary and a main verb

6th Stage Question tag, Negative question, Embedded question

Relative Clauses

Relative Clauses

Part of speech Relative clause

Subject The girl who was sick went home.

Direct object The story that I read was long.

Indirect objectThe man who[m] Susan gave the present to was happy.

Object of prepositionI found the book that John was talking about.

Possessive I know the woman whose father is visiting.

Object of comparisonThe person that Susan is taller than is Mary.

Source: Lightbrown, Patsy M. and Nina Spada. How Languages are Learned. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 90.

Movement through Developmental Sequences

Stages in language learning are not like “closed rooms“

Stress situations may cause learners to fall back into an earlier stage

Learners may have difficulty moving beyond a stage when facing similarities between first and interlanguage patterns

More about First Language Influence

First language interacts with developmental sequences

When learners reach a certain stage and perceive a similarity to their first language, they may linger longer at that stage

Addition of a substage May learn a second language rule

but restrict its application

Phenomenon of “Avoidance“

Feature in the target language too distant and different from their first language → don’t try it

Extent of transfer has do to with the L2 learner’s beliefs about the distance between the L1 and the L2

Language acquirer will typically avoid those structures that he is

not sure are grammatical in the L2 knows that idiomatic or metaphorical uses of

words are often unique to a particular language

Conclusion

The idea of developmental sequences greatly facilitates our understanding of L2 acquisition

However, the concept of L1 transfer should always be taken into consideration when looking at L2 acquisition processes

List of References Lightbrown, Patsy M. and Nina Spada. How

Languages are Learned. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.

Saville-Troike, Muriel. Introducing Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Cook, Vivian. Second Language Learning and Language Teaching. 3rd ed. London: Arnold, 2001.

Thank you for your attention and participation!