universal grammar and the learning and teaching
TRANSCRIPT
Universal Grammar and the learning and teaching of second languages.
Kelvin CastilloIsabel Díaz EspriellaItalia García EnríquezEduardo RojasCesar Ruíz
Vivian Cook
To describe the possible relationships between Universal Grammar and language teaching.
An overview of the principles and parameters theory of syntax.
To show how this relates to the UG model of language acquisition.
To describe some of the issues in applying the UG model to second language learning.
To draw some implications for language teaching.
Aims:
The Chomskyan UG model of aquisition is
based on the theory of syntax.
Language is knowledge stored in the mind.
Principles and parameters grammar.
Princip
le
s
Paramete
rs
Do not vary from one person to another
Settings that vary
according to the particular language that
the person knows
The human mind has built-in language “principles” that are part of its knowledge of any language.
It also has “parameters” within these principles whose values are set to the actual language it learns.
PERMANENT
tune the principles to a particular language.
Is Sam the cat that is black?
Is linked to a similar structure to that seen in: Sam is the cat that is black.
Forming a question involves knowing which of the two examples of is can be moved to the beginning of the sentence to get the grammatical sentence:
Is Sam the cat that is black.Instead of:
Is Sam is the cat that black?
I know!
A person who knows English knows the same
principles and parameters as a person who knows Spanish but has set the value of the pro-drop parameter differently.
A pro-drop language is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they are in
some sense pragmatically inferable
He’s going homeIt´s raining
Voy a casaLlueve
This claims that principles of language do not
need to be learnt as they are already build
into the mind.
No child needs to learn structure dependency
because he or she already knows it in some
sense.
The Universal Grammar model of language
acquisition
Learning English means setting all the values for UG
parameters to those for English.
Parameters are like electric switches that are moved
to one position or the other.
Example:
A child learning English needs to move the switches to
non-pro-drop.
A child learning Spanish to move the switch to pro-drop
Learning comes
down to the setting
of values for the
parameters to
moving the
switches.
What is the initial setting for a parameter?
A child starts from a neutral parameter setting and then adopts one or other of the possibilities that the switch is initially in the middle instead of one way or
the other.
Setting A (pro-drop)Neutral initial setting Setting B (non-pro-drop)
Example
A child learning English would start with a neutral
setting for pro-drop and change it to non-pro-
drop. In other hand, a child learning Spanish
would start from the same natural setting and
change it to pro-drop.
Hymes (1986) claims that young English
children often produce sentence without subjects
Want more bubblesNow wash my hands
And gradually learn that the subject is compulsory.
Access to UG in second language
learning
The main interest for L2 learning has been in the role
that the UG plays in L2 learning. In a no access
model L2 learners acquire the L2 grammar without
consulting the UG in their minds; the grammar is
learnt thorough other mental faculties. In a direct
access model L2 learners acquire the L2 in exactly
the same way as L1 learners by using UG
In an indirect access model L2 learners have access to UG throught what they know of L1, but they starrt with parameters in their L1 setting instead of in their original state
Let start with some of general arguments for the
no-access position
While L2 learners show some effects o UG, they
do not use it as consistently as L1 natives
The knowledge of L2 learners is not complete as
that of L1 learners and they are not as successful
Children manage to learn any L1 with equal ease;
some language are clearly much more difficult
for L2 learners than others, for instance Chinese
versus italian for speakers of english
If the learner breaks principles of language or has
impossible values for parameters, the UG position is discomfited. To make these arguments for no-access pertinent, it would have to be shown that these core areas were different in L2 learning.
Claim that L2 learners know less of their L2 than
their L1 are certainly true in a general sense, with
some demurrals to be made later; but a little of
the research shows that the learners know less of
core UG grammar. If L2 learners knew principles
partially or if L2 different in difficulty so far as
central UG areas are concerned or principles are
parameters were “fossilied” in some way the
argument would have some weight.
The sentences involving wh words such as who and
what are regarded as being derivate from other
structures via who movements
Who did he say that John liked?
Is based originally on an underlying structure
similar to:
He said that John liked who?
But in English its ungrammatically to say:
The task which I didn't know to whom they would
entrust
Although this sentence is derived from the
underlying structure similar to that of the
grammatical sentence
I didn't know to whom they would entrust the task
The reason for it doesn't works for the items must
not to be move across too many barriers in the
sentence; the principle of subjacency says that
an item can be move across one such barrier but
not across more
Research by Bley-Vroman, Felix and Loup (1988)
tested whether L2 learners who spoke and L1 that
did not have subjace3ncy showed signs if having
acquired it in English; if they did, this would show
that their UG was still available. Schater (1989)
performed an experiment with a similar logic on
L2 learners of English with Chinese, Korean and
Indonesian as L1; she gives the learners both a
syntax test to see if they knew the structure
involved and a subjacency test.
Clahsen ans Muysken (1986) compared the
learning of german word order by native children
and foreign adults using many published studies.
German has a Subject, Object and Verb (SVO)
Ich sage, dass ich dich liebe (I say that I love you)
A word order in the main clause in which the verb
comes second is an SVO order
Ich liebe dich (I love you
Dich liebe ich (You love I) (OVS)
And adverb VS:
Immer liebe ich dich (Always love I you)
Many linguistics treat the SVO order as the norm, and
derive the order found in the main from it by moving
the verb into second position.
The claim for differences between L1 and L2 learners of
germna is scarcely by itself sufficient to disprove
access to UG by all L2 learners for all aspects of
syntax. For instance, adults learners have a larger
memory processing capacity than children; for this
reason children may start by not distinguishing
subordinate from main clauses, and so use the verb
final forms interchangeably with the verb second
forms
What are the initial L2 parameter settings?
PARAMETER
UG and L2 acqisition
Direct Access
L2 learners would start
with the same values for
parameters from scratch.
Indirect Access
The starting point for L2 learners is the
values of their first languages, which may
or may not be the unmarked settings for
L1 acquisition.
Do the principles and parameters change as
the L2 learner learns?
UG might depend upon the learner´s age, on the one hand, the development of the L2 in children might be in step with the development of the L1.
On the other hand UG is more accessible with the learner´s choice learning access.
The UG main point is how a mind comes to
acqire grammar of one language in the form of the language principles and the values for parameters.
But L2 learning is predicated on the fact that the mind can learn two grammars, both obeying the same principles but having different settingfor parameters.
Multicompetence
The state of the mind with two languages has
been termed “multicompetence”, this means that ‘the compound state of a mind with two grammars’.
Cook says “ the mind of a person who knows two languages should be taken as a whole rather than as equivalent to two minds that know one language each.”
Language teachers must look
elsewhere for ideas about
communicative competence,
pragmatic competence, or
listening and speaking “skils”.
UG and Language Teaching
UG is concerned by definition with “obvious”
things about language. Ideas like structure-dependency are built into the mind; they are not mentioned in typical grammar books for a language, because it can be taken for granted that all readers know them.
As Chomsky has pointed out, a single sentence such as “John ate an apple” can set the values for the major word-order parameters in English.
In first language acquisition, for instance,
Cromer (1987) showed that exposure to ten
sentences with easy/eager to please
constructions every three months was enough
to teach children the difference between
these two constructions.
Morgan (1986) demonstrates that certain
aspects of syntax may be unlearnable if the
input does not have clear clues to its phrase
structure.
UG theory minimises the acquisition of syntax,
maximises the acquisition of vocabulary items
with lexical entries for the privileges of
occurrence and so on.
Cook (1990) drew some implications for the
classroom of the distinction between External
Language and Internal Language approaches to
linguistics introduced by Chomsky (1986).
External Language
Internal Language
At the level of goals, it suggests that teaching
should not produce ersatz native speakers
so much as people who can stand between
two languages and interpret one to the other
– what Byram (1990) calls “intercultural
communicative competence”.
The UG model is a reminder of the cognitive
nature of language: L2 learning is the
creation of language knowledge in the
mind as well as the creation of the ability
to interact with other people.