How Languages Are Learned

4th edition
Patsy M Lightbown & Nina Spada

SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 2
Contexts for Language Learning

a young child learning a first language (L1)

a child learning a second language in day care
or on the playground (L2 - ESL)
an adolescent studying a foreign language in
their own country (L2 - EFL)
an adult immigrant with limited or disrupted
education working in a second language
environment and having no opportunity to go to
language classes (L2 - ESL)
Contrastive analysis
 Contrastive analysis: Analysis of the
differences between the L1 and the L2 to
predict in advance the problematic areas in
which transfer is likely to occur.
 Limitations:
Over-predicted errors
Under-predicted errors
Not all errors are ‘bi-directional’
Doesn’t account for developmental errors (e.g.
simplification, overgeneralization).
Error analysis
🞂 Analyzing second language learners’ errors
rather than predicting the errors they might
make
◦ Start with the errors that learners make and try to
understand them.
◦ With reference to the L2, the L1, and other factors
◦ Descriptive not prescriptive in nature
Interlanguage
🞂 Learner’s developing second language
knowledge
◦ Systematic & rule-governed
◦ Dynamic & continually evolving as learners receive more input and
revise their hypotheses.
Fossilization
🞂 When some interlanguage features stop
changing
◦ Controversial because further change is always possible if circumstances
change
Interlanguage error types

• Developmental (intralingual)errors:
• Reflect understanding of the L2 system

Interlingual errors: based on cross-

linguistic influence:
• Reflect L1 grammar – due to transfer
Developmental Errors
1. She looking around.
2. She rans to escape.
3. Yesterday he play soccer.
4. Why you don’t like cheese?
5. The dog run fastly.
Developmental Errors
🞂 She looking around: Developmental.
Simplification of the verb phrase by omitting the
auxiliary.
🞂 She rans to escape: Developmental.
Overgeneralization of the 3rd person singular ‘s’
present marker to the past.
🞂 Yesterday he play: Developmental.
Simplification. No tense or number marker on
the verb.
🞂 Why you don’t like…: Developmental. Learner
is at Stage 3 of question development
🞂 The dog run fastly. Developmental.
Overgeneralization. Adverbs add –ly to an
adjective.
Cross-linguistic influence
🞂 French speaker: The boy kiss her mother.
🞂 Spanish speaker: He no speak e-Spanish.
🞂 German speaker: Like you ice cream?
🞂 Arabic speaker: The boy that I saw him was running fast.
 Cross-linguistic influence
🞂 French speaker: The boy kiss her mother. (French possessive
determiners agree with object possessed.)
🞂 Spanish speaker: He no speak e-Spanish. (Spanish has no
initial consonant clusters.)
🞂 German speaker: Like you ice cream? (At Stage 4/5 of
question formation, learner hypothesizes that full verbs can
be inverted in questions.)
🞂 Arabic speaker: The boy that I saw him was running fast. (In
relative clauses, Arabic does not delete the pronoun from its
‘original’ place.)
Limitations of error
analysis
🞂 Doesn’t take into account learner strategies
such as avoidance
🞂 Has one single focus: errors. Thus does not track
changes in interlanguage that may reflect
progress.
Performance analysis

🞂 Analysis of learners’ errors as well as their ability

to do things correctly in order to come up with a
more comprehensive view of the learners’
interlanguage and language use strategies.
 Grammatical
morphemes
🞂 Do L2 learners acquire grammatical morphemes in
the same order as L1 learners?
◦ Obligatory context methodology: identify the context in which a specific
morpheme is required; calculate the percentage accuracy of suppliance in
obligatory contexts
◦ In L1 research, acquisition was seen as “mastery” (90% accuracy)
◦ In L2 research, relative accuracy was compared
L1 Order - L2 Order
Present progressive (Mommy
running)
-ing (progressive)
Plural –s (Two books) Plural
copula (to be)
Irregular past (Baby went) ▼
Auxiliary: progressive
Possessive ‘s (Daddy’s hat) (He is going)
Article
Copula (Mommy is happy)
▼
Articles the and a Irregular past
▼
Regular past –ed (She walked) Regular past –ed
Third person singular –s
Third person singular simple present Possessive ’s
–s (She runs)

Auxiliary be (He is coming)

Accessibility hierarchy – Relative
Clause
🞂 Subject
That’s the man [who ran away].
🞂 Direct object
That’s the truck [that I sold yesterday].
🞂 Indirect object
That’s the man [to whom I gave the letter].
🞂 Object of preposition
Less
That’s the book [that I told you about]. accessible
🞂 Genitive
That’s the man [whose sister I know].
🞂 Object of comparison
He’s the only man [whom I am taller than].
Reference to past
🞂 Beginning: learners with very limited language
may simply refer to events in the order in which
they occurred or mention a time or place to
show that the event occurred in the past
◦ My son come. He work in restaurant
◦ January. It’s very cold
◦ Viet Nam. We work too hard
Reference to past
🞂 Later, learners start to attach a grammatical
morpheme which shows that the verb is marked
for the past.
◦ The people worked in the fields
🞂 Even after they begin marking past tense on
verbs, however, learners may still make errors
such as the overgeneralization of the regular -ed
ending
◦ She rided her bicycle
More about grammatical past
🞂 Learners are more likely to mark past tense on
some verbs than on others. Why?
🞂 Due to the ‘lexical aspect’ of different verbs
(Bardovi-Harlig (2000).
o Learners learn first to mark past tense when referring
to completed events (I broke the vase or My sister
fixed it with glue) than when referring to states and
activities which may last for extended periods
without a clear end point (She seemed happy last
week or My father belonged to a club).
Movement through
developmental sequences
🞂 Not like ‘closed doors’
🞂 Emergence of new form, then increasing
frequency of use
🞂 Progress to a higher stage can result in new
(different) errors (e.g. ‘He ran out the door’
followed by ‘He runned out the door.’
🞂 Developmental progress interacts with L1
influence
Movement through
developmental sequences
🞂 Some factors that seem to influence the order of acquisition are:
🞂 salience (how easy it is to notice the morpheme)
🞂 linguistic complexity (for example, how many elements you have to
keep track of)
🞂 semantic transparency (how clear the meaning is)
🞂 similarity to a first language form
🞂 frequency in the input
 Cross-linguistic
influence
🞂 Cross-linguistic influence no longer referred to
as‘transfer’or‘interference’. Why?
◦ Cross-linguistic influence can promote L2 development.
◦ Cross-linguistic influence can result in avoidance as well as
errors because learners are sensitive to degrees of distance
between L1 and L2.
◦ L2 can influence L1 (influence goes both ways).
🞂 L1 sometimes makes it difficult for learners to notice
something they’re saying is not a feature of the L2
(e.g. adverb placement)
Vocabulary
🞂 English language estimated to have between
100,000 and one million words
◦ Teach/teaching/teacher
◦ Everyday conversation requires about 2,000 words
◦ A ‘general’ academic vocabulary adds about 700
more.
◦ Specialized and literary vocabularies add thousands
more.
🞂 Educated speaker of English knows at least
20,000 words
Learning new words
🞂 Vocabulary learning requires effort by learner
and teacher (Nation, 2001).
🞂 In order to guess the meaning of a new word in
context, one needs to know more than 90% of
the words already in the text. Even then context
can be inadequate or misleading.
🞂 Frequency makes a big difference in word
learning: words must be encountered many
times to be firmly established in memory.
🞂 Cognates and borrowed words can also play a
role.
Interlanguage pragmatics
🞂 Learning to use language appropriately
🞂 Even if learners have advanced grammatical and
lexical knowledge in the L2 they may not know
how to apologize, politely refuse, express
deference, disagree, recognize humour etc…
🞂 Researchers have shown that these skills are
also acquired developmentally (Kasper & Rose,
2002) and that learners benefit from instruction
(Bardovi-Harlig, 1999).
 Pronunciation
development
🞂 Learners need to perceive differences in sounds
before they can produce them.
🞂 Greater differences between the L1 and L2 can lead
to greater pronunciation difficulties.
🞂 Longer periods of exposure lead to improved
pronunciation.
🞂 Adults who continue to make greater use of their L1
have stronger accents in the L2.
🞂 Ethnic affiliation and identity choices also contribute
to pronunciation development.
 Pronunciation
🞂
development
International and regional varieties of English are
appropriate goals for many learners
🞂 For most learners, the goal is to be intelligible and
communicatively competent, not to ‘sound like’ a
native speaker
◦ Instruction that focuses on supra-segmentals rather than
segmentals has been found more effective for improving
intelligibility.
◦ Even when perfectly intelligible, L2 speakers may experience
discrimination related to their perceived ‘accent’
Sampling learner language
🞂 Corpus linguistics emphasizes the analysis of
authentic spoken and written texts.
◦ Documented language use rather than hypotheses
about what users ‘might’ say or write
🞂 The same computer-based tools allow
researchers to collect larger and more authentic
samples of learner language.