English 418 Second Language Acquisition Session Twenty Four ...

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• First: you must decide whether or not acquisition can best be characterized by means of innateness • Is it nature or nurture • Does the learner come to the learning task with an underlying grammar? (Innatism) • Or does language learning result from social interaction? (Behaviorism) • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • Those working within the first paradigm take as the scope of investigation linguistic descriptions of grammars • In so doing, an idealized speaker-hearer is assumed, with the claim being made that in order to fully understand formal constraints on language, one needs to isolate that linguistic system and investigate it in and of itself without external influences • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • In the social interactionist view, language and social interaction cannot be separated without resulting in a distorted picture of the development of linguistic and interactive skills • <strong>Language</strong> and cognitive development are deeply embedded in the context • Thus, understanding the development of syntax, for example, can only come about as one investigates how syntax interacts with other relevant aspects of language • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • These conflicting positions have resulted in the development of different research traditions as a result of the different questions being asked • This, in turn, has resulted in conflicting views about the best way to gather data and the correct questions to be asked • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • Next, what is the role of input? • (Regardless of which perspective above you choose, it is clear that input of some sort is necessary in order for acquisition to take place) • We should first note that learners are exposed to a large body of second language data • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • A well-established fact about second language acquisition is that not everything that learners hear/read is used to form internal grammars • Some data filters through, some does not • In other words, some data is apperceived, some is not • The first stage of input utilization is called apperceived input
• Building a Personal Theory of SLA • Apperception is the process of understanding by which newly observed qualities of an object are related to past experiences • In other words, past experiences relate to the selection of what might be called noticed material • Apperception is an internal cognitive act, identifying a linguistic form as being related to some prior knowledge • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • You can think of apperception as a priming device that tells us which parameters to attend to in analyzing second language data • That is, it is a priming device that prepares the input for further analysis • What is noticed, then, interacts with a parsing mechanism that attempts to segment the stream of speech into meaningful units for the learner • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • Thus, apperceived input is that bit of language that is noticed in some way by the learner because of some particular features • Why are some aspects of language noticed by the learner, whereas others are not? • What are the mediating factors at this initial stage? • What factors serve as input filters? • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • One obvious factor is frequency • Something that is very frequent in the input is likely to be noticed • On the other hand, something that is unusual because of its infrequency may stand out for a learner • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • A second factor that influences apperception is affect • This category can include such factors as: • Social distance • Status • Motivation • Attitude • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • A third factor that may determine whether language data are apperceived is prior
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English 418 Second Language Acquisition Session Twenty Four ...

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