English 418 Second Language Acquisition Session Twenty Four ...

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• After there is language intake, there are several possible outcomes: • 1) Hypothesis confirmation/rejection (intake) • This results in intake • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • 2) Apparent non-use • This stems from the fact that the information contained in the input is already incorporated into a leaner’s grammar • This does not preclude it from being used, however • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • The additional information may be used for rule strengthening or hypothesis reconfirmation • Part of becoming a fluent speaker of a second language involves the automatic retrieval of information from one’s knowledge base • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • Information that may appear to be redundant may in fact be serving an important purpose in terms of the access a learner has to that information • 3) Storage – perhaps some level of understanding has taken place, yet it is not clear how to integration can or should take place • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • 4) Non-use • In this final possibility, learners make no use of the input at all • This may be because they have not succeeded in comprehending it at a useful level • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • Finally, what is the role of output? • There are two points to emphasize: • First, there is the role of comprehensible output in the testing out of hypotheses • This provides a feedback loop back into the intake component • Building a Personal Theory of SLA • Second, there is the role output plays in forcing a syntactic rather than solely semantic analysis of language • This provides a feedback loop to comprehended input • Thus, output is an active part of the entire learning process • Second Language Syllabuses
• Second Language Instruction • Does Instructed Second Language Acquisition really make a difference? • A major goal for studying what we have been studying is to provide a sound psycholinguistic basis for Second Language teaching • But what role does all this theory play? • Second Language Instruction • Evidence from morpheme studies has shown that instruction has little or no effect on the acquisition order • Found similar orders of acquisition between naturalistic and instructed settings • The result was the claim that instruction has little or no effect on the acquisition order of SLA • Instruction has been proposed to help SLA in two important ways, however: • Second Language Instruction • 1) Rate of acquisition • A study by Pienemann (1984) suggests that while it seems impossible to alter the developmental sequences, it does seem possible that instruction can have a facilitating effect on the rate of SL learning • It is in fact in this area that instruction is most clearly beneficial, with empirical support strong and diverse • Second Language Instruction • Long reviewed eleven studies of the achievement of learners after comparable periods of classroom instruction, natural exposure, or combinations of the two (called ‘mixed’) • He found six which clearly showed faster development in children and adults receiving formal SL teaching, two whose findings, while ambiguous, were arguably in the same direction, and three which showed minor or no effects for instruction • Second Language Instruction • Weslander and Stephany: report on a large-scale evaluation of “pull-out” ESL for 577 LEP students (grades two through ten) in public schools in Des Moines, Iowa • Results showed that children receiving more ESL instruction outperformed those receiving less instruction on the Bilingual Syntax Measure, with effects being strongest at lower levels • Why is it important that we increase the rate of acquisition?
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English 418 Second Language Acquisition Session Twenty Four ...

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