Part 1: Introduction, first and second language acquisition ...

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Transcríbhinn: Podchraoladh – Sealbhú teanga 2:59 This is a very very interesting question. It’s a question that has exercised Muiris quite a lot of theorising and empirical research over the years. Now to begin with I’ll talk about learning a second language 11 . And recent research has investigated evidence that maybe yes, learners do acquire in a specific sequence 12 , what they call developmental stages 13 . And for example, two linguists, Florence and Myles, tell us that young learners of a second language – English for example – when they’re leaning the negative 14 , you know, I did not or whatever, they might put the negative particle either at the beginning or end of a sentence, they’d say: no me playing here or me playing here no. Then they might go and insert that negative particle in a verb phrase: car not coming And then finally they manipulate it correctly. So it’s a very interesting thing then, that there seems to be an order. Now that’s based on very interesting research that took place in the 1970s by Brown. And he looked at the way that children acquire their first language and he said, yes, they pass through similar stages, from crying to cooing to babbling, to just intonation 15 , to one-word utterances 16 , to two-word utterances to inflection 17 (that means they can change words, they can add plurals for example) to questions, to negatives and then to complex sentences. And he looked at children acquiring morphemes (a morpheme 18 is the smallest meaningful language unit. It could be a word, a part of a word, like dog or even the s, that’s a morpheme too, ‘s’ in dogs). So he found for example that, in the case of English, and in other languages there seems to be this order: • a present progressive 19 : so you’d have boy singing – ‘ing’ comes first; crying, doing, • then followed by prepositions 20 : doggy in car • followed by plural 21 : sweeties • followed by past irregular: gone • possessive 22 : [for example baby’s pram] • past regular comes after that: wanted • third person singular: eats • and the auxiliary: is running There has been just one research study that I know of regarding acquisition of Irish as a first language. It was a study done by McKenna and Wall in 1986 with two young children, Áine and Máire. Áine was 18 months and Máire was 28 months, in Cnoc Fola in northwest Donegal Gaeltacht. And they studied what’s called the MLU - Mean Length of Utterance, or how long their sentences were in terms of time. And they did look at order. They found that these children began with questions, and then they went to the possessors 23 : the mo (you know–my) and they worked from there to imperatives 24 (giving orders), and ended, interestingly enough, with negatives. But more and more studies need to be done so that we can determine if that order that you refer to actually takes place in first language acquisition and then if there’s an order in second language acquisition. And if we know about the order in first language acquisition (how you acquire your mother tongue) should we … replicate that order in the way we present language to learners? 11 L2 (abbreviation) T2 (Irish abbrev) 12 ord, seicheamh 13 céimeanna forbartha 14 diúltach 15 tuin chainte 16 ráiteas aon‐fhocal 17 infhilleadh 18 morféim 19 an t‐ainm briathartha 20 réamhfhocal 21 an t‐iolra 22 sealbhach (nó ginideach) 23 an aidiacht shealbhach 24 an modh ordaitheach
Transcríbhinn: Podchraoladh – Sealbhú teanga 6:18 And if I’m understanding you correctly then Muiris, that there’s a Marie difference between the order in how we acquire our L1 and how we acquire our L2 or other additional languages, are there any particular things that teachers should be aware of or watching out for when we’re thinking about teaching second or additional languages? 6:36 Absolutely. I think the thing they must be aware of is what they call Muiris interlanguage 25 . Interlanguage is a mixture of the first language and the second language, the mother tongue and the second language that they’re learning. It’s like they’re meeting and the two of them are trying to co-exist side by side. Interlanguage is not stable – it produces errors. Young children when they’re hearing language, first of all they’re looking for the meaning in their first language, they’re noticing how things are different. Now there can also be transfer 26 . In Irish teachers will know about for many years the Tá sé fear. This is a transfer from He is a man in English. And the transfer sometimes can be positive as well, if structures work in the same way in the first language: Tá sé mór- he is big and that’s a positive transfer 27 . So, as I said, it causes instability. It can cause as well what they call fossilisation 28 , and actually can stay in the system forever … somebody could actually go on saying forever Tá sí liathróid. That would be regarded as fossilisation and it can be very difficult if the language is not acquired correctly then. So interlanguage is very complex, and I think it’s good that teachers realise that if learners make errors it’s actually part of their developmental acquisition and they have to go through the stage where sometimes they make hypotheses 29 about language themselves and say Well, it must work in this way. Then they produce something and the utterance is deviant from what’s acceptable and that is when error occurs. But it’s good to think that sometimes: errors – you’re going to meet them, it’s not necessarily that the teacher has done something incorrectly or whatever, it’s the nature of acquisition. 8:20 When you talk about this developmental order and how we have to Marie accept that children will be making errors, it immediately brings to mind questions about: well at what stage and … the ages of children. Because when you think about learning Irish as second language children start at age four. Is there any research or information about optimal ages 30 for learning languages or anything like that? 8:40 Oh there is, there’s been a lot of work done in that area Marie as well. Muiris They’ve talked about, that when we acquire languages, Chomsky and people spoke about this thing called the LAD –the language acquisition device 31 … like a biological function 32 which is in the brain, and which is strongly activated when we are acquiring a first language. Now the thinking was that that language acquisition device, like other biological functions … works successfully only when it’s stimulated 33 at the right time. And that made them research this idea of what’s called a critical period hypothesis 34 – that there’s a specific and limited time period for language acquisition. And the thinking is that yes, young children between four and twelve, before puberty, have this – almost – ability to acquire language naturally, and later there seems to be a cut-off-point 35 , maybe beyond adolescence 36 , although the thinking on this, and the theorising on this, isn’t necessarily fully established. 25 idirtheanga 26 traschur 27 traschur deimhneach 28 iontaisiú 29 hipitéis 30 aois bharrmhaith, an aois is fearr 31 mianach sealbhaithe teanga 32 próiseas bitheolaíoch 33 spreag (briathar) 34 hipitéis na tréimhse criticiúla 35 scoithphointe/ pointe scoite 36 ógántacht
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Part 1: Introduction, first and second language acquisition ...

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