Adult Foreign Language Research Articles

Attainment of Syntactic and Morphological Accuracy by Advanced Language Learners

The present study examines the relationship between syntactic development, or complexity, and overall accuracy evidenced in the written English of advanced adult foreign language learners. Similar acquisition profiles were found to exist for 30 learners across five language groups: Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Malay, and Spanish. Syntactic complexity, measured in number of clauses per T-unit, is found to be similar in all five groups. These advanced foreign language learners, who show similar patterns of error distribution, all show relative strength in syntax, what Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1977) call a universal design feature of language, but relative weakness in morphology, which is always a language-specific system.

The Acquisition of ser and estar by Adult Learners of Spanish: A Preliminary Investigation of Transitional Stages of Competence

The field of second language (L2) acquisition research has shown that for some grammatical structures in English, there seems to be an order of acquisition. (See for example, Dulay and Burt, 1974; Bailey, Madden and Krashen, 1974; Larsen-Freeman, 1976; Krashen, 1981.) Certain early acquired structures have been identified (e.g., -ing) as well as certain late acquired items (e.g., third person -s). Research has also shown, however, that it is not enough to examine orders of acquisition: one must also look at what are called 'transitional stages.' Accordingly, it is not sufficient to say that in English L2 learners' negation is acquired at X point in relation to other structures, for this does little to reveal what steps the learner took to arrive at the acquisition of that form. Closer looks at transitional stages have shown that learners of English as an L2 go through certain steps regardless of first language (L1) background and regardless of rate (see Dulay, Burt and Krashen, 1982, for a summary of English L2 negation development and a discussion of transitional stages). It would seem appropriate, then, to ask whether adult foreign language learners, even though in a formal situation, advance through certain stages of development regardless of level, L1, text, syllabus, and teacher. This paper is a first step toward that goal in that it reports on several stages of development in the acquisition of the Spanish copulas ser and estar in adult learners of Spanish. The question as to how the data in this study relate to current hypotheses about L2 acquisition is also raised. An important task of those who research foreign language (FL) learners as opposed to L2 learners (e.g., ESL learners) is to see if FL originated data can be explained or interpreted by the so-called 'general' principles of L2 acquisition research. In this manner, data from FL learners can help to confirm, refine, or even reject hypotheses based on research using L2 learners.

Production of /t/ and /u/ by monolinguals and French‐English bilinguals

If adult foreign language learners judge the phones found in L2 as belonging to categories established during native language (L1) acquisition, the accuracy with which L2 phones are produced may be limited, and production of L1 phones modified. To test this, the VOT of /t/ and the F2 in /u/ produced by four bilingual groups, and by monolingual speakers of French and English, were examined. Experienced but not relatively inexperienced L2 learners produced phones differently in L1 and L2. Although the L2 learners “approximated” the phonetic norms of L2 to a greater extent as a function of increased experience, none of them perfectly matched monolingual speakers of L2. There was evidence that learning a foreign language affected production of L1 phones with a close counterpart in L2. The /t/ (and to a lesser extent /u/) produced by experienced bilinguals in L1 tended to resembled the /t/ (and /u/) of their L2.

Transfer and developmental processes in adult foreign language speech production

ABSTRACTThis study tested the hypothesis that factors that shape children’s production of their native language (L1) will also influence adults’ pronunciation of sounds in a foreign language (L2). The final stops in CVC English words produced by 12 adult native speakers each of English, Polish, Spanish, and Chinese were phonetically transcribed. The frequency with which these stops were devoiced, deleted, or fricativized was tabulated. The Spanish subjects (unlike the Chinese or Poles) showed the effect of a transfer process, producing word-final /b, d, g/as fricatives. Subjects in all three non-native groups (but not the native English subjects) resembled English-learning children in devoicing word-final /b, d, g/. Subjects whose L1 does not have word-final stops (i.e., the native speakers of Chinese and Spanish) showed another process commonly observed in English L1 acquisition: final stop deletion. A number of language background variables (e.g., age of arrival in the United States) were found not to be significantly correlated with the accuracy of final stop production. These findings suggest that, in addition to transfer processes arising from L1/L2 phonetic and phonological differences, developmental processes similar to those affecting child L1 speech production also influence adult L2 speech production.

Community Language Learning: Is It a Method?

Teachers of ESL/EFL are faced with a plethora of teaching 'methods' many of which are based on conflicting theoretical claims and widely varying designs and classroom procedures. A compara tively recent phenomenon, CLL emerged out of the humanism of modern counselling therapy as a reaction to the audiolingual pre scriptions of behavioural psychology and structural linguistics which had dominated previous decades. The principal barriers to successful adult foreign language learning are seen to lie in the anxiety and negative emotions of the human learning situation. Language should therefore be learned in small communities of learners whose motiva tion for learning is the desire to communicate with each other. A community nurtures the natural learning process which develops in a warm environment through mutual support and co-operation. Upon examination, CLL as a methodology evidences serious shortcomings. Among these are included a lack of specification of syllabus, model of linguistic competence or of the structural composition of language, and the high demands CLL places on the teacher with limited resources. While CLL's strength lies in its Approach, signifi cant flaws in its theoretical underpinnings — such as the stress on human affect at the expense of cognition — are also apparent.

Errors in foreign language learning

In almost every study of adult foreign language learning one of the researcher's central questions is related to the extent to which the learner's native language influences his interlanguage.