Function

to form

mapping

Utterance

organization

L1 influence

Corrections

L2

processing

Prof Gregg Brekke - EDU 361

Noticing hypothesis

• Nothing is learned unless it is noticed, even

unconsciously. Importance of awareness and attention in L2 learning

Input processing

• Learners have difficulty focusing on word form and

meaning at the same time. Learners focus on

meaning first and ignore “grammar” information.

Reflect understanding of the English L2 system

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.

She looking around: Developmental. Simplification of the verb phrase by omitting the auxiliary.

Yesterday he play: Developmental. Simplification. No tense or number marker on the verb.

She rans to escape: Developmental. Overgeneralization of the 3rd person singular ‘s’ present marker to the past.

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.

Learners in uninstructed settings

• Nothing is learned unless it is noticed, even

unconsciously. Importance of awareness and attention in L2 learning

Input processing

• Learners have difficulty focusing on word form and

meaning at the same time. Learners focus on

meaning first and ignore “grammar” information.

Information Organization of IL structures

01

02

03

Nominal Utterance

OrganizationUse of nouns, pronouns,

adjectives

Very few verbs used

Charlie and girl accidentInfinite Utterance Organization- Basic

VarietyUse of uninflected verbs (No #, person, tense)

Use of prepositions

The blonde friend tell other woman about the son

Finite Utterance Organization Morphological “grammar” endings and words

he has finished the work

Klein & Perdue 1993

Function-Form mapping

Reference to the past

01

02

03

Contextual

Describe the

situation

Lexical (vocabulary words)

with time meanings

Morphological “grammar”

endings and words

Phase 1: Contextual

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 and He work in restaurant.

January. It’s very cold.

Viet Nam. We work too hard.

Phase 2: Lexical (vocabulary words)

learners use a rich repertoire of adverbs

Many calendric (Sunday) and anaphoric adverbs

(after, before, then)

Some frequency (always) and durational (two

hours) adverbs.

After his bike fall down, his fruit then fall

down.

Phase 3: Morphological

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 endingShe rided her bicycle

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).

L2 Morpheme Order

1

2

3

4

-ing (progressive): Girl watching picture

Plural –s: Boy give away two pens

Be copula: She is the one

Be Auxiliary: progressive He is going

a/the: Article: He steals a bread

Irregular past: The teacher took us there

Regular past –ed We crashed the car

3rd singular –s He takes a nap

Possessive -- ’s the bread shop’s owner

Hierarchy of processing skills

01

02

03

04

apple

walk

apples

walked

three + big + apples

slowly + walked

The three big apples + are ripe.

A big apple + is spoiled.

(N)

(V)

(N)

(V)

(NP)

(VP)

(NP + VP)

Cross -Clause boundary movement

05

2

Are / the three big apples / ____ ripe?

Hierarchy of Internal Clause reordering (S1 + S2)

01

02

03

04

That’s the man [whoran away].

That’s the truck [that I sold yesterday].

That’s the man [to whom I gave the letter].

That’s the book [that I told you about],

or [about which I told you]

Processability Theory- (Pienemann)

1. Developmental features or sequences in syntax and morphology are affected by how easy they are to process. L2 learners follow these pathways.

2. Distance among phrase elements, and across phrase and clause boundaries require increasingly complex processing

3. Cognitive load in working memory limits depth of processing. More advanced structures are accessed only after previous ones are automatized.

Interlingual errors: based on cross-

linguistic influence:Reflect L1 grammar – due to transfer

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.

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 [sp-].)

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.)

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)

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.

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

Teachers’ questions in classrooms (Long and

Sato, 1983)

Scaffolding and display and referential questions

(McCormick and Donato, 2000)

Open and closed questions (Dalton-Puffer, 2006)

Wait time (White and Lightbown, 1984; Long et

al., 1985)

Explicit correction

Recasts

Clarification requests

Metalinguistic feedback

Elicitation

Repetition

Pienemann (1988) and his colleagues suggest that:Some aspects of language are best taught according to learners’ internal schedule (i.e. developmental features).

Other aspects of language can be taught at any time (i.e. variational features). Vocabulary!

Instruction cannot change the ‘natural’ developmental course. For some learners, it can speed up passage.

Important to assess learners’ development and teach what would naturally come next.

Advocates of this proposal suggest that:◦ Not everything has to be taught; lots of language can be

acquired naturally with sufficient exposure.

◦ Some aspects of language must be taught and may

need to be taught explicitly (e.g. when learners share the

same first language).

◦ Other aspects of language can be taught by helping

learners to notice certain features in the input and to

increase their awareness of form.

‘Get it right in the end’

◦ Strong evidence that form-focused instruction within the context of communicative and content-based language teaching is more effective in promoting L2 learning than instructional approaches that are limited to an exclusive emphasis on accuracy, comprehension, or interaction.

◦ Decisions about balancing form-focus and meaning-focus must take into account differences in learners’ characteristics (e.g. age, goals for learning, etc.).

It is not necessary (or desirable) to choose

between form-based and meaning-based

instruction. The challenge is to find the best

balance between these two orientations.

Many questions about L2 teaching remain to be

answered by classroom-based research on L2

learning.

30

t1 t2 t3 t4 t5

S'-procedure

(EmbeddedS)

- - - - +

Sentence-

procedure

- simplified simplified inter-phrasal

information

exchange

inter-phrasal

information

exchange

Phrasal

procedure

(head)

- - phrasal

information

exchange

phrasal

information

exchange

phrasal

information

exchange

category

procedure

(lex. categ.)

- lexical

morphemes

lexical

morphemes

lexical

morphemes

lexical

morphemes

word/ lemma + + + + +

Table 1:Hypothetical hierarchy of processing procedures (Pienemann, 1998)

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

That’s the book [that I told you about].

Genitive

That’s the man [whose sister I know].

Object of comparison

He’s the only man [whom I am taller than].

Less accessible