‘I hope this makes sense!

’
Parallel Accounts of Second Language Acquisition

by
Stephanie Zlotnick

B6000 Intro to Language Studies

Professor Qian Malkoff
December 7, 2021
KEY TERMS

 Second language acquisition  Dental sound

 Bilingual/multilingual  Phoneme
 Prescriptive approach  Syntax
 Descriptive approach  Pragmatics

INTRODUCTION

A significant amount of research exists in regard to first and second language acquisition,

literacy, and sociolinguistics. Each of these concepts include a breadth of subtopics that can be

examined deeply through both empirical and quantitative research, and that research often

discovers the intersectionality of these very distinctive, very complex subjects. It is this

intertwining that intrigues and inspires me.

In this paper, I will explore interview responses of two bilingual women in my life, both

31 years old, one from the United States and the other from the Dominican Republic (DR). These

women have had, in some ways, parallel experiences with a foreign language. Melissa is my

sister-in-law. She grew up briefly in Pittsburgh, PA before moving to my hometown in

Westchester County, NY in fifth grade, where she met my brother. It was not until after Melissa

returned from her service in the Peace Corps in Guatemala that she and my brother began dating

and got married, so the majority of the time I’ve known her, she’s been fluent in Spanish in

addition to her native English. Now, Melissa is a high school English as a New Language (ENL)

teacher in Westchester County, working primarily with Spanish-speaking students who have

recently emigrated to the United States from Latin America. Alfonsina is a friend and former co-

worker. She was born and raised in the DR, attended graduate school in Mexico, and is now

living, working, and pursuing her doctoral degree in New York City. A native Spanish speaker,

Alfonsina lives her life in a primarily English-speaking world, both professionally and

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personally. For both Melissa and Alfonsina, the processes of second language acquisition

dictated the direction of their adult lives and resulted in daily use of both Spanish and English.

I conducted my interview with them over Zoom one evening in November – in English –

with follow-up conversations over email. Through these interviews and the corresponding

research presented in this paper, I aim to answer two main questions: 1) What does the process of

learning a second language look like?; and 2) What are the primary linguistic and regional

differences between English and Spanish? By exploring these main ideas, I hope to provide a

snapshot of some of the elements of second language learning in different contexts.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

In order to thoroughly explore my research questions, it was important that I develop a

personal understanding of a few particular concepts that helped shape my questions and

subsequent interpretations of the responses. First, and perhaps most obvious, multilingualism as

an area of study is crucial to this project. In his 2006 book How Language Works: How Babies

Babble, Words Change and Languages Live or Die, David Crystal argues that “multilingualism

is the normal human condition” because three-quarters of the human race speak two or more

languages (409). Because of this, I can safely say that Melissa and Alfonsina, as bilingual adults,

are among the majority. Crystal also explains his view of bilingualism as a continuum of fluency

on which bilinguals find themselves at different points, “with a minority approaching the

theoretical ideal of perfect, balanced control of both languages” (412). Further, Crystal’s book

provides an introduction into the various processes seen in teaching and learning of foreign

languages and how they determine a person’s language abilities, which sets the backdrop for the

simultaneously unique and universal experiences of Melissa and Alfonsina.

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 Second, much of my conversation with Melissa and Alfonsina included their reflections

on how they got to the linguistic places they are today, and a large part of these reflections

included people, institutions, and learning materials. Thus, their experiences learning Spanish

and English respectively reflect Deborah Brandt’s theory of literacy sponsors. According to

Brandt, literacy sponsors are “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable,

support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy – and gain

advantage by it in some way” (166). Analyzing the sponsors that informed Melissa and

Alfonsina’s second language literacies allows for a deeper understanding of the ideological,

economic, and social routes through which they accomplished language learning.

Finally, we cannot analyze the second language acquisition processes within two people

from different parts of the world without exploring the cultural differences among dialects and

accents of one language used in different locations. Because both Melissa and Alfonsina have

spent time in multiple regions in which they communicated in both Spanish and English, they

were exposed to significant cultural and linguistic differences. Specifically, between the two of

them, dialects of these languages have been encountered in the US, Spain, Guatemala,

Dominican Republic, and Mexico City. According to Augustin Martinez in his introduction of

the Multicultural Spanish Dictionary: How Everyday Spanish Differs from Country to Country,

“language can never be reduced to one absolute term, especially in our fast-changing world”

(Martinez). Further, he raises important questions that capture the sentiment of issues to consider

while analyzing people’s second language learning: “Is Spain still the standard-bearer of

Spanish? Has Latin America, or one particular Latin American country, such as Mexico, taken

the lead? Is there a standard Spanish language?” (Martinez). These questions have helped guide

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my understanding of the language variations Melissa and Alfonsina have encountered in their

lives.

LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

As a child in the northeast region of the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s,

Melissa was raised with a multicultural perspective of the world. Her father traveled for work –

primarily to Switzerland, thus taking in a variety of German dialects – and her older sister

studied abroad in Cuba where she learned Spanish, which first and foremost normalized

international travel and the importance of linguistic and cultural understanding within her

household (Dishart Nov. 11). So, when her mother enrolled her in an after-school Spanish

language program in fifth grade, she was eager. Even though she recalls that eagerness stemming

from a desire to be just like her older sister and “modeling [her] behavior” after family members,

Melissa remembers immediately taking a liking to the language learning process and realizing

she actually enjoyed it (Dishart Nov. 11).

The primarily white Somers Central School District in which we grew up required each

student to choose a foreign language starting in seventh grade; we had French, Italian, and

Spanish to choose from. Naturally, when it came time for this decision, Spanish was the easy

choice for Melissa. In both of these experiences, she remembers learning through what she now

realizes was a prescriptive approach, which, in his book The Study of Language, George Yule

defines as that which views “grammar as a set of rules for the proper use of a language” (97).

Through repeated conjugation exercises, songs, and grammar-focused exams, Melissa acquired a

basis of the Spanish language, confirming that she “needed [a prescriptive approach] as a

learner” to understand the formulas for Spanish sentence structure (Dishart Nov. 11).

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 After six years of Spanish class in public school which culminated in the AP exam,

Melissa attended George Washington University, taking more Spanish classes and ultimately

studying abroad in Madrid, Spain. There, she became completely immersed in the language:

living with a host family and attending Spanish-only classes that included subject matter as

culturally complex as art history and cinema (Dishart Nov. 11). She considers the most active

sponsors of her Spanish literacy to be these professors in Madrid whose classes were distinct and

small enough to offer a comfortable environment in which to speak, make mistakes, and ask

questions without shame (Dishart Nov. 11). Post-college graduation, Melissa joined the Peace

Corps and was placed in a rural, mountainous region of Guatemala. This experience solidified

her fluency in Spanish through intensive Spanish and Guatemalan culture classes and daily life

without the option of English. Now, Melissa reflects on her years of Spanish language learning

from the perspective of an ENL teacher in a high school just a few towns over from ours.

Around the same time that Melissa began learning Spanish, approximately 1,500 miles

south of New York, Alfonsina was learning English in the Dominican Republic. Though

primarily Spanish-speaking, she emphasizes that the DR is highly influenced by American

culture (Frias Nov. 11). From tourism, to pop culture, to baby names, the United States plays a

major role in the Dominican daily life. Even more, because of the immense tourist economy in

the country, many employers require their staff to speak English in addition to Spanish. It is for

this reason that English is actually required in many Dominican schools. Alfonsina and her

classmates thus began learning English in elementary school as a requirement of the curriculum.

But even before she learned English in a prescriptive classroom setting, she was acquiring

English from television and movies, citing Friends as her favorite show. Additionally, her

mother, who was already looking ahead to when she and her daughters could move to the US,

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gave her a kit of video tapes, audio cassettes, and activity sheets called Aprende Ingles con

Maria Pascual, which she remembers as “the most fun thing to study ever” (Frias Nov. 11).

These English tapes were supplemented by her relationships with cousins who were born in the

US and spoke primarily English. They commonly wrote letters to one another in English so

Alfonsina could practice her language skills, and when they visited, Alfonsina begged them to

speak to her in English (Frias Nov. 11). These familial aspirations to live in the US – especially

her mother’s foresight and determination – became the most prominent English literacy sponsors

in Alfonsina’s life.

When Alfonsina was fourteen years old, her mother – still planning ahead – enrolled her

in a private English institute connected to the US Embassy. This was an expensive, exclusive

school that students needed to test into, and Alfonsina, with her prior immersion in the English

language, tested into the sixth level of twelve, which determined she would attend the institute

twice a week for two and a half hours after her normal school day. To further emphasize the

persistence that it took for Alfonsina to become fluent in English, the school was an hour-long

bus ride from her house that she had to take alone as a young teenager (Frias Nov. 11).

Eventually, Alfonsina attended undergrad at the Universidad Católica de Santo Domingo

in the DR. While she was there, she had one friend who had previously lived in the US and was a

significant help to her with the English language. Then when Alfonsina graduated, she began

working for a Chinese-based company in Santo Domingo that required employees to speak

English, as that was the common language for international business. Following this, she moved

to Mexico City to obtain her master’s degree from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana,

and even there, she “had to know English to work” (Frias Nov. 11).

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 Alfonsina is now pursuing a doctoral degree in New York City while working full-time in

the non-profit sector with a focus on bringing educational programs to underserved children.

Unlike Melissa – whose life remains primarily in her native language with the exception of the

Spanish-English medley in her job – Alfonsina spends more of her life speaking her foreign

language than she does speaking her native language; professionally, academically, and socially,

her primary communication is with people who speak only English (Frias Nov. 11). Like

Melissa, however, Alfonsina’s family played a major sponsorship role in her foreign language

literacy, especially her parents, who emphasized the importance of English learning and literally

financially sponsored much of the process. That said, we cannot trivialize the immersion into

American culture that Alfonsina had as a young girl in the DR, watching Friends and absorbing

English language, slang, and comedy.

LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES

From a purely linguistic view, Melissa finds English to be, in general, a more challenging

language than Spanish, and even though she is undoubtedly bilingual, the challenges she faces in

both languages point to the presence of the spectrum of fluency that Crystal argues for in his

book (Crystal 412). When teaching Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech

in tenth grade English, “the word ‘tortuous’ always trips [her] up. It means long and winding and

is NOT ‘torturous,’” which is generally what she says before correcting herself (Dishart Nov.

18). These words are an example of contrastive phonemes, which Yule asserts are helpful in

determining the phonemes of a language because the meaning of the word is reliant on the sound

of that word (Yule 46). The primary syntactic difference that Melissa identifies between the two

languages is the order of nouns and adjectives in sentences. She cites the example of White

House translating to Casa Blanca (Dishart Nov. 18). That said, she also finds the syntax in

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“Spanish to be more formal,” sounding “prettier and cooler” than English: “I love the phrase ‘It

calls my attention that…’ or asking a student ‘In this xyz, what calls your attention?’ It sounds so

much more elegant than ‘What do you think?’” (Dishart Nov. 18).

Alfonsina can also identify a few sounds in English that continue to be a challenge to her

pronunciation, reinforcing Melissa’s claim that English is harder than Spanish. She “can never

tell the difference between” beach and bitch, for example (Frias Nov. 17). Further, because the

dental sound of the th in English does not exist in Spanish, Alfonsina has particular trouble

enunciating it. Syntactically, Alfonsina finds English to be “so basic because words are very

descriptive. For example, shoelaces, trashcan, pencil sharpeners” (Frias Nov. 17). In her native

Spanish, these kinds of items have their own unique terms and the English-style combinations

are rarely seen. When it comes to the pragmatics of English, Alfonsina finds that people don’t

say what they mean: “The language is on the surface, in the sense that it can be so descriptive of

what we can see…that it doesn’t go into the depth in terms of meaning. Spanish for example, has

much more meaning when you say something because we have a word for everything! Love, for

example, we have a Te Quiero (I love you), which means I care about you, you are important to

me but no te amo, and we have Te Amo (I love you) which means the same as I love you in

English” (Frias Nov. 17).

REGIONAL DIFFERENCES

Both Melissa and Alfonsina have experiences speaking Spanish and English in different

countries, which provides for them deep insight into the phonological, syntactic, and pragmatic

differences among regions. Melissa summarizes her experiences in Spain, Guatemala, and New

York by connecting the types of Spanish speech with people’s sociocultural differences. In

Madrid, her experiences reinforced the assumption that Martinez refers to that Spain has

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traditionally been considered the “standard-bearer” of Spanish: she notes that the culture in Spain

projects an air of higher class than other Spanish-speaking countries in “the way that people

carry themselves, in the way that people look,” which is very different from the indigenous

Spanish speakers of Guatemala or newly-emigrated students from a variety of Latin American

countries in the US (Dishart Nov. 11). But in addition to the cultural assumptions embedded in

the language varieties, there exists a myriad of colloquial phrases and pronunciations that differ

from one place to another. Melissa recalls perhaps her one of her more embarrassing language

faux pas when in Guatemala: in Spain, coche means car, whereas it refers to pig in Guatemala. It

is in these moments, she remembers, that someone would point out the mistake while laughing,

and you would vow to never make the mistake again. Similarly, Melissa was told early in her

time in Guatemala that she was not rolling her “r” enough. She would want to say carro,

referring to car, but instead say caro which means expensive. Because of the difference in

grammar use and part of speech with these two words, a listener could typically determine with

context clues what the speaker means, but the mispronunciation “makes you feel like a dumb

foreigner with an inauthentic accent” (Dishart Nov. 11).

When it comes to English in different countries, there appears to be less of a systemic

difference in pronunciation or vocabulary, but rather a sociocultural distinction. Both Melissa

and Alfonsina attest to the global assumption that knowing English as a second language is a

sign of higher cultural status, be it economic, social, regional, or academic; Alfonsina adds that

when “speaking English in Dominican culture, you’re really cool” (Frias Nov. 11). Even more,

Alfonsina has experienced the benefits of her English proficiency; she notes that her status as an

immigrant plays a role in her daily life, situating her in a specific social status, while her

language abilities afford her more opportunities than family members who came to the US at the

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same time as her but have not acquired English as fluently as her (Frias Nov. 11). Because of her

language skills, Alfonsina is able to build relationships and attach herself to American culture in

addition to Dominican differently than some of her cousins in the US. This, unsurprisingly,

contrasts with Melissa’s privilege to keep her second language in her back pocket for use when it

can be beneficial, but it is not a determinant of her social or professional status.

CONCLUSION

The anecdotes provided in this paper do not present a full picture of the second language

acquisition process. However, I hope they offer a unique look into the parallel experiences of

two women, very similar in many ways, who learned a second language that ultimately became a

major part of their daily adult lives. Melissa’s learning process depicts a prescriptive approach to

language acquisition, while Alfonsina – despite referring to contexts in which prescriptive

approaches were highly present – learned her foreign language with a more immersive,

descriptive approach. Further, both women have encountered a range of accents, dialects,

regions, and sociocultural contexts in which English and Spanish are present, which puts them a

unique position to comment on the phonemic, syntactic, and pragmatic characteristics of both

languages. By learning from the experiences of bilingual speakers like Melissa and Alfonsina,

we, as educators, can better understand the personal processes each student we teach goes

through every day to navigate the variety of discourses that fill their lives. This kind of

understanding will ultimately help us improve our own teaching practices and make space to

celebrate linguistic difference in writing and speaking.

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 Works Cited

Abbott, Martha G. “Beyond a Bridge to Understanding: The Benefits of Second Language

Learning.” American Educator, vol. 42, no. 2, American Federation of Teachers, AFL-
CIO, 2018, p. 39–43.

Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication 49, no. 2,
1998, 165-185.

Crystal, David. How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and
Languages Live or Die. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2006, pp. 409-422, 430-436.

Dishart, Melissa. Personal interview. 11 Nov. 2021.

Dishart, Melissa. Personal email. 18 Nov. 2021.

Frias, Alfonsina. Personal interview. 11 Nov. 2021.

Frias, Alfonsina. Personal email. 17 Nov. 2021.

Martinez, Augustin. “Introduction.” Multicultural Spanish Dictionary: How Everyday Spanish

Differs from Country to Country, Taylor Trade Publishing, 2011.

Martínez-Gómez, Alberto. “Transitioning to Communicative Activities in Teaching English as a

Foreign Language in the Dominican Republic.” Revista Caribeña de Investigación
Educativa, vol. 4, no. 2, Instituto Superior de Formación Docente Salomé Ureña, 2020,
pp. 159–71.

Pufahl, Ingrid, et al. What We Can Learn from Foreign Language Teaching in Other Countries.
ERIC Digest. ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics, 2001.

Yule, George. The Study of Language, Seventh Edition. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

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