SOCIAL FACTORS

AND
SECOND LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
Presented By:
Ali-Ali, Jeadh Deen
Caballero, Erwin
Levita, Alliah Kyla
Sagusay, Mylene
Cummins’ two types of Proficiency
1. Basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) –
they develop naturally as a result of exposure to a
language through communication.
2. Cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP) –
consists of the linguistic knowledge and literacy
skills required for academic work.
Learner Attitudes
1. The target language
2. Target language speakers
3. The target language culture
4. The social value of learning the L2
5. Particular uses of the target language, and
6. Themselves as members of their own culture
Baker (1988) discusses the main characteristics of
attitudes
1. Attitudes are cognitive (capable of being taught
about) and affective (have feelings and emotions
attached to them)
2. Attitudes are dimensional rather than bipolar –
they vary in degree of favorability/unfavorability
3. Attitudes predisposes a person to act in a certain
way, but the relationship between attitudes and
actions is not a strong one.
4. Attitudes are learnt, not inherited or genetically
endowed.
5. Attitudes tend to persist but they can be modified
by experiences.
• Specific social factors which influence the
attitudes held by different groups of
learners and which lead to different levels
of L2 proficiency.
THE FOUR VARIABLES

• Age
• Sex
• Social class
• Ethnic identity
AGE
 Chambers & Trudgill (1980)
 Sociolinguists, who documented variants of /
/ in the speech of different generations of
speakers in Norwich (England)
 Younger generation (10-19 yrs. Old) – used
non-standard variants
 Middle-aged speakers (30-60 yrs. Old) –
use standard variants
 Older speakers (70 + years) –
demonstrated use of non-standard variants
but not to the same extent as the younger
generations
• Younger speakers are subject to
social pressures from their peer group
• Middle-aged speakers have less
cohesive social networks and are
more influenced by mainstream
societal values
• In older, retired people,
social pressures lessen and
social networks again become
narrow.
 Preston (1989)

Suggest that children may be more

prepared to share external norms because
they are not subject to peer pressure and
have not formed stereotypes of their own
identities.
He argues that adolescents take
learning an L2 as threat to their identity,
that may explain why adolescents
are resistant to L2 learning in
foreign language setting.
SEX
 Sex – a biological distinction
Gender – a social one.

Labov (1991; 206) - “there is little

reason to think that sex is an
appropriate category to explain
linguistic behavior
 He also identified two distinct and
apparently contradictory principles
relating to sex differentiation in
native-speech
1.In stable sociolinguistic
stratification, men use a higher
frequency of non-standard forms
than women.
2.In the majority of
linguistic changes, women
use a higher frequency
of the incoming forms than men.
 Both principles suggest that women might be
better at L2 learning that men.

Burstall (1975)
• Investigated sex differentiation (study of 6, 000).
• Reported that the girls scored significantly higher
than the boys on all tests measuring achievement

Boyle (1987)
• Female students achieved higher over all
means on tests of general L2 English
proficiency
• However, in his study male students
performed better on listening vocabulary
Ludwig (1983)
• Male learners were more in instrumentally
motivated
Bacon and Finneman (1992)
• Reported that female learners of L2 Spanish at
university level had the stronger instrumental
motivation
• Reported that women greater use of a “private/non-
oral mode’ in language learning than men.

Bacon (1992)
• Found that men reported using
translation strategies more than women
• Women monitoring their comprehension
more than men.
Eisenstein (1982)

• Found that females consistently

and significantly out-performed
males in discriminating among
different American English
accents
• Female learners may also
be more active strategy users.
Why, for instance, do
males have a wider
listening vocabulary?
SOCIAL
CLASS
Income
Level of education
occupation
Four Groups
o Lower class
o Working class
o Lower middle class
o Upper middle class
Preston (1989; 117)
• Points out that there is a clear parallel between
sociolinguistic phenomena associated with social
class and language change and inter language
development
 Hypercorrection
 Negative transfer
 Indicator
 Change
 monitoring
Burstall (1975; 1979)
• Both male and female primary and
secondary school learners of L2 French
there was a strong correlation between
socio-economic status and achievement
• Children from middle-class homes
regularly outperformed those from
• lower and working class homes
• Working class children tend to drop
French after their second year in
secondary school, while middle-class
children were likely to continue.
 Skehan (1990)
• Also reports moderate correlations between the
family background.
• Suggest that these relationships may reflect the
learners’ underlying ability to deal with context-
disembedded language.

 Researchers suggest that ‘the developmental

of oral/aural interpersonal communication
skills in a second language do not appear to
be dependent on individual differences of a
cognitive, linguistic and social nature’
 ETHNIC
IDENTITY
 Gudykunst and Ting Toomey (1990)
“ethnicity is a slippery concept”
Objective – researchers imposed external
categorizations on their subjects.
Subjective – see ethnicity as a
process whereby individuals use
labels to define themselves in
communication with others and
are now generally favored.
There is a general consensus that
ethnic identity can exert a profound
influence on L2 Learning. And these
are:
1.Normative
2.Socio-psychological
3.Socio-structural
Normative view
• Seek to establish to what extent membership of a
particular ethnic group affects L2 achievement.
• The ‘distance’ between the cultures of the native
and target languages.
• The idea that the more distant the two cultures are,
the more difficult L2 learning is and, therefore, the
lower the achievement levels.
Svanes (1988)
Three ethnic groups in Norway
1. ‘near’ group;
2. ‘intermediate ‘ group; and
3. Distant group
 Socio-psychological view

Emphasizes the role of attitudes

Reflect the intersection of their
views about their own ethnic
identity and those about the target-
language culture.
 Lambert (1974)
Additive and subtractive bilingualism
Balanced bilingualism and semilingualism
monolingualism
Native culture Target culture
Additive bilingualism + +
Subtractive - +
bilingualism

Semilingualism - -
monolingualism + -
“willingness to be valued members of the
(second) language community results in high
level of L2 proficiency.”
However…
Okamura-Bichard

• Argues that the ‘personal translation of social

factors is…critical in motivating individual
learners to make efforts in their learning
attempts (1985; 85)
• “happiness” factor maybe more important than
interest in or attitudes towards the target-
language when the learner is a child.
Socio-cultural view
Examined the effect that ethnic identity has
on the interactions between members of
different ethnic groups

Giles and Johnson (1981) according

to ethnolinguistic theory, members of
an in group may or may not adopt
positive linguistic distinctiveness
strategies when communicating with
members of an out-group.
Giles and Ryan (1982) suggest that speakers
evaluate a situation and then decide whether to adopt
status or solidarity, and person-centered or group-
centered strategies.
 Gardner and Lambert
 Giles and his associates – proposed a
theory of L2 learning a.k.a the ‘the
inter-group Theory
Sato (1981) showed that ethnicity
affects the communication styles
found in ESL classroom discourse.
Questio
n???
Thank