Second Language

Acquisition (SLA)
Research
Methodology
SHAMSIAH ABDULLAH
HUSNOORLAILI HUSAIN
NUR ROZZIENNA RAMLAN
 INTRODUCTION
‘Research is a systematic approach to finding
answers to questions’ (Hatch and Farhady 1982)

 Part of being systematic is having a well-planned

research design.
 There are four aspects of research design:
i. Methodology
ii. Setting
iii. Instrumentation
iv. Measurement
 Qualitative vs
 QualitativeQuantitative
– an ethnographic study in which the
researchers do not set out to test hypotheses but rather
to observe what is present with their focus and
consequently the data, free to vary during the course of
the observation.

 Quantitative – an experiment design to test a

hypothesis through the use of objective instruments
and appropriate statistical analyses.
Qualitative Paradigm
Advocates the use of qualitative methods
Concerned with understanding human
behaviour from the actor’s own frame of
reference
Naturalistic and uncontrolled observation
Subjective
Close to the data: the ‘insider’ perspective
Grounded, discovery-oriented, descriptive and Ungrounded, verification-oriented, inferential
inductive
Process-oriented
Valid: ‘real’ , ‘rich’ and ‘deep’ data
Ungeneralizable; single case studies
Assumes a dynamic reality
Quantitative Paradigm
Advocates the use of quantitative methods
Seeks the facts or causes of social phenomena
with little regard for the subjective states of
individuals
Obtrusive and controlled measurement
Objective
Removed from the data: the ‘outsider’
perspective
and hypothetico-deductive
Outcome-oriented
Reliable: ‘hard’ and replicable data
Generalize; multiple case studies
Assumes a stable reality
 It is provided by Reichardt and Cook (1979)
 There are two implications:
i. It is assumed that if researchers subscribe to
one paradigm over the other and thus view the
world differently, they must use different
methods of inquiry.
ii. The paradigms are use to be inflexible so that
one’s only choice is between the two.
 The distinction to exemplify is between
longitudinal and cross-sectional studies.
Longitudinal Approach
 Often called a case study, in SLA field
 Involves observing the development of linguistics
performance, usually spontaneous speech of one
subject, when the speech data are collected at periodic
intervals over a span of time.
 Characterized by 3 qualitative paradigm attributes:
i. Naturalistic (use of spontaneous speech)
ii. Process-oriented (it takes place over time)
iii. Ungeneralizable (very few subjects)
 Cross-Sectional
studied and theApproach
 Linguistic performance of a larger number of subjects is
performance data are usually collected at
only one session.
 The data usually elicited by asking subjects to perform
some verbal task such as describing a picture.
 4 characters:
i. Obtrusive
ii. Controlled environment (use of artificial tasks)
iii. Outcome-oriented (takes place at only one point in
time)
iv. Generalizable (larger group of subjects)
 Process-oriented vs outcome-oriented distinction
should not be associated with one approach.
 Must be able to trace change over time, one would
allow the researchers to trace the process not just
analyze the outcome
 The lack of generalizability of findings from single
case longitudinal study can be solved by conducting a
number of concurrent longitudinal studies
 What is important to researchers is not the choice of
methodologies but be clear on what the purpose of
the study.
 Introspection
 Qualitative is an introspective one, with
guidance from the researchers, leaners
examine their own behaviour.
 There are SLA researcher's challenge the
validity of introspection insights because
they question leaners’ report.
 They suggest that it only limited to the
study of affective factors such as attitudes
and motivation.
Participant Observation
 Researchers take part in the activities they
are studying.
 That take note whatever they observe and
experience.
 Notes usually recorded immediately after
the activities to allow researchers full
participation.
 The period is usually long and the number
of subjects studied is small.
 Non- participant
Observation
 A researcher engaged in non-participant
observation do not entertain any
hypotheses, he only observe the activities.
 Usually researcher takes notes or makes
tape recording.
 The subjects are few in number and the
period of study relatively long.
 Focused Description
 Similar to observational studies since they are too
descriptive in nature.
 The difference is the researcher wish to narrow the
scope of their study to a particular set of variables.
 E.g. interaction analysis; researcher observe a
language class using a data collection device or
instrument to focus and record their observation.
 He measures certain leaners’ characteristics
(motivation) or characteristics learning environment
(amount of native speaker input).
 The advantageous is the scope of the researchers'’
task is limited, once the focus has been established, it
is maintained.
 Usually less time-consuming so more of them can be
conducted and more subjects can be observed.
 The disadvantageous is he ignores the fact that SLA
is multi-dimensional phenomenon.
 The other is the use of instrument to help
standardizing researchers’ observation but if they
investigates behaviour, the data could be biased.
 Pre-experiment
 Researchers attempt to establish a casual
relationship between treatment and consequences.
 Two criteria must be satisfied:
i. There must be experimental and control group
ii. Subjects must be randomly assigned to one of
these group.
 One type of it is called the one-group pretest-
posttest design.
 Quasi-experiment
 Quasi-experimental designs do not require
random assignment of subjects to groups but do
include one or more control group.
 Time-series designs are quasi-experiment since
they improve upon the one-group pretest-posttest
design.
 Thus, subjects in one group serve both as control
group and as an experimental group.
 Experiment
 There are two criteria:
i. There must be experimental and control group
ii. Subjects must be randomly assigned to one of
these group.
 The purpose is one group is treated in one manner
and another in a different manner.
 Since their behaviour is differ, conclude that as
consequence of their different treatments.
 From this also, a cause-effect relationship
between treatment and consequence can
be determine.
 Sometimes inappropriate for studying
human behaviour because of the progress
acquiring SL, subjects receiving restricted
input compared with that control group
receiving normal input.
 SETTING
 Needs to truly understand the acquisition process in its
natural state.
 Instructions could alter natural language processing & thus
contaminate SLA data.
 Selinker (1972) – characteristics of learner errors were
specifically textbook or teacher-induced
 Kasper (1982) – identified teacher-induced errors in the
discourse behaviour of German students of advanced English
 2 settings:
(a) Instructed Setting – organised according to the
presentation rules in classroom
(b) Naturalistic Setting – no formal articulation of rules &
emphasis in on communication of meaning.
INSTRUMENTATION
Instrumentation: Production Data Elicitation
 Qualitative Methodologies – reject the use of
instruments to elicit data
 Quantitative Methodologies – choose to use instruments
in the studies
 Impossible to study all aspects of a learner’s developing
performance
 Learners will often not reveal to researchers their entire
linguistics range
 Researchers face limitation to describe what arose
spontaneously for a given subjects
 There are 12 Appropriate Elicitation Procedures in SLA
Research
(a)Reading Aloud
 Has been used in studies researching
pronunciation (Beebe 1980a; Flege 1980)
 Procedures:
(i) Subjects – read aloud the word lists,
sentences or passages (which are an
abundance of particular sounds in
representatives environment)
(ii) Subjects’ performance is recorded – future
analysis
(b) Structured Exercises
 Exercises have been utilized:
(i) Transformation Exercise
(ii) Fill-in-the-blanks with correct form
(iii) Sentence-rewrite
(iv) Sentence-combining
(v) Multiple Choice
 Procedures:
(i) Subjects – perform some grammatical manipulation
(ii) Researchers – study subjects’ performance with
regard to specific morphemes or syntactic patterns.
(c) Completion Task
 Procedures:
(i) Subjects – listen to or read the beginning of a
sentence
(ii) Subjects need to complete it using their own words
 Richards (1980) – to study infinitival & gerundive
complements
 Bialystok (1982) –
 Natalicio and Natalicio (1971) –
 Berko (1958) -
(d) Elicited Imitation
 Procedures:
(i) Researcher – reads to subjects a particular set of
sentences (contain examples of the focused structure)
(ii) OR researcher – play a taped reading (for better aspects
of delivery’s rate)
(iii) Subjects – imitate each sentence after been read

 Based on an assumption by Naiman (1974) who suggested

15 syllables:
(a) Subjects are unable to repeat the sentence by rote because
their short-term memory will be taxed.
(b) So, subjects need to understand and reconstruct the
sentence using his or her own grammar.
(e) Elicited Translation
 Procedures:
(i) Subjects – get a sentence in their native language
(ii) Subjects – translate into their second language or
vice versa
 Subjects’ performance will approximate natural
speech production because:
- the procedures require both decoding of the
stimulus sentence & encoding of the translation
(f) Guided Composition
 Procedures:
(i) Subjects – produce oral OR written
composition in response to some set of
organized stimuli
 Richards (1980) – used picture sequnces which
tell story as stimuli
 Ioup (1984a) – gave an arrangement of content
words & then subjects are asked to write a
composition
(g) Question & Answer (with stimulus)
 Procedures:
(i) Subjects – look at a picture OR series of pictures
(ii) Answer questions designed to elicit particular
structures relate to the study
 Bialystok (1982):
(i) Subjects – listen to 16 personalized situations
which are described in a few sentences & end with
a question
(ii) Subjects – give a contextually appropriate
response.
(h) Reconstruction
 Hulstijn and Hulstijn (1984) – story retelling
 Connor and McCagg (1983) – paraphrase recall
 Procedures:
(i) Subjects – read OR listen to a story (Larsen-
Freeman 1983a) OR
(ii) Subjects – watch a movie (Godfrey 1980)
(iii) Subjects – retell OR reconstruct the story orally
OR in writing
(i) Communication Game
 Procedures (Scarcella and Higa; 1981):
(i) Native English Speakers combined with child
& adolescent ESL learners
(ii) Each pair – asked to use pieces of plastic to
replicate a picture given
(iii) Their conversations were audiotaped &
transcribed
(iv) Transcriptions were analysed
 Procedures (Lightbown, Spada and Wallace;
1980):
(i) Each subject got 10 sets of cards
(ii) Each set consisted of 4 pictures (differed from
each other minimally)
(iii) Subject – asked to choose 1 of the 4 &
described to the researcher (researcher would
know which been selected)
(iv) Pictures – specifically designed to provide
contexts in which the structures under study
would be likely occur
(j) Role Play
 Act as a useful way to study learners’ pragmatic
competence
 Speech act can be kept constant while the contextual
features are varied
 Many dimension of the learners’ pragmatic
competence may be explored
 Procedures:
(i) Subjects – asked to participate in a more or less
structured role play with the researcher OR
(ii) Researchers – used puppets to do role play
(subjects are children)
(k) Oral Interview
 Some researchers use exercise control over the topic – they
can steer the subjects
 Other researchers allow subjects to choose their own topic
 Subjects tend to involve in the subject matter been discussed
& produce more spontaneous speech

(l) Free Composition

 No interference by researchers
 e.g:
(i) Researcher – studies something related to grammatical
morphemes
(ii) Subjects – need to relate the writing with past time
expressions (but not guarantee subjects will do so using
past time morphemes)
 Variability Problem
 Subjects performance varies from task to task.
 Logic – if subjects had acquired a particular structure,
then they should be able to use it in all contexts &
modalities.
 Tarone (1983) – task variability happens when a task
elicits a relatively more careful style, that the style may
contain more target language forms or more prestige
native language variants than the relatively more casual
style elicited by other tasks.
 Researchers need to control task in their studies to
ensure the task used & those from other researchers are
the same before comparing findings across studies.
 Instrumentation: Intuitional Data Elicitation
 This kind of data has been referred to on a variety
of ways.
 Some call it data on learners’ competence;
 Others refer to it as metalinguistic judgement data
or intuitional data.
 There are 4 elicitation procedures which SLA
researchers have utilised in an attempt to get at
learners’ intuitions:
(a) Error Recognition & Correction
(b) Grammatically Judgements
(c) Other Judgement Tasks
(d) Card Sorting
(a) Error Recognition & Correction
 Procedures:
(i) Subjects – ask to locate an error in a particular
sentence produced by themselves
(ii) They also been asked the reason they thought they had
made the errors
 But, sometimes they are given correct sentence and they
are asked to judge it.

(b) Grammatically Judgements

 Refer to a speaker’s intuition concerning the nature of
particular utterance
 Subjects are asked whether or not a given utterance is
well formed.
(c) Other Judgement Task
 Tucker and Sarofin (1979) – asked subjects to rate deviant
& well-formed sentences in terms of their social
acceptability
 Walters (1979) – subjects need to make judgements relate
to relative politeness of request strategies

(d) Card Sorting

 Procedures:
(i) Pictures or sentences are placed on cards
(ii) Subjects – need to categorise or rank-order them
 To test the ability of children to discriminate gender
differences.
 Instrumentation: Use of Miniature Language
 Miniature Language – often elicit both linguistic
production & intuitional data
 FLA Research, Smith and Braine (1972):
- Subjects are exposed to a set of sentences of a miniature
artificial language created by the researcher
- Subjects are asked to recall or recognise the sentences
after some exposure
- Recall  they are actually being asked to produce
sentences
- Recognise  ask to make grammatically judgement
based on the regulations induced from the sentences
 SLA Research, Dunkel (1948) – use the concept to
experiment on the effect of instructions.
- He used a portion of a real language
- Used a short series of lessons in Farsi was constructed
in alternate forms
- Evaluate both visual & auditory presentation
- One group got visual, another group got auditory 
results were compared.

 McLaughlin (1980) – made the case for the use of

miniature artificial languages to study the process of
second language acquisition.
 Instrumentation: Affective Variable
 Instrumentations used in SLA to study
affective variables such as attitudes &
motivation.
 5 ways commonly used to study this area:
(a) Questionnaires
(b)Sociometry
(c) Matched Guise Technique
(d)Diary Study
(e) Focused Introspection
(a) Questionnaires
 To get language learners to self-report their attitudes or
personal characteristics

(b) Sociometry
 Use indirect means for young children because direct
questions concerning their attitudes are inappropriate
 Strong (1984):
(i) Children need to nominate classmates who speak
different native languages
(ii) Identified subjects’ allegiances & plot the group structure
in diagrammatic maps called sociograms
 Sociograms – useful in studying attitudes towards
minority-group members within a group
(c) Matched Guise Technique
 Use to elicit attitudes towards speakers of other
languages.

(d) Diary Study

 Use to study both second language teaching & second
language learning

(e) Focused Introspection

 To confront the subjects with audio or video
recordings of themselves
 To seek information from the subjects on what they
were feeling during the interaction, their attitudes
towards the interlocutor, etc.
 Instruments from Other Disciplines
 Use to analyse learners characteristics
 SLA researcher have used various tests:
(i) To discover subjects’ cognitive styles
(ii) Personality assessment measures
 From neurolinguistics SLA researchers have
borrowed dichotic listening tests & eye movement
observation to study brain functions and
hemisphericity
MEASUREMENT
Measuring Learner
Performance
 Before embarking on SLSA study we must
define what we mean by language/language
proficiency and determine how will we
know when it is required.
 Defining Language Proficiency
 Language proficiency could be divided into
unrelated skills (L-S-R-W)and knowledge
of language component.
 Oller (1976) hypothesizing that language
proficiency is a unitary and indivisible trait.
 Oller and Perkins (1979) claimed this
global proficiency factor was strongly
related to IQ.
 Cummins (1980,1981) finds value in the
notion of a global language-proficiency factor
‘which can be assessed by a variety of reading,
writing, listening and speaking tests and which
is strongly related to general cognitive skills…
and to academic achievement’.
 Cummins- CALP (Cognitive/academic
language proficiency) and BICS (Basic
Interpersonal Skills)
 Canale and Swain (1980) suggested that there
were 3 components to communicative
competence: grammatical, sociolinguistic and
strategic competence.
 Larsen-Freeman (1981) – 5 areas of
communicative competence; linguistic form,
pragmatic/functional competence,
propositional content, interactional patterns
and strategic competence.
 Canale (1994) include 4 components of
communicative competence: grammatical,
sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic
competence.
 Bachman and Palmer (1985) identified two
subordinate types: grammatical, discourse,
illocutionary and sociolinguistic.
 Defining an Acquisition Point
 Definition – Cazden’s (1968) “the first speech
sample of three such that in all three the inflection
is supplied in at least 90% of the contexts in which
it is really required”
 Hakuta (1995) “ the point of acquisition is the first
of three consecutive 2 week samples in which the
morpheme is supplied in over 90% of obligatory
context.
 Limitation of these 2 definition;
1. Sometimes obligatory contexts are easy to
identify.
2. It is often desirable to know how learners are
using a particular structure long before the
learner have acquired it, in the sense of
attained native-like control.
 Task vs Test
 Test are devised to measure what the learner
knows and does not know of the target
language.
 Task is devised to reveal what a learner
knows.
 Corder continues that “we may sometimes
be able to infer about the learner’s rules,
systems and categories from test results, but
that is not what the tests are devised to
reveal.
 An Index of Development

 Several researchers have used native-speaker

judgements to gauge learner proficiency.
 Scores on standard examinations, or
proficiency scales have been used as a
measures of second language proficiency.
 Sometimes it is determined by teacher’s
evaluation or by level of course.
 Larsen-Freeman and Storm
(1977)
 Examined ESL’s students compositions and
determined that the written measures which
seemed most suitable were the average
length of T-units and the total number of
error-free T-units per composition.
 In 1978, added another measure: the
average number of words per error-free T-
Units.
 In addition to having it be valid for all
subjects, in 1983 Larsen-Freeman listed
another desirable characteristics of an SLA
index of development: that it be readily
available, work for all speakers of different
native-language backgrounds and for different
target languages.( include ages, edu.
backgrounds, etc)
 Pienemann and Johnston
1987
 Construct a non-normative language
developmental sequence based upon
observed learner behavior which based
on speech-processing complexity,
rather than the accuracy with which
learners produce certain target-
language structures.
 CONCLUSION
 Both qualitative and quantitative
research has a role to play in enhancing
our understanding of SLA.
 SLA began their quest for an
understanding of the “natural” SLA
process in hopes that language learning
would be enhanced when language
teaching harmonized with it.
 We raised the question of whether any data
collected foe research purposes could be said
to be truly “natural”, and we submitted that
well-designed instruments could make
production, intuitional and effective data
collection more efficient.
 Finally, we dealt with the nettlesome problem
of language proficiency. We pointed out the
value in having the means to study structures
as they are developing.