Development of Learner Language

Dr. Ahmet Remzi Uluşan

1
 Development of Learner Language

(In second language acquisition) the linguistic

Interlanguage system characterizing the output of nonnative
speaker at a stage prior to full acquisition of
the target language.

beginning full
acquisition
Interlanguage
 SLA scholars who investigate learner language seek to explain:

L2 competence L2 development

The nature of the mental The processes and

representations comprising the mechanisms by which those
internal grammar of learners representations and the
ability to use them change
over time

The focus is typically on grammar, and

more narrowly on morphology and syntax.

? What about vocabulary, phonology,

pragmatics and discourse? ? ?
? ?
?
 Interlanguages

Interlanguage the language system that each learner

constructs at any given point in development.

…he falls a It [a wall] was

piece of note falled down in order
she…runned into dough by to get a bigger
away mistake green house

Japanese Spanish
Korean
What kinds of mental representation of English past tense and causative
verbs did these Japanese, Korean and Spanish learners hold when they
produced these solutions?

Most certainly, they did

not pick them up from And, nothing in Japanese,
their surrounding input Korean or Spanish would
(e.g. textbooks or L1 necessarily explain these
English friends). innovations.
 This illustrates
two important L2 learners end up building mental
generalizations about representations that are:
interlanguage.
different from what also different from
the target input in the grammar
their surrounding representations
environment (be it the available in their
classroom or the wider first language
society) looks like

I’m going
to fall this
There is a third on her
generalization about
interlanguage. Many of
the same developmental
solutions are attested in
the speech of young Young children are fond of
children who are learning overextending causation to
their mother tongue. intransitive verbs in their early L1
Production.
If interlanguage solutions are often shared by first and second
language acquirers, and if neither the target input nor the L1
influence can entirely explain them, then what can?
 COGNITIVIST EXPLANATIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT
OF LEARNER LANGUAGE

He offered a list of 40
Children are guided by
maxims that described
Slobin (1973) universal Operating Principles
what children seemed to
in their processing of the
‘look for’ in the input
input for learning.
data in order to learn
the L1 grammar.

‘Pay Attention to the End of Words’ (which helps explain why children
learn suffixes earlier than prefixes in words)
‘Avoid Exceptions’ (which is consistent with many overregularization
phenomena in L1 and L2 acquisition).

His One to One Principle, for example, has met with ample support in the
L2.

If you have something to say, assume that there is one

way, and only one way, to say it. Indeed in L1 acquisition,
milk / nice
for example, children do start off one expression to carry
of one function.
Bill VanPatten’s (2002)
compiled psycholinguistic principles
Input Processing theory

(a) learners will (b) they will also process (c) they will
process content lexical encodings before interpret
words before synonymous grammatical first nouns in
anything else (a encodings (yesterday sentences as
strategy we exploit before –ed) as well as subjects (the
naturally when we semantic or non- eraser hits the
compose telegrams redundant encodings cat, ‘eraser =
or read newspaper before formal or doer’)
headlines); redundant ones (the
pronoun he before the
third person singular
marking –s in he works
here);
 FORMULA-BASED LEARNING
Five 6-year-old Mexican children whose
Lily Wong Fillmore (1979)
families had just immigrated to California
for farm work

Formula-based learning
These bits and pieces of language are
refers to a learner's
used in an unanalyzed fashion at first:
process using of memorized
Wait a minute, You know what?, Knock
chunks of language
it off, It’s time to clean up, No fair!,
(formulas) as he or she
Gotcha.
learns a language.

Then the learner

usually breaks down
these formulas and
learns to use their
meaningful parts
effectively.
 3 stages in formula-based learning

First, the learner

learns a meaningful Next, she develops (by
formula: "How do hearing the formula
you do dese". repeated in different
contexts) low-scope
patterns, which enable
her to use the formula
more broadly: "How do
you do dese in English".
Finally, the learner
develops construction
or schema from the
formula, in which she
starts to appreciate
the structure of the
formula and is able to
extract meaning from
its parts: "How do
you make the
flower?"

A learner's formulas do not disappear

after the learner learns to analyze them.
The learner just knows how to use them
more effectively. 
 FOUR INTERLANGUAGE PROCESSES

With the help of learners’ internal knowledge systems

memory of formulas continually engage in processes of building,
and experience- revising, expanding and refining L2
based induction of representations, as the new grammar
abstract develops.
generalizations

How?

through

simplification overgeneralization restructuring U-shaped behavior

 1 FOUR INTERLANGUAGE PROCESSES

Simplification reflects a process that is called upon when messages

must be conveyed with little language.

very common at very early stages of L2

development and among naturalistic
learners

Though there are 8 forms of

Ken-ga utat- Booru-ga oti-
articles, he uses only two of
te i-ru (Ken is te i-ru (The
them. la (‘the’ in feminine
singing) ball has
singular form) and, un (‘a’ in
fallen)
masculine singular form)

te i-ru = both L2 Japanese

progressive learners at first
and use it to express
resultative) progressive
meaning only.

L2 Japanese Learner L2 Spanish Learner

2 FOUR INTERLANGUAGE PROCESSES

Overgeneralization is the application of a form or rule not only to

contexts where it applies, but also to other contexts where it does not
apply.

For example, learners begin using –ing

particularly well from very early on, but they also
documented with
morphology
overgeneralize it to many non-target-
like contexts, sometimes for
substantially long periods.

Remember Wes

I don’t know Also remember that

so yesterday
why people Wes learned English
I didn’t
always talking naturalistically
painting
me
2 FOUR INTERLANGUAGE PROCESSES

In instructional contexts, too, classroom students have been seen to

overgeneralize –ing frequently, even during the same period when they may
not provide it in other required contexts.

L1 Spanish learners of
English

I was study
I like to studying languages all
English last year
2 FOUR INTERLANGUAGE PROCESSES

Overgeneralization can be
The overapplication of –ed to
apparently random, or it can
irregular verbs
be systematic.

After a certain level of

development, learners have
Do not always interpret at least partially figured
overgeneralization out some regularity.
negatively.

After systematically
overgeneralizing, the
learning task is to retreat
from the overgeneralization
and to adjust the application
of the form or rule to
increasingly more relevant
contexts.
3 FOUR INTERLANGUAGE PROCESSES

Restructuring is the process of self-reorganization of grammar

knowledge representations.

Existing knowledge Or, a new organization may be

schemata may be quite imposed on already stored
radically modified, knowledge structures

so as to

accommodate smaller-
scale knowledge
changes that may have
occurred previously.

So, restructuring involves knowledge

changes that can be large or small, but
abrupt or gradual, but always
qualitative and related to Progress ≠ Increased accuracy
development or progress.
4 FOUR INTERLANGUAGE PROCESSES

U-shaped behaviour is the appearance of correct, or nativelike, forms at

an early stage of development which then undergo a process of attrition,
only to be reestablished at a later stage.

The linguistic products of

However, the underlying
the final phase cannot be
representations at the two
distinguished from those
times are qualitatively
of the first phase, as
different.
both are seemingly error-
free.

In the first phase, accuracy is purely

Remember the Dutch
learners of English.
breken / break
Typical u-shape behavior
coincidental, because it lacks the full
representation of target-like functions
and meanings that underlies the final
phase.
 HOW DO INTERLANGUAGE PROCESSES WORK?
GE’S CASE…

Huebner (1983)
a naturalistic learner
of English in his early
twenties who also
spoke Hmong as an L1
and Lao as an additional
language.

How did he acquire the

English article system?
These languages do not
have articles
 Ge’s development of the definite English article underwent several
restructuring phases.

Initially, he mostly marked nouns either with no articles or with da (his

rendition of the), to encode the meaning of “assumed known to hearer”
(which only partly overlaps with the notion of definiteness.”

one-form-one meaning purpose

chainis tertii-tertii
fai. bat jaepanii isa gow howm, isa plei
twentii eit da gerl

[literally: Chinese thirty,

thirty-five, but Japanese is [literally: go home, is play
twenty-eight] the girl]
[The Chinese man is thirty- [When we went home, we
five, but the Japanese is would visit with the girls]
twenty-eight]

The internal grammar representation at this poing may have simply been a
unique rule that could be expressed as “in English, nouns must be marked as
-/+ ‘assumed known to hearer’ with da.” (Remember that he had no
notion of articles before learning English.)
 After a month and a half this representation was destabilized, and Ge
began using da to mark between 80-90 percent of all noun contexts he
produced.

Huebner called this extremely pervasive overgeneralization “flooding”.

It may have been motivated by a

This interlanguage
restructured rule like “nouns must
solution may have or always be marked by an article in
been random
English”

In fact, this new rule can be

Be that as it may, the
considered a better (albeit
flooding of da to a majority
overly general) approximation
of contexts naturally
to the target rule which says
resulted in much higher
“all nouns must be marked by a
levels of non-targetlike use
three-way choice: zero article
of the definite article (the
/ the / a.”
u-shaped behavior).
 Five months later, Ge started not to use da in first-mention contexts (as in
a woman was walking down the street)

And shortly before the seventh month da began to retreat from even more
non-targetlike contexts. (reached stable tagetlike 80-90 percent levels)

So what?

Ge’s development of the Or, as Kellerman (1985) put it,

article da (the) shows that learners must go “beyond
an item sometimes has to success” and restructure in
get worse before it can what may appear to be a
get better in language non-targetlike direction,
development. before they can refine their
representations of the L2.
 FOSSILIZATION

was coined by Selinker (1972)

‘Permanent lack of mastery of a target language (TL)

despite continuous exposure to the TL input, adequate
motivation to improve, and sufficient opportunity for
practice’
Re m e m b e r Schumann (1976)

A 33-year-old immigrant worker from

Costa Rica

Unable to move beyond basic English

after almost a year and a half in Boston,
and even after he was provided with
some individualized instruction.

Alberto
-ing low
-ed zero
questions third stage
negation pre-verbal first stage

Seven months of individualized instruction bu Schumann himself.

Result: no change in negation level. (still 20 percent accuracy)
 Not all learners Not all fossilization occurs Lardiere (2007)
who allegedly at only initial stages of
fossilize are development. It may be
naturalistic. seen among very advanced
learners.

 an L1 speaker of Hokkien and Mandarin

 moved to the United States at age 22
 was 31 years old when Lardiere first interviewed her
 about nine years later, at age 40, she was interviewed again,
 and once again two months later

Patty

Over two decades of being surrounded by
English in graduate school and later in her
workplace, Patty developed advanced
English abilities. (e.g. very high levels of
accurate article usage despite this being an
area of great difficulty for many L2 users
from no-article language backgrounds) (as
Mandarin and Hokkien are).
But after two decades, Patty
continued to supply two of the
morphemes at extremely low
rates: about 35 per cent for
regular past –ed and about five
per cent for third person singular
–s.
 Objections to the notion of fossilization

Complete and permanent cessation of learning cannot be conclusively

1 demonstrated unless learners are followed over their lifetime, or at

least over a very long period of time.

2 The studies rarely document in depth whether the so-called fossilized

learners enjoyed truly optimal learning conditions, including:

(a) sufficiently rich (b) positive (c) the aid of (high-

opportunities for attitudes towards quality) instruction.
exposure and the target language
practice and society
 Even if it could be demonstrated that fossilization exists, there is no
3 consensus on the reasons behind it.

offered negative attitudes towards the

Schumann (1976)
target language and culture as the culprit.

Han, Lardiere, and proposed that fossilization is caused by a

also Sorace subtle ceiling that the L1 imposes on L2
(1993) development for even the most advanced
learners.

suggested that sensitivity to the input (or

Long (2003) lack thereof) may be the best explanation
for fossilization in general.

stipulated that it is all of these causes in

Selinker and various combination that can lead
Lakshmanan (1992) to fossilization.
 Generally accepted view on fossilization

Under this perspective,

fossilization ultimately
Fossilization is an means that L2 grammars
inevitable universal cannot reach an
characteristic of isomorphic state with
all L2 learning. the grammars of native
speakers.

All learners are expected

to fossilize. Some do
sooner and others do
later.
INSTRUCTION, DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNER READINESS

Pienemann (1984, 1989)

the Teachability Hypothesis learner readiness

Teachers can only hope

to teach successfully
what learners are
developmentally
ready to learn.

Language teachers should

carefully consider what
their students are
developmentally ready to
learn.
 For some developmental
The principle of learner
areas, such as sequences
readiness should not be
for word order and tense
followed slavishly, because
and aspect morphology,
not all interlanguage
learners appear
systematicity presents
psycholinguistically unable
equal challenges for
to skip stages.
instruction.

But for other areas of the

grammar, instruction above
the cutting edge of a given
interlanguage may
accelerate development.
 ADVANTAGES OF GRAMMAR ACCURACY AND RATE
INSTRUCTION OF LEARNING

Instructed learners progress at a

The accumulated evidence
clearly shows accuracy and rate
advantages for instruction.
faster rate, they are likely to
develop more elaborate language
repertoires and they typically
become more accurate than
uninstructed learners.

While many naturalistic L2 German learners may not reach the particle
separation stage (e.g. He looked the answer up) even after several
years of living in the L2 environment (Meisel et al., 1981), in the foreign
language classroom most students reach that stage by the end of the
second semester.
 Pavesi (1986)

relativization

Only about 25 per cent of 38

whereas the same stage had been
naturalistic learners with six
reached by about 40 per cent of 48 high
years on average of living in the
school students in Italy with an average
L2 environment were capable of
of only four years of foreign language
producing object of preposition
instruction.
relative clauses in English