As you continue to read this book, you may do well to pay increasing attention to your growing stockpile of language learning/teaching principles that together are forming a composite approach to language learning and teaching. Consider the pedagogical implications and classroom applications of every finding, every issue, every conclusion, and every generalization. In so doing your overall approach will not only be more enlightened but more readily applicable to classroom practice.
[Note: (I) individual work; (G) group or pair work; (C) whole-class discussion.]
1. (G)The class should be divided into groups of five or six people per group. Each group is assigned a country; countries should be as widely varying as possible, but at least one of the countries should be geographically close to the country you are now in. First, each group should be warned to suspend their usual tact and diplomacy for the sake of making this activity more enlightening. The task is for each group to brainstorm stereotypes for the people of their assigned country. The stereotypes can be negative and demeaning and/or positive and complimentary.
2. (C) Groups in item 1 now write their list of stereotypes on the black board; each group reports on (a) any difficulties they had in agreeing on stereotypes, (b) what the sources of these stereotypes are, (c) any guilty feelings about some of the items on the list and the reasons for the guilt, and (d) comments on any of the other lists. The ultimate objective is to get stereotypes out in the open, discuss their origins, and become sensitive to how oversimplified and demeaning certain stereotypes can be.
3. (C) Anyone in the class who has lived for a year or more in another country (and another language) might share with the class the extent to which he or she experienced any or all of the stages of culture acquisition discussed in this chapter. Were the stages easily identifiable? Was there an optimal period for language breakthrough?
4. (I) Look again at Hofstede's categories: collectivism/individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity/femininity. Try to find one example of each in your own past experiences in language classrooms (or in any other classroom). What did the teacher do? Was it effective in bridging any gaps? If not, how could you have made a more effective bridge?
5. (G) In considering so-called "world Englishes," where do you draw the line in recognizing the "legitimacy" of a variety of English? If Indian English, for example, is a legitimate variety of English, is "Singlish" (English in Singapore) in the same category? What about Japanese English ("Japlish")? With a partner, think of other examples and try to arrive at a conclusion.
6. (C) Why is language learning and teaching a political issue? In countries with which you are familiar, discuss in class the extent to which government dictates language policies either in education in particular or in the country in general.
7. (G) In groups of three to five, review Phillipson's (1992) contention that English teaching efforts around the world can be viewed as fostering linguistic imperialism. Do you agree? Provide examples and counterexamples to illustrate your answer. Report your findings back to the whole class.
8. (C) If you are familiar with the "English only" debates in the US or with similar issues in another country, share with others your perceptions of how special interest groups further their cause in their attempts to influence voting.
9. (C) In foreign languages represented in the class, find examples that support the contention that language (specific vocabulary items, per haps) seems to shape the way the speaker of a language views the world. On the other hand, in what way does the Whorfian hypothesis present yet another chicken-or-egg issue?
Morgan, Carol. 1993- Attitude change and foreign language culture learning.
Language Teaching 26:63-75.
Dirven, Rene and Piitz, Martin. 1993. Intercultural communication.
Language Teaching 26:144-156.
Both of these summary surveys offer overviews of research on culture learning and on intercultural communication.
Hofstede, Geert. 1986. Cultural differences in teaching and learning. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 10: 301-320.
Hofstede's article covers the perspectives of fifty different countries on collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity. It might be an interesting stimulus to conducting some of your own further research.
Kohls, Robert. 1984. Survival Kit for Overseas Living. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.
This handy manual provides a good practical set of culture learning techniques especially applicable to those traveling outside their own country.
Dresser, Norine. 1996. Multicultural Manners: New Rules of Etiquette for a Changing Society. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Dresser's book is written for the lay audience and humorously discusses a multitude of cross-cultural rules of etiquette, ranging from body language to colors, food, gifts, religion, holidays, and health practices.
Scollon, Ron and Scollon, Suzanne Wong. 1995. Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
The authors provide a more technical read here on the topic of discourse patterns across cultures.
Fantini, Alvino E. 1997. New Ways of Teaching Culture. Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.
A nice collection of practical classroom activities, all categorized into different types and coded for appropriate levels of proficiency, is provided in this volume in TESOL's "New Ways" series of innovative classroom techniques.
Tollefson, James. 1995. Power and Inequality in Language Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A number of sensitive political issues are covered in this very informative anthology. Topics range from power issues in classrooms all the way up to societal implications.
[Note: See pages 18 and 19 of Chapter 1 for general guidelines for writing a journal on a previous or concurrent language learning experience.]
-In your journal, describe any cross-cultural living experiences you have had, even just a brief visit in another country. Describe any feelings of euphoria, uneasiness or stress, and a sense of recovery if you felt such. How did those feeling mesh with any language learning processes?
-Think of one or two languages you're familiar with or you've tried to learn. How do you feel about the people of the culture of that language! Any mixed feelings?
-Look at item 4 on page 203 and write about an example of one or more of Hofstede's categories in your own current or past experiences in language classrooms.
-Do you personally think the spread of English in the colonial era had imperialistic overtones? How can you as an English teacher in this new millennium avoid such cultural imperialism?
-Make a list of words, phrases, or language rules in your foreign language that are good examples of the Whorfian hypothesis. Take two or three of those and write about whether or not you think the language itself shapes the way speakers of that language think or feel.
CHAPTER 8
CROSS – LINGUISTIC INFLUENCED AND LEARNER LANGUAGE
Up to this point in the treatment of principles of second language acquisition, our focus has been on the psychology of language learning. Psychological principles of second language acquisition form the foundation stones for building a comprehensive understanding of the acquisition of the linguistic system. In this chapter we will take a different direction as we begin to examine the most salient component of second language acquisition: the language itself. This treatment will first consider, in historical progression, an era of preoccupation with studies of contrasts between the native language and the target language (contrastive analysis) and the effect of native on target language (now called "cross-linguistic influence"). We will then see how the era of contrastive analysis gave way to an era of error analysis, with its guiding concept of interlanguage, now also widely referred to as "learner language." Finally, questions about the effect of classroom instruction and error treatment will be addressed, with some practical implications for the language teacher.
In the middle of the twentieth century, one of the most popular pursuits for applied linguists was the study of two languages in contrast. Eventually the stockpile of comparative and contrastive data on a multitude of pairs of languages yielded what commonly came to be known as the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (САН). Deeply rooted in the behaviorist and structuralist approaches of the day, the САН claimed that the principal barrier to second language acquisition is the interference of the first language system with the second language system, and that a scientific, structural analysis of the two languages in question would yield a taxonomy of linguistic contrasts between them which in turn would enable the linguist to predict the difficulties a learner would encounter.
It was at that time considered feasible that the tools of structural linguistics, such as Fries s (1952) slot-filler grammar, would enable a linguist to accurately describe the two languages in question, and to match those two descriptions against each other to determine valid contrasts, or differences, between them. Behaviorism contributed to the notion that human behavior is the sum of its smallest parts and components, and therefore that language learning could be described as the acquisition of all of those discrete units. Moreover, human learning theories highlighted interfering elements of learning, concluding that where no interference could be predicted, no difficulty would be experienced since one could transfer positively all other items in a language. The logical conclusion from these various psychological and linguistic assumptions was that second language learning basically involved the overcoming of the differences between the two linguistic systems—the native and target languages.
Intuitively the САН has appeal in that we commonly observe in second language learners a plethora of errors attributable to the negative transfer of the native language to the target language. It is quite common, for example, to detect certain foreign accents and to be able to infer, from the speech of the learner alone, where the learner comes from. Native English speakers can easily identify the accents of English language learners from Germany, France, Spain, and Japan, for example. Such accents can even be represented in the written word. Consider Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad (1869: 111), in which the French-speaking guide introduces himself: "If ze zhentlemans will to me make ze grande honneur to me rattain in hees serveece, I shall show to him everysing zat is magnifique to look upon in ze beautiful Paree. I speaky ze Angleesh parfaitmaw”. Or William E. Callahan's Juan Castaniegos, a young Mexican in Afraid of the Dark, who says: "Help me to leave from thees place. But, Senor Capitan, me, I'ave do notheeng. Notheeng, Senor Capitan." These excerpts also capture the transfer of vocabulary and grammatical rules from the native language.
Some rather strong claims were made of the САН by language teaching experts and linguists. One of the strongest was made by Robert Lado (1957: vii) in the preface to Linguistics Across Cultures: "The plan of the book rests on the assumption that we can predict and describe the patterns that will cause difficulty in learning, and those that will not cause difficulty, by comparing systematically the language and the culture to be learned with the native language and culture of the student." Then, in the first chapter of the book, Lado continues: "in the comparison between native and foreign language lies the key to ease or difficulty in foreign language learning... .Those elements that are similar to [the learner's] native language will be simple for him and those elements that are different will be difficult" (pp. 1-2). An equally strong claim was made by Banathy, Trager, and Waddle (1966: 37): "The change that has to take place in the language behavior of a foreign language student can be equated with the differences between the structure of the student's native language and culture and that of the target language and culture."
Such claims were supported by what some researchers claimed to be an empirical method of prediction. A well-known model was offered by Stockwell, Bowen, and Martin (1965), who posited what they called a hierarchy of difficulty by which a teacher or linguist could make a prediction of the relative difficulty of a given aspect of the target language. For phonological systems in contrast, Stockwell and his associates suggested eight possible degrees of difficulty. These degrees were based upon the notions of transfer (positive, negative, and zero) and of optional and obligatory choices of certain phonemes in the two languages in contrast. Through a very careful, systematic analysis of the properties of the two languages in reference to the hierarchy of difficulty, applied linguists were able to derive a reasonably accurate inventory of phonological difficulties that a second language learner would encounter.
Stockwell and his associates also constructed a hierarchy of difficulty for grammatical structures of two languages in contrast. Their grammatical hierarchy included sixteen levels of difficulty, based on the same notions used to construct phonological criteria, with the added dimensions of "structural correspondence" and "functional/semantic correspondence." Clifford Prator (1967) captured the essence of this grammatical hierarchy in six categories of difficulty. Prator's hierarchy was applicable to both grammatical and phonological features of language. The six categories, in ascending order of difficulty, are listed below. Most of the examples are taken from English and Spanish (a native English speaker learning Spanish as a second language); a few examples illustrate other pairs of contrasting languages.
Level 0 — Transfer. No difference or contrast is present between the two languages. The learner can simply transfer (positively) a sound, structure, or lexical item from the native language to the target language. Examples: English and Spanish cardinal vowels, word order, and certain words (mortal, inteligente, arte, americanos).
Level 1 — Coalescence. Two items in the native language become coalesced into essentially one item in the target language. This requires that learners overlook a distinction they have grown accustomed to. Examples: English third-person possessives require gender distinction (his/her), and in Spanish they do not (su); an English speaker learning French must overlook the distinction between teach and learn, and use just the one word apprendre in French.
Level 2 — Underdifferentiation. An item in the native language is absent in the target language. The learner must avoid that item. Examples: English learners of Spanish must "forget" such items as English do as a tense carrier, possessive forms of wh- words (whose), or the use of some with mass nouns.
Level 3 — Reinterpretation. An item that exists in the native language is given a new shape or distribution. Example: an English speaker learning French must learn a new distribution for nasalized vowels.
Level 4 — Overdifferentiation. A new item entirely, bearing little if any similarity to the native language item, must be learned. Example: an English speaker learning Spanish must learn to include determiners in generalized nominals (Man is mortal/Elhombre es mortal), or, most commonly, to learn Spanish grammatical gender inherent in nouns.
Level 5 — Split. One item in the native language becomes two or more in the target language, requiring the learner to make a new distinction. Example: an English speaker learning Spanish must learn the distinction between ser and estar (to be), or the distinction between Spanish indicative and subjunctive moods.
Prator's reinterpretation, and Stockwell and his associates' original hierarchy of difficulty, were based on principles of human learning. The first, or "zero," degree of difficulty represents complete one-to-one correspondence and transfer, while the fifth degree of difficulty was the height of interference. Prator and Stockwell both claimed that their hierarchy could be applied to virtually any two languages and make it possible to predict second language learner difficulties in any language with afair degree of certainty and objectivity.