Sascha W. Felix

Language Acquisit ion and Language Learning

Today's situation in foreign language teaching is ma~ked by a feeling of increased confusion and disillusionment. None of the currently competing teaching methods and techniques has produced the type of results that its pro- moters had promised and that foreign language instructors had hoped for. Even the massive use of language labora- tories, audio-visual aids, and other technical equipment has failed to significantly improve students' foreign language abilities (Jung 1977). Although certain individ- ual teaching techniques appear to be more effective than others, the crucial dilemma is that we still lack an in- tegrated theory which will explain and predict differences in foreign language achievement, teaching success, and communicative abilities. Learning a foreign language is a highly complex process, but little is known about the process itself and its underlying regularities (Butzkamm 1976, Felix 1977c).

In his daily routine the classroom teacher is very much on his own. Neither psychologists nor linguists have provided the kind of theoretical framework necessary to help the teacher decide on the organization and presentation of foreign language material. It seems that the teacher has to rely primarily on his own personal experience.

The rather unpromising state of the art in foreign language teaching became also apparent in a feeling of disorientation that could be observed in the foreign language section of the 1977 School Radio Conference held in Munich under the sponsorship of the Internationales Zentralinstitut fHr das Jugend- und Bildungsfernsehen (International Center for Educational Television). Broadcasters, program planners, and administrators representing radio and television station~ in 19 European countries welcomed the opportunity to discuss problems and to propose solutions in the area of educational broadcasting, in particular foreign language instruction. Representatives of four different radio/TV stations (Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, and BBC London) showed impressive examples of well-devised foreign language programs. The use of sophisticated technical equipment and the broadcasters' profound experience in dealing with acoustic and visual stimuli will certainly not fail to activate the students' motivation to an extent that the ordinary classroom teacher can hardly ever compete with.

And yet, broadcasters, teachers, and textbook writers appear to struggle with essentially the same problems. How should

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foreign language material be presented in order to be effective? How does the student respond to different material? How can we make sure the student learns what we want him to learn? And most important, how does a stu- dent learn a foreign language in the first place? I.e., how does his linguistic competence develop and how does this development correlate with the didactic intentions of the instructor?

Participants of the Munich conference repeatedly voiced their belief that in the long run foreign language educa- tional programs cannot be successful unless these and similar basic questions are answered. At present, however, broadcasters felt themselves to be in very much the same situation as classroom teachers who, in the absence of more appropriate guidelines, follow their own individual experience and intuition.

Nevertheless, research on foreign language learning and teaching has been very intensive during the past years (see Wienold 1973, Chastain 1976). It has primarily fo- cused on the description and analysis of those situational variables that are believed to govern language learning in a classroom context. Motivation, aptitude, affectivity, teaching method and teachers' behavior are among those variables that have been studied in great detail (see Schumann 1975, Solmecke 1976). The rationale behind this type of research is that if we succeed in controlling the contextual variables of foreign language learning we will thereby be able to control the learning process itself. This assumption reflects the belief that learning a foreign language is a process totally dependent on and governed by external factors, a process that is - at least in principle - infinitely varied according to the contextual conditions under which it takes place.

Recent studies on second language acquisition (Dulay & Burt 1974, Bailey & Madden & Krashen 1974, Felix 1978) indicate, however, that the process of learning a second language is not totally a function of its contextual conditions; rather, there seem to be certain universal and invarlant regular- ities in the way every L2 learner acquires the target lan- guage. These findings have led to a new perspective in which the learner himself and his verbal behavior are the center of attention. The crucial questions are: how does a student process the linguistic structures he is exposed to? Are there any regularities in the learning process itself that reflect basic principles of man's ability to acquire language(s)?

The Kiel Project on Language Acquisition (Wode 1976a, Felix 1978) has attempted to look at problems of foreign lan- guage learning/teaching from a still broader perspective. The process of learning a foreign language is not seen as

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an isolated phenomenon, but rather studied in the total context of human language acquisition. This is done by systematically observing and comparing different types of language acquisition with the aim of determining differ- ences and commonalities in the way a learner's competence develops under different conditions. The rationale behind these comparative studies is that only man is able to acquire language(s); he can learn more than one, he can forget and relearn a language; and all this under very different conditions. In order to explain this unique ability and its underlying principles, it is necessary to contrast different types of language acquisition and to see how this ability functions under various circumstance~ To date, longitudinal observations have been made on:

a. L1 acquisition, i.e. how children learn their mother tongue. (Wode 1976b, 1977a)

b. naturalistic L2 acquisition, i.e. how children or adults acquire a second language in a natural environ- ment, that is without any type of formal classroom instruction. (Felix 1976, 1978; Wode 1976a)

c. foreign language teaching, i.e. how students learn a second language in a classroom situation under formal instruction. (Felix 1977b-c)

The striking result of these comparative observations was that despite the contextual diversity and despite certain individual variations there is a core of devel- opmental regularities common to all learners and all types of acquisition. In other words, the way in which a learner takes in, processes, stores, and thus acquires linguistic structures is not infinitely varied, but shows significant parallels across different types of language learning situations.

These findings suggest that the process of learning a language - either as L1 or as L2, either with or without formal instruction - follows certain invariant principles which are independent of contextual variables and which appear to underlie man's ability to acquire language.

At least for L1 acquisition there are some a priori theo- retical reasons suggesting that language learning cannot be a process totally dependent on and determined by exter- nal variables. If this was the case, then children from different cultural, ethnic, socio-economic, religious, etc. backgrounds should vary significantly in the command of their mother tongue. While it is true that people may differ in the way they make use of their language, no normal child has ever failed to acquire the phonology, morphology or syntax of his native language. No child is known to speak with a non-native accent or to be unable to form interrogative or negative sentences due to un- favorable conditions of learning. Consequently there must

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be something in man that guarantees successful acquisition of his mother tongue no matter what the external circum- stances may be like.

Although many, if not most, of the regularities and prin- ciples underlying first language acquisition are still unknown, there is some indication of what are the basic features of human language learning:

a. children do not acquire their mother tongue by imitating or reproducing the structures they hear as a whole. Rather, they systematically decompose target structures, i.e. they extract individual structural features of the target language and use these to form utterances which in terms of the adult language may be ungrammatical. This process of decomposing target structures is system- atic in the sense that all children appear to proceed in the same way. In the acquisition of negative structures, for example, chuldren consistently use no before they learn not; and during an early stage of development they regularly use no to negate sentences although the adult language re- quires not in these cases. Thus children will say no the sun shine in sense of the sun doesn't shine, simi- larly, German children acquire nein before nicht, French children non before pas (see Wode 1977a).

b. children pass through an ordered sequense of develop- mental stages. Adult structures are first decomposed and then, in an ordered sequence of stages, re-integrated towards the target model. The adult language is therefore acquired through a sequence of intermediate grammatical systems whose structural properties gradually approach those of the target language. This sequence is ordered in the sense that certain stages appear to occur with all children.

c. the crucial variable which determines the sequence and the structure of the intermediate grammatical systems is found in the formal linguistic devices a language uses to express a given content. Different formal struc- tures in the target language lead to different develop- mental sequences; similar formal structures result in similar developmental sequences.

It should be emphasized that the ungrammatical structures which occur in the course of development are not errors in the usual sense of the word. They are not accidental phe- nomena indicating insufficient knowledge of a rule, but they represent a developmentally necessary step towards the achievement of adult competence. The learner cannot do without them.

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A systematic comparison of first language acquisition and naturalistic second language acquisition showed that L2 learners by and large follow the same or similar basic principles as L1 learners (Felix 1978; Wode 1976a). This is not to say that L1 and naturalistic L2 acquisition are totally identical processes. In fact, there are many sig- nificant differences (Felix 1977a). However, both L1 and L2 acquisition are subject to ordered developmental se- quences. L2 learners - just as L1 learners - decompose target structures and re-integrate them by passing through various intermediate grammatical systems. Certain basic developmental stages and the structures that characterize them are, in fact, the same in first and second language acquisition.

The parallels that appear in the way children acquire a first and a second language again support the assumption that the process of learning a language is not merely a function of external and contextual variables. Rather, there must be certain general and universal principles of language acquisition which account for the striking parallels between L1 and L2 learning despite the extremely divergent conditions under which a first and a second language are most frequently learnt.

If there is indication that language learning, in general, follows certain universal principles, an appropriate test for this hypothesis would be to see how these principles operate - if at all - when a second language is learnt in a classroom situation under formal instruction. It has frequently been claimed that naturalistic language acquisi tion - in particular L1 acquisition - and foreign language teaching are two totally uncomparable processes due to their extremely different situational settings. Not only do L1 learners differ from L2 students in terms of age, motivation, cognitive maturity etc., but also the class- room situation is characterized by the fact that the learning process is guided and controlled by the teacher, while the L1 learner has to construct the grammar of the target language on his own without the help of formal instruction.

For a period of 8 months a class of 34 German high school students (10 and ii years old) was observed daily. These students were taught English 5 times a week,*each time for a period of 45 minutes. All sessions were recorded on tape with three observers in the back of the classroom taking notes on the situational context and the students' behavior (see Felix 1977b).

An analysis of the students' utterances showed that a sub- stantial number of grammatical errors had the same struc- tural properties as those utterance types which in L1 and naturalistic L2 acquisition mark certain developmental

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stages, i.e. intermediate grammatical systems. In fact, most of the structures typical of the early stages in naturalistic L2 acquisition were also found in the early productions of the high school students. This evidence lends support to the assumption that also under formal instruction a learner will process - at least in part - the linguistic data he is exposed to according to the same or similar principles that govern language acquisi- tion without formal instruction.

If, however, the process of learning a foreign language in a classroom situation follows general regularities which are not dependent on external factors, but which constitute universal properties of human language acqui- sition, then these regularities and principles have to be taken into consideration when foreign language courses, programs, textbooks, etc. are planned. Apparently, formal instruction cannot manipulate or control the learning process arbitrarily, but only within the relatively narrow limits set by the principles of human language acquisition. Not everything can be taught at any given time. Rather, the way in which the human mind processes unknown linguis- tic data is, to a large extent, predetermined. It would be reasonable to make use of the mechanisms of human lan- guage acquisition in the context of foreign language teaching. At least teaching methods and techniques of presenting foreign language material should not counteract those mechanisms. In this sense it is clearly insufficient to simply present linguistic structures and to have students practice these structures. I have shown elsewhere (Felix 1977b) that students learn certain structures with practi- cally no training at all, while other structures are con- sistently avoided or misreproduced in spite of very inten- sive training. The structures which students tended to avoid or to misreproduce were those that in naturalistic L2 acquisition are mastered comparatively late. This seems to indicate that practice alone is not the crucial factor which determines whether or not a given structure will be learnt successfully. Rather, the student has to have reached a certain developmental stage or standard before a given structure can reasonably be taught.

In this context the notion of 'error' needs to be re- considered. In naturalistic language acquisition structures which in terms of the target language are ungrammatical may have an important developmental function. They are not accidental, but represent a regular and necessary develop- mental step towards the final goal: adult competence. In foreign language teaching, however, errors are considered to be an indication of imperfect teaching and imperfect learning. Teachers attempt to have students produce only fully grammatical utterances. Errors are corrected as soon as they occur. If, however, errors serve a crucial develop- mental function in naturalistic language acquisition, and

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if grammatical errors that occur under formal instruction show structural properties similar to those that mark de- velopmental stages in naturalistic language acquisition, then we should examine whether or not certain types of errors are developmentally necessary in foreign language teaching as well. This does not mean that errors should never be corrected or that every type of error be toler- ated. Considering, however, the enormous - and after all futile - efforts that students have to make in order to produce only fully grammatical sentences, it might be legitimate to ask whether or not these efforts should rather be directed towards a more reasonable goal.

While practice alone apparently does not guarantee crea- tive mastery (Felix 1977d) of a given structure, it is clear that a foreign language can only be acquired if the learner is sufficiently exposed to the language. Exposure, here, should not be understood as mere listening or listening-comprehenslon; rather the student must consis- tently be given the opportunity to actively handle the new language, i.e. to actively use it in communication. This active use is difficult to achieve in the ordinary classroom situation where the teacher can concentrate on an individual student only for a fraction of the entire class period. Consequently the student will only rarely and irregularly participate in L2 communication; most of the time his participation will be limited to mere recep- tiveness.

In this dilemma, technical equipment, in particular the language laboratory, could be assigned a new function. Traditionally, the language laboratory was used to pro- vide structured stimuli that were meant to guide and control the student's attempts to practice a given lin- guistic pattern. There is some evidence (Jung 1977) that practicing with the language laboratory is not signifi- cantly more effective than practicing without the language laboratory. In the light of our findings on the relation- ship between naturalistic language acquisition and foreign language teaching this is not surprising. Practising in the sense of traditional exercises of repetition and pat- tern drill is not crucial for learning success. What the language laboratory can do, however, is to provide a high degree of linguistic exposure for each individual student. Suitable programs may be able to provide a communicative framework within which each student can actively handle the language during the entire class period. In this sense the language laboratory would not be used as a pattern drill instrument, but as a source of L2 communication.

Department of English University of Kiel

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REFERENCES

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Butzkamm, W., 1976. Grammatlk bilingual. Fragment einer Theorie des Grammatikerwerbs. In: Rall, D. et al. (eds.), Didaktik der Fachsprache. Bonn, 83-95.

Chastain, J., 1976. Developing second language skills: theory to practice. Chicago.

Dulay, H. & Burr, M., 1974. A new perspective On the crea- tive construction process. Language Learning 24, 253-278.

Felix, S., 1976. Wh-pronouns in first and second language acquisition. Linguistische Berichte 44, 52-64.

Felix, S., 1977a. Some differences between first and second language acquisition. To appear in: Snow, C. & Waterson, N. (eds.) The development of communica- tion. London.

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Felix, S., 1977d. Kreative und reproduktive Kompetenz Im Zweitsprachenerwerb. In: Hunfeld, H. (ed.) Neue Perspektiven der Fremdsprachendldaktik. Kronberg, 25-34.

Felix, S., 1978. Linguistische Untersuchungen zum natUr- lichen Zweitsprachenerwerb. MUnchen.

Jung, U., 1977. Kein Ausweg aus der Krise? Die Sprachlabor- arbeit im Lichte neuerer linguistischer und mediendldaktischer Erkenntnisse. In: Hunfeld, H. (ed.) Neue Perspektiven der Fremdsprachendidaktik. Kronberg, 185-198.

Schumann, J., 1975. Second language acquisition: the pidgini- zation hypothesis. Dissertation Harvard.

Solmecke, G., 1976. Motivation im Fremdsprachenunterricht. Paderborn.

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Wienold, G., 1973. Die Erlernbarkeit der S~rachen. Miinch~n.

Wode, H., 1976a. Developmental sequences in naturalistic L2 acquisition. Working Papers on Bilingualism 11, 1-31. Toronto.

Wode, H., 1976b. Some stages in the acquisition of questions by monolingual children. In: Raffler-Engel, W. (ed.) Child Language 1975, Word 27, 26U-310.

Wode, H., 1977a. Four early stages in the development of L| negation. Journal of Child Language 4, 87-102.

Wode, H., 1977b. The L2 acquisition of /r/. Phonetica 34, 200-217.