SHOULD WE TEACH CHILDREN SYNTAX?

SHOULD WE TEACH CHILDREN SYNTAX?

Heidi C. Dulay and Marina K Burt State University of New York at Albany

Two r e s e a r c h s tudies on child L2 acquisition were conducted sequentially over the last year . The f i r s t study used comparative e r r o r analysis to determine whether the actual L2 e r r o r s chil- d r e n make can be accounted f o r by “creat ive construction” o r “habi t formation.” The findings provided the impetus f o r the second study which compared the sequence of acquisition of cer- tain grammat ica l morphemes in three different groups of chil- d ren , using a cross-sect ional technique. The combined findings of the two studies suggest that, given a natural communication situation, children’s innate ability to organize s t ruc ture accounts in a major way f o r their acquisition of L2 syntax. Although we believe that a n L2 teacher should continue to diagnose children’s L2 speech, our findings suggest that we should leave the learning of syntax to the children and r e d i r e c t our teaching efforts. Prac- tical suggest ions are offered to help c r e a t e speech environments in the classroom that capitalize on the child’s natural language

learning processes .

INTRODUCTION

Research seldom does any practical favors for teachers in the sense that it does not usually provide teachers with short cuts. Individualized instruction, f o r example, whose value few of u s would doubt, requires more teaching t ime, machine time, and mater ia ls than ever before. Recommendations made by “exper t s” and re- s ea rche r s usually involve the teacher’s spending more t ime, more energy, and even working many hours af ter school in order to c rea te new learning environments for children in the classroom. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that we report some research findings in the a r e a of child second language syntax that suggest t he opposite: less teaching t ime and energy may result in better learning.

This suggestion emerges-perhaps tentatively, but nevertheless compellingly-from our comparison of the processes of first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition by children. In the last fifteen years of L1 research, the emphasis has shifted from a search f o r environmental fac tors such as reinforcement and frequency of st imulus-response associations, to a search for the innate ability of the human child to organize speech data. (See Brown 1973a for

245

246 LANGUAGE LEARNING, VOL. 23, NO. 2

a short and comprehensive review of the research.) While it is obvious that there must be differences between L2 and L1 acquisition because of differences in the conceptual reper toire , memory span, and previous language learning experience of L2 and L1 learners , the discovery in L1 research of the fundamental process of “crea t ive construction” of speech by the child cannot be ig- nored by the ser ious student of L2 acquisition. All of our research has focused on the following question: i s L2 acquisition by children characterized by the child’s gradual construction of his own linguistic rules, and if so, what consequences would this have fo r L2 instruct ion?

We have begun to answer that question in the area of syntax and have limited our investigations to five- to eight-year-old children. The f i r s t s tep in ou r investigation was the theoretical anal- ys i s which integrated the surprisingly smal l amount of existing empirical data on the speech of children acquiring a second language (Dulay and Burt 1972). This analysis a lso laid out the theoretical framework for our subsequent research. In the present paper we report on two empirical studies done sequentially over the last year.

The f i r s t study, which was reported a t the 1973 TESOL Con- vention in San Juan, was designed to provide systematic empirical data on the “ habit formation” vs. “ creative construction” nature of second language learning by children. The findings of that study led u s to investigate fur ther the creat ive construction account of L2 acquisition in a second study which asked, essentially, whether there is a natural sequence in t h e acquisition of cer ta in basic syntactic s t ruc tures ac ross children in diverse L2 learning environments.

THE FIRST STUDY: HABIT FORMATION VS. CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION

Rationale The first study was motivated pr imari ly by the conflict be-

tween ou r past ESL training (which we had put into pract ice during ou r teaching ca ree r s ) and what we were hearing f rom Chomsky and his colleagues a t M.I.T. and Brown and his colleagues a t Har- vard. The basis of our ESL teaching techniques was the habit formation account of L2 acquisition. That is , a second language i s learned by imitation, reinforcement of the cor rec t associations between verbal responses and contextual o r verbal st imuli , practice of cor rec t responses, and immediate correction by the teacher of incorrect responses. This is quite the opposite of the creative

SHOULD WE TEACH CHILDREN SYNTAX? 247

construction point of view in L1 acquisition, which attr ibutes to the child the mechanisms necessary to organize and generate the syntax of a language. During the learning process the child’s syntax differs f rom the commonly “ correc t” o r developed structures. However, the child himself gradually resolves the mismatch between h i s forms and the developed forms he hears , without any observable external intervention (see Cazden 1972).

We had no c l ea r evidence for e i ther theory of child L2 acquisition, because there were virtually no studies on how children acquired a second language (Dulay and Burt 1972). Furthermore, the pedagogical implications of each account are almost diametrically opposed. Thus, both as ESL teachers and as researchers , we designed a study that we hoped would provide f i rm direction fo r o u r subsequent work.

According to the habit formation theory, cer ta in kinds of e r r o r s are predicted in the speech of children learning a second language. These e r r o r s should appear wherever the child’s mother tongue and the L2 being acquired differ. They are believed to be the result of the child’s t ransferr ing the s t ructures of his L1 (his old habit) onto the s t ruc tures of the L2 (the new habit he is trying to acquire). Thus the e r r o r s a r e called “ interference” e r rors . The creat ive construction theory, however, predicts quite different kinds of e r ro r s . The child is “reconstructing” the new language in- dependently of his knowledge of the s t ructures of his f i r s t language. Thus, e r r o r s due to t ransfer of L1 s t ructures onto L2 s t ruc tures should not occur. Instead, the e r r o r types should be the resul t of the processing s t ra tegies the child uses to organize and produce the new language. These would be “developmental” e r r o r s s imi la r to those of children learning that language natively.

The differences in both se t s of predictions are relatively simple to identify. One only needs to look a t the types of e r r o r s made and see if they reflect s t ructure (see Stockwell, Bowen and Martin 1965, for a contrastive analysis of Spanish and English), o r if they a r e s imi la r to the developmental e r r o r s found in the published data of L1 researchers . (Brown 1973b, and Klima and Bellugi 1966, provide representative samples. )

One important distinction must be kept in mind when classifying these e r r o r types: e r r o r s must be unambiguously classifiable as interference o r not. For example, Spanish speaking children are often heard producing utterances such as:

He no eat I no wanna go

24 8 LANGUAGE LEARNING, VOL. 23, NO. 2

While i t is t rue that these reflect Spanish s t ructure (El no come, Yo no quiero ir) , these e r r o r s a r e also produced by children learning English as L1. Thus, they are ambiguous with respect to o u r question, since they support both accounts of L2 acquisition.

Procedure Natural speech was elicited from 145 Spanish-speaking five-

to eight-year-olds, and 388 unambiguous e r r o r s f rom that speech sample were tabulated for this study. The children were all learning English as a second language in three school districts-two in northern California and one in New York City. All of the children’s utterances were collected by their teachers using the Bilingual Syntax Measure (Burt, Dulay and Hernandez 1973).

The Bilingual Syntax Measure (BSM) is an instrument designed to measure young children’s acquisition of English and/or Spanish grammatical s t ructure in an L2 situation. The BSM consists of seven colored cartoon type pictures and a set of 33 questions in English and 33 in Spanish. The BSM has no “co r rec t ” o r “bes t” answers in t e r m s of the content of children’s responses. It only measures the degree of proficiency with which the child uses the s t ructures he offers in response to the questions. The questions are structured so that cer ta in s t ruc ture types will be almost un- avoidable in the child’s response. For example, pointing to a very fat cartoon character , the investigator asks , “Why is he so fa t?” Most children offer some form of “(because) (s)he eat(s) too much.’’ Thus, we have data on how the child forms simple finite c lauses (word order , gender, number and case for the pronoun, agreement for the verb, the form of the qualifier, etc.). However, less common responses such as “ H e not on Weightwatcher” a r e coded for the s t ruc tures the child offered. The aim of the BSM i s to elicit natural speech f rom children, not specific responses, so that we can get an indication of how proficient the child is, given the s t ruc tures he offers.

E r r o r analysis and findings We investigated e r r o r s in s ix elicited syntactic s t ructure types

which were different in Spanish and English. W e classified the e r r o r s into three types: a) developmental: those e r r o r s that a r e s imi la r to L1 acquisition e r r o r s ; b) intevference: those e r r o r s that reflect Spanish s t ructure; c ) unique: those e r r o r s that are neither “ developmental” nor “ interference,” but which appeared in our sample.

For example, fo r the question “Why do the baby birds want food?” the most common structure type used by the children is a


form of “ they’re hungry.” If a child says “they hungry,” the e r ro r (omission of the copula) would be classified as developmental, since it is also a form used by children acquiring English natively. If a child says “ they have hunger/hungry” the e r r o r (use of have for be) would be classified as an interference e r r o r since it directly reflects Spanish s t ructure (ellos tienen harnbre), and since i t i s not found in the data of children learning English as a f i rs t language. If a child says (‘they do hungry” it would be classified as unique, since the use of do for be neither reflects Spanish nor is it found in English L1 data.

Table 1 summar izes the s ix s t ructure types in our data that were relevant to the study. The two necessary conditions for this analysis were met: 1) there were instances of e r r o r s , and 2) the e r r o r s could be unambiguously classified as either interference o r developmental. Fo r example, for s t ructure 1 (NP-V- Pron), the habit formation theory would predict L1 interference: a native Spanish speaker should produce NP-Pron-V as in The dog i t a te / took/stole, etc. because that constituent o rde r holds in Spanish (E l periro se lo cornid); o r he may also add a reflexive marker which is obligatory in Spanish. On the other hand, the creative construction theory would predict developmental e r ro r s : the omission of the a r t ic le the, o r the omission o r misformation of the past tense as in ( the) dog eat/eated i t .

The final step in the analysis was the tabulation of e r r o r s in each category. The resul ts , summarized in Table 2, indicate that three pe r cent of the 388 e r r o r types fell into the interference category, and 85 p e r cent were developmental. The remaining 12 p e r cent were unique, and we leave their explanation to future research.

Implications of findings The resul ts of the f i r s t study show that most of the children’s

L2 syntax e r r o r s in English were of the type made only by children learning English natively. This suggests that children learning a second language are as creative as are their L1 counterparts. Their e r r o r s suggest that they also make use of universal language processing s t ra tegies described in L1 research. These s t ra tegies have been described for languages as diverse as English, Samoan, Japanese, Russian, Finnish, and several Mayan languages. They include the reliance upon the word o rde r of the language being learned to express semantic relations. For example, “Dog eat turkey” clear ly expresses an agent-action-object relation without the use of functors-i. e., the grammatical ( ( frills” required in the developed form (‘ the dog i s eating the turkey” (the tense i s c lear f rom the context). The omission of functors is soon replaced by

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SHOULD WE TEACH CHILDREN SYNTAX?

TABLE 2

Distribution of e w o m

Developmental Interference Unique

Structure 1 2 3 4 5 6

65 72

156 5 5

19

0 0

10 1 0 0

5 0

33 0 4 3

Total 332 (85%) 11 (3%) 45 (12%)

e r r o r s caused by (‘ over-generalizations,” that is, applying a regular of pervasive rule in the language to an exception, such as the plural form -s in foots (for fee t ) , the past -ed in eated (for a te ) , the possessive form in the reflexive pronoun hisself (for him s e Zf) .

One observable conclusion drawn f rom this study is that children’s L2 e r r o r s in syntax are s imi la r to those of children learning a f i r s t language. That is, they are characterized by the omission of functors and over-generalizations ra ther than by the incorrect u s e of L1 s t ruc tures in L2 speech. These facts are interesting pr imari ly because they support the hypothesis that children learning a second language use the same general language processing abili- ties which children use in learning their mother tongue. This means we have some evidence that the child’s cognitive input to the L2 situation is necessary to account for h i s acquisition of syntax. Comparative e r r o r analysis has thus provided the empirical support necessary to continue exploring the productivity of the creative construction process in predicting the form of children’s L2 speech. This conclusion provided the s tar t ing point for our second study.

THE SECOND STUDY: NATURAL SEQUENCE OF L2 STRUCTURE ACQUISITION

Rationale If we assume that children use common processing s t ra tegies

to learn a second language, what other evidence might there be (in addition to the e r r o r analysis described above) that reveals that “ commonness,” o r universality of process? Here again, L1 research gives u s a lead. In addition to the impressive finding


that children al l over the world c rea te the same types of syntactic rules to produce ear ly ut terances in their mother tongue, Brown (1973b) found that there is a common (“ invariant”) sequence of acquisition of a t least 14 “ functors”-the l i t t le function words that have a t best a minor role in conveying the meaning of a sentence: noun and verb inflections, ar t ic les , auxiliaries, copulas and prepo- sitions.1 These were acquired in the same order by children un- acquainted with each other and of different socioeconomic levels. A subsequent cross-sectional study (de Vil l iers 1972) corroborated that invariant sequence of acquisition.

This finding of L1 research motivated ou r next question: Is there a common sequence with which children acquiring English as a second language learn cer ta in s t ructures?

Before describing t h i s study and discussing its resul ts , a note regarding the specific orde r of acquisition must be made, because we would predict a different o rde r fo r L2 children f rom the order Brown found for h i s L1 children. After an exhaustive analysis of semantic and grammatical complexity of the functors, Brown con- cluded that “. . . the o rde r of acquisition is dependent upon rela- t ive complexity, grammatical and/or semantic” (Brown 1973b). In other words, neither grammatical nor semantic complexity alone could explain the acquisition o rde r in younger children one and one-half to four yea r s old. However, five- to eight-year-old chil- d ren such as those we studied are more sophisticated with respect to cognitive and conceptual development. In short , the older L2 learner need not struggle with the same kinds of semantic notions already acquired in earlier childhood.

Since the variable of “ semantic complexity” is absent for the elementary s t ruc tures we are dealing with in L2, we would not expect those s t ruc tures to be acquired in the same order as in L1. The framework fo r this study can thus be stated as follows: If the creat ive construction process is a major force in L2 acquisition, we hypothesize that, a s in L1, there should be a common sequence of acquisition of cer ta in syntactic s t ruc tures a c r o s s chil- d ren learning a second language. However, these s t ruc tures in L2 acquisition would be acquired in a different o rde r than that found in L1 acquisition.

P roc edu re In this study we again used natural speech of five- to eight-

year-old Spanish- speaking children learning English as L2, collected

1The 14 functors in Brown’s four-year longitudinal study were: present progressive, in, on, plural, past irregular, possessive, uricontractible copula, articles, past regular, third person regular, third person irregular, uncontractible auxiliary, contractible copula, and the contractible auxiliary.


by means of the Bilingual Syntax Measure. These data had been collected before ou r second study was conceived, in schools which had used the measure to assess children’s L2 development. W e decided to use those data to pilot our analysis techniques and as a preliminary test fo r ou r hypothesis. The speech corpus con- tained 8 of Brown’s original 14 functors, including those that were acquired a t the beginning, middle, and end of the L1 sequence. If one ranked Brown’s 14 functors f rom 1 to 14, the 8 in our study were those that ranked 1 (present progressive) , 4 (plural), 5 (past i r regular) , 6 (possessive), 8 (art icles), 10 (third person regular), 13 (contractible copula), and 14 (contractible auxiliary).

The sample consisted of 151 children: 95 Chicano children from Sacramento, California; 26 Mexican children studying in San Ysidro, California, a town five minutes away f rom Tijuana, Mexico, where the children lived; and 30 Puerto Rican children f rom the East Harlem dis t r ic t in New York. These three groups of children differ with respect to amount of exposure to English, as well as with respect to level of proficiency in English. Most of the East Harlem children had not lived in the States more than a year and were exposed to English in school through a “balanced bilingual program” where subject mat ter was taught through both Spanish and English, with no formal instruction in ESL. Of the three groups, the East Harlem children had the least exposure to English. The children in San Ysidro were exposed to English only in school, as they all lived in Tijuana and returned home every afternoon af ter school; however, English was the sole medium of instruction in the school. The Sacramento children had the most exposure to English. Most of the children were born in the U.S., and attended a “dual model” bilingual program (one English model and one Spanish model p e r class). School exposure to English included both subject mat ter instruction in English and ESL classes.

In summary, we had three groups of children who differed in several ways, including amount and type of exposure to English, although all were exposed to substantial amounts of natural communication in English. If there i s a universal sequence of acquisition of L2 s t ructures , this o rde r should be reflected ac ross a l l three groups of children. Thus for each group, we determined the degree of acquisition of each of the eight functors mentioned, by means of the analysis described below.

Functor analysis and findings Grammatical morphemes, o r functors, a r e required in almost

any verbal utterances consisting of more than one morpheme. For example, in the utterance (‘ she i s dancing” a mature native speaker

LANGUAGE LEARNING, VOL. 23, NO. 2

of English would never omit the functor -ing, because it is obligatory that -ing be attached to any verb in English when expressing a present progressive action. However, as the presence o r correct u se of functors contributes l i t t le to communication in English, one can communicate quite adequately without them (Burt and Kiparsky 1972). Children who are learning English as L2 do exactly that, much like children who learn English natively. When a child speaks a language he is sti l l learning, he will c rea te obligatory occasions for functors in h i s utterances, but he may not furnish the required forms. He may omit them, as in “ H e like hamburgers,” where the third person present indicative is missing, o r he may misform them, as in ‘( They do hungry,” where something was supplied for the copula, but it wasn’t quite the right “thing.”

Given the notion of “obligatory occasions,” one can use the natural utterances children offer, and at the same t ime precisely quantify the degree of functor acquisition.

One can s e t a n acquisition cr i ter ion not simply in t e r m s of output but in t e r m s of output-where required. Each obligatory context can be regarded as a kind of test i tem which the child passes by supplying the required morpheme o r fa i l s by supplying none o r one that i s not cor rec t . This performance m e a s u r e , the per- centage of morphemes supplied in obligatory contexts, should not be dependent on the topic of conversation o r the charac te r of the interaction. (Brown 1973b:255)

Thus, treating each obligatory occasion for a functor as a “ t e s t i tem,” we scored each i tem a s follows:

no functor supplied = 0 (she’s dance ) misformed functor supplied = 0.5 (she’s dances) cor rec t functor supplied = 1.0 (she’s dancing)

The degree to which a functor had been acquired in each of our three groups of children was computed by means of a ratio for each functor, where the denominator indicated the total number of obligatory occasions for that functor ac ross all children in the group, and the numerator was the sum of the scores obtained for each obligatory occasion.

This computational procedure was followed for each functor and for each group of children. The resu l t s appear in Figure 1. A s the figure indicates, the contours for the acquisition of o u r eight functors are s imi la r for each of the three groups, even though the degree of acquisition of those functors differs somewhat fo r each group. It is also c l ea r that the o rde r of acquisition of these


(N=95)

(N=26)

(N=30)

functors is different f rom that found in L 1 acquisition. 'The func- t o r s specified on the horizontal axis appear in the o rde r in which they were acquired in L1. If we charted out the L1 order , then, the line would be roughly diagonal, start ing a t the top left and ending in the lower right-hand corner.

It is important to point out that these contours should not be


the resul t of Spanish interference (even though all the children were Spanish-speaking), as the resu l t s of the first study show that only three p e r cent of the e r r o r s children made fell into the interference category.

Thus, at this point in our research, both of ou r hypotheses received support: 1) there does seem to be a common o rde r of acquisition for cer ta in s t ruc tures in L2 acquisition, a t least for our three groups of children, and 2) the o rde r is different f rom that found in L1 acquisition. Thus this pilot study supplies independent and additional evidence of the creat ive construction process in L2 acquisition.

THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

The f i r s t study indicates that most of the syntactic e r r o r s Spanish-speaking children make in English are the resul t of the developmental linguistic ru les children construct to generate the language, ra ther than the result of first language habits. (This finding is supported by studies on Japanese [ Milon 19721, Chinese [ Huang 19721 and Norwegian children [ Ravem 19701 learning Eng- l i s h as a second language.) The construction of those rules is said to be creat ive because no native speaker of the target language- whether peer , parent, o r teacher--models the kind of sentences produced regularly by children who a r e still learning the basic syntactic s t ruc tures of the language.

In the second study, the common sequence of acquisition of cer ta in grammatical morphemes by three groups of children in diverse English learning environments provides independent evidence that the s t ra tegies of second language acquisition by children a r e universal. Furthermore, t h i s common sequence indicates that the learning o rde r of these s t ruc tures is controlled by the child’s processing s t ra tegies , in the sense that he must be cognitively ( ( r eady” in o rde r to acquire any one of them.

To date, no one has found a way to accelerate the child’s pro- g r e s s through the s teps in the acquisition of syntax, however, work in this a r e a is just beginning. At this point, our knowledge of the language acquisition process te l ls u s that exposing the child to a natural communication situation is sufficient to activate h i s language learning processes. If we accept this, the next question arises: What are the crucial character is t ics of a natural communication situation for L2 learning?

Perhaps the most important character is t ic of a natural communication situation that is most often overlooked in language

SHOULD WE TEACH CHILDREN SYNTAX? 2 57

c lassrooms is that the attention of the speaker and hearer is on the ( ( message,” o r content, of the verbal exchange rather than on i t s form. Yet, most language teaching mater ia ls focus on the struc- tu res to be taught, often with the resul t that the message of the sentences taught, if there is one, is meaningless fo r both teachers and children. This may be because language teachers are supposed to teach language and not anything else , just as social studies teachers or science teachers are supposed to teach social studies o r science. Though this analogy sounds reasonable enough, the fallacy lies in comparing language, which is “form,’ ) to subject matter, which is (‘ content.” Thus to the extent that form replaces content, language c l a s ses are not natural communication situations.

Another important character is t ic of a natural communication situation that is conducive to language learning is the presence of c lear and concrete referents for the major meaning-bearing ele- ments of the verbal expressions. That i s , as much as possible, all the nouns, verbs and adjectives in the teacher’s utterances to the child should be at least visually accessible to the child as he hears the teacher speaking. In other words, the more props there are in the classroom that represent the objects used in the activity, the more easily the child will be able to infer the “message” from the “ form,” i.e,, the teacher’s actual speech. For example, elementary science kits are one of the best kinds of mater ia ls for L2 learning. A child who doesn’t understand all o r much of what the teacher is saying (form) will certainly understand and retain interest in what is going on before h i s eyes (message). And in the magical manner of language acquisition, the child will process and begin to produce the speech that he hears.

Thus, in answer to the question “Should we teach children syntax? ’’ the available research indicates, ( ( No.” Although we believe that an L2 teacher should continue to diagnose children’s L2 syntax, our findings suggest that we should leave the learning to the children and redirect our teaching efforts to other .aspects of language.

REFERENCES

Brown, R. 1973a. Development of the f i r s t language in the human species. American Psychologist February.

Brown, R. 1973b. A F i r s t Language. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press.

Bur t , M. K., H. C. Dulay and E . Herngndez Ch. 1973. Bilingual Syntax Measure (Restr ic ted Edition). New York: Harcour t B r a c e Jovanovich.

Bur t , M. K. and C. Kiparsky. 1972. The Gooficon: A Repair Manual for English. Rowley, Ma.: Newbury House.


Cazden, C. 1972. Two paradoxes in the acquisition of language structure and function. Paper presented a t a conference sponsored by the De- velopmental Sciences T r u s t , CIBA Foundation, London.

De Vil l iers , P. and J . de Vil l iers . 1972. A cross-sect ional study of the development of grammatical morphemes in child speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2.

Dulay, H. C. and M. K. Burt. 1972. Goofing: a n indicator of children’s second language learning s t ra tegies . Language Learning 22.235-52.

Huang, J. S. P. 1972. A Chinese child’s acquisition of English syntax. Unpublished M.A. thesis. University of California, Los Angeles.

Klima, E . and U. Bellugi. 1966. Syntactic regular i t ies i n the speech of children. In Lyons, J. and R. J. Wales (eds.) Psycholinguistic Papers Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Milon, J. 1972. A Japanese child l e a r n s English. Paper presented a t the TESOL Convention, San Francisco.

Ravem, R. 1970. The development of urh-questions in f i r s t and second language learners . Occasional P a p e r s , University of E s s e x , Language Cent re , Colchester.

Stockwell, R. P., J. D. Bowen and J. W. Martin. 1965. The Grammatical Structures of English and Spanish. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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SHOULD WE TEACH CHILDREN SYNTAX?