The Role of the Native Language

Introduction

• The role of the native language has had a rocky history during the course of second language acquisition
research.
• This subfield of SLA has come to be known as language transfer
• Much of the history of this central concept has been tied in with the varying theoretical perspectives on SLA
• It has always been assumed that in a second language learning situation, learners rely extensively on their
native language. Lado stated this clearly:
• individuals tend to transfer the forms and meanings, and the distribution of forms and meanings of their
native language and culture to the foreign language and culture—both productively when attempting to speak
the language and to act in the culture, and receptively when attempting to grasp and understand the language
and the culture as practiced by natives.
 Cont.

• Lado’s work based on the need to produce native language-based materials.

• To produce these materials , it was necessary to do a contrastive analysis of the native language and the
target language.
• To understand why language transfer was accepted as the mainstream view of language learning, it is
necessary to understand the psychological and linguistic thinking.
Behaviorism

• Early research in language learning was dependent on the dominant linguistic and psychological
paradigms.
Linguistic background

Leonard Bloomfield: His major work, Language (1933) is regarded as the classic text of structural
linguistics, also called structuralism and provides the most elaborate description of the behaviorist
position with regard to language.

Typical behaviorist position : language is speech rather than writing

Justification for this position :
1. Children without cognitive impairment learn to speak before they learn to speak
2. Many societies have no written language
Cont.

• Within the behaviorist framework speaking consists of mimicking and analogizing

 Basic to this view is the concept of habits : we establish a set of habits as children and continue our
linguistic growth by analogizing from what we already know or by mimicking the speech of others.
 What makes us talk and carry conversation ? Consider the following :
 Suppose that Jack and Jill are walking down a lane. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple in a tree. She
makes a sound with her larynx, tongue and lips. Jack vaults the fence, climbs the tree, takes the
apple, brings it to Jill and places it in her hand. Jill eats the apple. (Bloomfield, 1933, pp. 22–23)
Linguistic background

• Bloomfield divides a situation like this into three parts:

1. Practical events before the act of speech (e.g., hungry feeling, sight of apple).
2. Speech event (making sound with larynx, tongue, and lips).
3. Hearer’s response(Jack’s leaping over the fence, fetching the apple, placing it in Jill’s hand).
 in this view, speech is the practical reaction (response) to some stimulus.
 Cont.

• late Bloomfieldian description of how language acquisition takes place.

1. Babbling
2. a pairing of this stimulus with the response of a native speaker
3. Bloomfield assumes that stimulus and response explain why the mother would say doll in the first
place.
4. the absence of the stimulus somehow creates another stimulus which generates the same response.
5. In accordance with behaviorist theory, Bloomfield posits that correct performance yields better results
Psychological background

• The terminology used in a language-learning setting and the associated concepts come from the
literature on the psychology of learning. The leading psychological school of thought of the time
was behaviorism. One of the key concepts in behaviorist theory was the notion of transfer.
• how fast and how well you learn something after having learned something else?
• Some examples :
From a physical perspective : tennis
Cont.

• if speakers of a particular language (in this case, Italian) form questions by saying:
• Mangia bene il bambino?(eats well the baby)
• “Does the baby eat well?”
• then those same (Italian) speakers learning English would be expected to say : Eats well the baby?
when asking a question in English
• A behaviorist notion underlying this expectation is that of habits and cumulative learning.
Cont.

• According to behaviorist learning theory:

• Learning is a cumulative process. The more knowledge and skills an individual acquires, the more
likely it becomes that his new learning will be shaped by his past experiences and activities. An
adult rarely, if ever, learns anything completely new; however unfamiliar the task that confronts
him, the information and habits he has built up in the past will be his point of departure. Thus
transfer of training from old to new situations is part and parcel of most, if not all, learning. In this
sense the study of transfer is coextensive with the investigation of learning.
 Psychological background

• positive transfer (also known as facilitation) and negative transfer (also known as
interference).
With regard to interference, there are two types noted in the literature:
(a) retroactive inhibition—where learning acts back on previously learned material, causing
someone to forget (language loss)—and (b) proactive inhibition—where a series of responses
already learned tends to appear in situations where a new set is required.
 Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis

• a way of comparing languages in order to determine potential errors for the ultimate purpose of isolating
what needs to be learned and what does not need to be learned in a second-language-learning situation.
• As Lado detailed, one does a structure-by-structure comparison of the sound system, morphological system,
syntactic system, and even the cultural system of two languages for the purpose of discovering similarities
and differences.
• The ultimate goal is to predict areas that will be either easy or difficult for learners.
Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis

1. Learning is habit-formation.
2. L1 causes most errors in the L2.
3. Compare and contrast L1 and L2.
4. Bigger differences mean more errors.
5. Learn differences, not similarities.
6. Difficulty is caused by difference.
Strong and weak version of CAH

• two positions that developed with regard to the CAH framework: strong
versus weak view.
• Strong view : one could make predictions about learning and hence about
the success of language-teaching materials based on a comparison
between two languages.
• weak version: starts with an analysis of learners’ recurring errors. In other
words, it begins with what learners do and then attempts to account for
those errors on the basis of NL–TL differences.
 Criticism
• . in its strongest formulation, the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis claimed that all the errors made in
learning the L2 could be attributed to 'interference' by the L1. However, this claim could not be sustained
by empirical evidence that was accumulated in the mid- and late 1970s.
• It was soon pointed out that many errors predicted by Contrastive Analysis were not observed in
learners' language. Even, some uniform errors were made by learners irrespective of their L1. It thus
became clear that Contrastive Analysis could not predict all learning difficulties, but was certainly useful
in the retrospective explanation of errors
hierarchy of difficulty
• Several attempts were made to formalize the prediction stage of contrastive analysis to avoid the
subjectivity involved in CA. One of the best known was a hierarchy of difficulty (Stockwell,
Bowen, and Martin 1965) by means of which it was possible to make a prediction of the relative
difficulty of a given aspect of the second language. The first such hierarchy was devised for
English and Spanish, but it was claimed to be universally applicable.
 Hierarchy of difficulty

• Differentiation: the native language has one form, whereas the target language has two.
‫او‬: he/she
• New category: An entirely new item needs to be learned in L2 because of little or no
similarity to the native language item.
• Absent category: an item in NL is absent in TL; the learner must avoid (forget) the item.
• Coalescing:two items in NL become coalesced (i.e. merge) into essentially one in TL;
learners need to learn to overlook a distinction they are used to. ‫شما‬/‫تو‬: you
• Correspondence: no difference or contrast is present between the two languages; the
learner can simply transfer (positively) a sound, structure, or lexical item from NL to TL
 Error analysis

• It is a type of linguistic analysis that focuses on the errors learners make.

• A sound way to study learner language is to investigate the errors learners commit during their language
learning and use.
• Unlike CA which was solely concerned with interference , error analysis concerns both intralingual
errors and interlingual errors.
• It also accounts for haw these errors have been commitet and the strategies involved in producing
language leading to such errors.
Cont.
• Mistake and error:
• Mistake : slips of the tongue , can be self-corrected.
• Error : systematic
 Cont.
• There are a number of steps taken in conducting an error analysis.
1. Collect data. Although this is typically done with written data, oral data can also serve as a base.
2. Identify errors. What is the error (e.g., incorrect sequence of tenses, wrong verb form, singular
verb form with plural subject)?
3. Classify errors. Is it an error of agreement? Is it an error in irregular verbs?
4. Quantify errors. How many errors of agreement occur? How many irregular verb form errors
occur?
5. Analyze source. See later discussion.
6. Remediate. Based on the kind and frequency of an error type, pedagogical intervention is carried
out.
Cont.
• Two main error types within an error analysis framework :intralingual and
interlingual .
Thank you