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Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
What is language and how can we investigate its acquisition by children or adults? What perspectives exist from which to view acquisition? What internal constraints and external factors shape acquisition? What are the properties of interlanguage systems? This comprehensive 31-chapter handbook is an authoritative survey of second language acquisition (SLA). Its multi-perspective synopsis on recent developments in SLA research provides significant contributions by established experts and widely recognized younger talent. It covers cutting edge and emerging areas of enquiry not treated elsewhere in a single handbook, including third language acquisition, electronic communication, incomplete first language acquisition, alphabetic literacy and SLA, affect and the brain, discourse and identity. Written to be accessible to newcomers as well as experienced scholars of SLA, the Handbook is organised into six thematic sections, each with an editor-written introduction.
- GenresLinguisticsLanguage
837 pages, Hardcover
First published January 17, 2013
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January 16, 2014
This substantial book, composed of 31 chapters averaging about 20 to 25 pages each, sets out to give a balanced overview of the whole field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). My impression is that it succeeds well; it has, at any rate, left me feeling that I understand it much better than I did when I started. I work actively in the related field of Computer Assisted Language Learning and am also very interested in learning languages myself, so I will hopefully find my new knowledge directly useful.
I thought I knew what SLA was about, but in fact I didn't. My naive belief was that SLA researchers studied methods for helping people learn a new language more effectively. This isn't completely off-target, but really they are occupied with a more fundamental problem. Nearly everyone learns their first language without conscious effort. By the time they are six or seven years old - sometimes earlier - they can pronounce all the sounds correctly, have a clear understanding of how the grammar works, and possess a large vocabulary. "Native-like use of a language", for most linguists, is synonymous with "perfect use of that language". But for second and subsequent languages, the pattern is quite different. Only a small minority of learners approach native-speaker competence, and the majority fall far short of it. Second language (L2) learners nearly always have a noticable accent, they make grammatical mistakes, and they don't know words they should. Why? I had never thought properly about how odd this is.
The central puzzle is interesting, but it seems to me that people are still a long way from being able to provide convincing answers. The book paints a picture of an academic discipline still in its infancy. There is disagreement about almost everything, even the question of whether second-language learners are actually capable of achieving native-level performance. The different chapters describe a variety of approaches, all of which intuitively feel like they at least have something to do with the problem. One neurologist looks at the way language acquisition interacts with fundamental brain functions; he argues that L2 learners need to feel sufficently relaxed and unthreatened for learning to happen. Another describes the remakably consistent EEG patterns triggered by exposure to ungrammatical sentences. Grammar is clearly an important thing in the brain - but how does it work? A couple of sociolinguists talk about societal power relationships and how they are mediated by language. It seems to be critical that the learner has some kind of positive image of the new persona they will acquire by gaining proficiency in the L2. Many people spin different kinds of linguistic theories.
The preliminary nature of much of the work is reflected in the methodology. Far too many studies seemed basically anecdotal in nature, and involved a handful of subjects - in some cases, just a single person. It is of course clear that it's difficult to track a large group of learners over an extended period and monitor their language use; but without doing this, how is the field ever going to make serious progress? There are a few aspects of language use where it's easy to collect large-scale statistics. One striking example was the chapter on vocabulary acquisition, where the author, among other things, compared rates of acquisition for Greek students learning English and British students learning French; the Greeks picked up three or four words per classroom-hour, the Brits only one. The chapter on age-related effects also gave a clear answer to the question of whether children learn language more effectively than adults (they do). Unfortunately, it's usually much harder to get good data.
Another thing I couldn't help remarking on was the attitude to Chomsky. Many chapters are organized around Chomskyan theories of "Universal Grammar" (UG): authors assume that humans are born with UG inside their brains, and that this drives language acquisition. It seems like a reasonable hypothesis, and the author who flatly denied the existence of any kind of UG came across as among the least convincing ones. On the other hand, the people offering detailed descriptions of the claimed structure of UG weren't much better. Yesterday evening, I was chatting with a friend who teaches Chinese, who was appalled at what he described as the extreme Eurocentric nature of UG. It is indeed easy to see why he'd feel that way about a theory which often treats tense as a biologically programmed part of language, given that Chinese doesn't have tense.
So, in short, I felt annoyed as often as enlightened, and there were a few moments when I just wanted to fling the book at the wall. But, unless I'm greatly mistaken, it's the field itself that's to blame, and the editors would have been irresponsible if they'd tried to make it seem more mature and logical than it is. They've done a fine job of presenting the important questions and the range of tentative answers currently on offer, and any good university library ought to have a copy. If yours doesn't, ask them why not.
I thought I knew what SLA was about, but in fact I didn't. My naive belief was that SLA researchers studied methods for helping people learn a new language more effectively. This isn't completely off-target, but really they are occupied with a more fundamental problem. Nearly everyone learns their first language without conscious effort. By the time they are six or seven years old - sometimes earlier - they can pronounce all the sounds correctly, have a clear understanding of how the grammar works, and possess a large vocabulary. "Native-like use of a language", for most linguists, is synonymous with "perfect use of that language". But for second and subsequent languages, the pattern is quite different. Only a small minority of learners approach native-speaker competence, and the majority fall far short of it. Second language (L2) learners nearly always have a noticable accent, they make grammatical mistakes, and they don't know words they should. Why? I had never thought properly about how odd this is.
The central puzzle is interesting, but it seems to me that people are still a long way from being able to provide convincing answers. The book paints a picture of an academic discipline still in its infancy. There is disagreement about almost everything, even the question of whether second-language learners are actually capable of achieving native-level performance. The different chapters describe a variety of approaches, all of which intuitively feel like they at least have something to do with the problem. One neurologist looks at the way language acquisition interacts with fundamental brain functions; he argues that L2 learners need to feel sufficently relaxed and unthreatened for learning to happen. Another describes the remakably consistent EEG patterns triggered by exposure to ungrammatical sentences. Grammar is clearly an important thing in the brain - but how does it work? A couple of sociolinguists talk about societal power relationships and how they are mediated by language. It seems to be critical that the learner has some kind of positive image of the new persona they will acquire by gaining proficiency in the L2. Many people spin different kinds of linguistic theories.
The preliminary nature of much of the work is reflected in the methodology. Far too many studies seemed basically anecdotal in nature, and involved a handful of subjects - in some cases, just a single person. It is of course clear that it's difficult to track a large group of learners over an extended period and monitor their language use; but without doing this, how is the field ever going to make serious progress? There are a few aspects of language use where it's easy to collect large-scale statistics. One striking example was the chapter on vocabulary acquisition, where the author, among other things, compared rates of acquisition for Greek students learning English and British students learning French; the Greeks picked up three or four words per classroom-hour, the Brits only one. The chapter on age-related effects also gave a clear answer to the question of whether children learn language more effectively than adults (they do). Unfortunately, it's usually much harder to get good data.
Another thing I couldn't help remarking on was the attitude to Chomsky. Many chapters are organized around Chomskyan theories of "Universal Grammar" (UG): authors assume that humans are born with UG inside their brains, and that this drives language acquisition. It seems like a reasonable hypothesis, and the author who flatly denied the existence of any kind of UG came across as among the least convincing ones. On the other hand, the people offering detailed descriptions of the claimed structure of UG weren't much better. Yesterday evening, I was chatting with a friend who teaches Chinese, who was appalled at what he described as the extreme Eurocentric nature of UG. It is indeed easy to see why he'd feel that way about a theory which often treats tense as a biologically programmed part of language, given that Chinese doesn't have tense.
So, in short, I felt annoyed as often as enlightened, and there were a few moments when I just wanted to fling the book at the wall. But, unless I'm greatly mistaken, it's the field itself that's to blame, and the editors would have been irresponsible if they'd tried to make it seem more mature and logical than it is. They've done a fine job of presenting the important questions and the range of tentative answers currently on offer, and any good university library ought to have a copy. If yours doesn't, ask them why not.
Displaying 1 of 1 review