 The importance of teachers’ feedback
Through taking SLA class, I found feedback the most interesting in that it is practical and usable. I believe that giving feedback on learners’ output must be extremely important as much as providing input(or feedback can be one of input).
Output is the production that implies learner’s interlanguage, which should not be left alone. Once the learners have produced the output, it is the teacher’s role to deal with it. The degree and the ways of giving feedback might widely vary according to many factors such as learners’ age, learning strategies, learning styles, individual preferences, etc. And the feedback itself would vary in terms of its frequency, salience, degree, and methods. If the teacher misses the effective and instant feedback on learners’ output, it will retard or defer learner’s progress in learning their second language.
While working on my final paper on the teacher’s feedback, I realized how much giving feedback is time&effort consuming, and got to wonder learners’ reaction to the feedback as well. “Do learners appreciate teachers’ labour on the feedback, particularly aimed at their own paper? Do they even read the feedback carefully? How differently does each learner take the feedback? Does the feedback just slip away or penetrate into learners’ interlanguage, and further, prevent fossilization? How do they utilize the feedback to improve English? Is it helpful after all?

 Learners’ reaction to the feedback
Thinking of the importance of feedback, I realized that the learners might not appreciate the teachers’ feedback and it is more evident in writing. For example, when I was a middle and high school student, all I cared about on my paper was the score. The teacher would have spent substantial time in giving feedback, but it took only a few seconds for me to find the score.

As soon as I got the paper from the teacher, I turned it over quickly so that nobody could see my paper and flipped the corner of paper and checked my score on the back page. Then quickly folded it in half and put it in my bag. Sometimes I looked at it carefully at home, but it was frustrating and overwhelming because my paper was all blooded with the teacher’s correction in red and mostly on grammar.
I believe that it was not only me, but everyone else at that age. For example, I and my friends were curious about each other’s score and I kept asking “What is your score?”. However I never asked “What feedback did you get from your teacher?”

Adults, on the other hand, probably more appreciate the feedback since most of them are fully motivated to learn the second language. Personally I love feedback and I seek for the feedback on purpose. I like asking questions and getting explicit, prompt feedback. I still care about my score but I more focus on what I did good and wrong.
As for myself, the obvious reasons for different attitudes toward the teacher’s feedback are motivation and the definite goal. Also, it is interesting that young learners and adults have different behaviors on feedback. I want to know more about the LEARNERS’ SIDE on feedback for the further study, hopefully! I guess, there is relatively less paper on how learners take the feedback than how teachers give feedback.

 How to utilize the feedback in learning
To prompt learners to utilize the feedback, teacher should try to give positive feedback MORE (especially for young learners!), and more importantly, should come up with activities or assignments to have learners take advantages of the feedback. As for teaching writing, process-based writing should be more appropriate than production-based approach, for example.
I believe that giving input -> producing output -> providing feedback -> utilizing feedback -> converting into autoINPUT (which was proved to be more effective than the input by others) -> output -> feedback and so on. This circulation might break if one of four factors is missing. All of them are equally important for learners and should not be neglected.

Posting the last blog !
It is bittersweet to write the last blog, but overall, the blog was much more SWEET than bitter during this semester, because it helped me in many ways. I believed that it enabled me to internalize the concepts that I learned in class, by summarizing, applying to other fields and connecting to my learning experience, not to mention that it provided much practice in writing. I learned a lot through this class, and had a loooooooooot of fun at the same time ! :-)

The effects of incidental focus on form

Communicative focus on form (Doughy, Varela, 1998)

There is general agreement that accuracy is an important classroom language goal, but against the explicit rule explanation, fluency has been the major advancement of communicative approaches and ‘focus on form’ appear to fulfill both requirements and reach the middle ground between accuracy and fluency.

Before reading this article, I was a bit doubtful about the Focus on Form. Naturally drawing attention to the form without distracting original communicative intent? How to arise the target form incidentally, but also naturally and contextually? This technique sounded very appealing to me, but at the same time, ‘too ideal’ at first.

As the outset of FonF study, ESL science content-based class was conducted for 2 weeks in order to determine the effectiveness of incidental focus on form in the context. The instructional tasks were designed to elicit spontaneous and planned production of all aspects of the past tense, both orally and in writing. The negative evidence was provided by repeating to draw attention followed by RECASTS. The teacher repeated a phrase containing an incorrect past verb, putting the error in focus with different stress and intonation to induce students’ noticing. Also, the teacher required students to answer spontaneous questions during the discussion in class. When she found some errors from a student, the teacher had the whole class repeat the correct form at times. Lastly, the teacher videotaped students’ presentation about their labs and in the following class, the teacher asked the students to repeat the errors of the past tense while they were watching the tape together. Also, on students’ writing, the teacher gave both negative evidence in the form of a recast and content-based comments.

Effectiveness ?
Since it was the science class, there was evident awareness on the past tense among students and they began to self-correct before the teacher recasted and some of students even peer-corrected each other. Therefore, the use of past tense was natural and accordingly, it was incidental for teacher to provide the focus on form. However, the recasts was to adjust to be immediate and brief and not to be an object of the lesson. As the result, the FonF(the treatment group) showed significant and large gains in the past tense on both the written and the oral measures, compared to the control group. This article mentioned that the FonF technique in content-based class demonstrated both the feasibility and effectiveness. While reading this article, it fulfilled most my curiosity and interest about the effectiveness of the focus of form. The FonF class sounds so effective that I want to take this class and it is refreshing that the FonF overcomes the problems that the current communicative language class has.

Feasibility ?
It should be, and must be a loooot of work to do for teachers. First, the teacher must keep track of what students are saying throughout the class. The teachers should literally focus on forms, content, and manage the classroom at the same time. It must involve a great deal of requirements, like providing recast, asking spontaneous questions, having the whole class repeating someone’s errors and giving feedback on writing as well, apart from videotaping student’s presentation. Plus, the teacher should be able to adjust the amount of corrections- not too many corrections but they should be brief and immediate. It sounds that the teacher should be trained, experienced and very skillful.

In Korea?
I wonder the 'FonF in content-based' can be applied to Korean students. For example, is it possible to teach middle and high school students with the FonF techniques in content-based class? First of all, where to find the decent teachers who can teach their subjects in English?
One of my friends gives tutoring as a part time job. She majored in Math and Business and had lived in the states for about 9 years. She teaches math in English and makes good money. It is because it is hard to find someone who is good at both English and other subjects. In some of international schools in Korea, students take all classes in English, of course all of students can speak English fluently. What about the students in regular schools? Some of students might get interested and show significant improvement in English and gain the knowledge of specific subjects, but most of them might rather lose their interest both in English and the content. I believe that focus on form in content-based lesson works as long as the students have reached the certain level in their English proficiency, not to mention, teachers should be able to conduct their subjects in English first of all.

How to select input?

Learner Spontaneous Attention in L2 Input Processing(Park & Han, 2007)

Why only on forms??

Learning about output hypothesis last time, I wondered why it focused on only forms. Thinking of my noticing the gap, I do not focus on forms, but mainly on meaningful CHUNKS (not a single grammatical unit). For example, when native speakers get on the bus, I prick my ears and listen to how they produce native-like sentences and how differently use vocabulary in different contexts.
I learned English grammar for years and years at middle and high school, so it is not too difficult to to make grammatically correct sentences, but they do not sound ‘right’ in some way. Therefore, it is not grammar but, the meaningful chunks that native speakers actually use, which makes me and native speakers have a huge gap, which I try to fill in by awareness. Similarly, when I struggle to say something, (noticing the hole?), it is due to the choice of vocabulary rather than grammar. How come I do not focus on forms while researchers are mainly talking about forms in learners’ noticing the gap, producing output and giving feedback?


– “Noticing(Ellis, 2002) is basically the idea that if learners pay attention to both the form and meaning of certain language structures in input, this will contribute to the internalization of the grammatical rules”.
- ‘Focus on form (Doughty&Williams, 1998a) whose central mission is about manipulating learner attention in order to facilitate learner noticing, and hence intake, of certain aspects of the TL.
-Noticing of target L2 form and has an effect on learners’ subsequent output (Jourdenais et al.1995)



Because of Learner-centered attention!!

This article (Park & Han, 2007), simply put, scratched my itchy spot, giving a clear answer to what I was confused. What input is converted into intake depends on so-called default processing. Learners’ attention is driven by their own perceptions about what is worth attending to, irrespective of the external intervention(Park & Han, 2007). This LEARNER-GENERATED ATTENTION and its awareness correlate, noticing (Schmidt, 1990), which perfectly makes sense to me. I was wondering why the gap should be on forms, but I realized that noticing the gap depends on learners’ current IL. It also explains that why I concentrate on the meaningful chunks while listening to native speakers. I do not find grammar difficult but I struggle with appropriate expressions, most of time.

- Lightbown(2000) ‘Even when forms are frequently present in classroom input, learners may filter them out because of characteristics of their L1 or their current interlanguage’
- Philp (2003) ‘Learners are biased to the input by their current interlanguage knowledge as well as by their natural orientation for meaning’



Because of Salience and Knowledge of TL!!

As for input, the more I hear, the more I want to know. By the time I’ve heard more than three times, I get really curious and usually look up the dictionary. This refers to ‘salience’ in input. Focus-on-form researchers (Ellis, Swain?) seek to make the target features in the input salient (called ‘external salience’, generated by a teacher or researcher), and I, as a learner, seek to meaningful expressions in the input salient(called ‘internal salience’), according to ‘default processing’.

Furthermore, I was surprised and pleased when I was reading the lines from the article (Park and Han, 2007) - “Learners who have acquired some knowledge of the target language will adopt a meaning-based approach to input processing.” Again, it explained why I focus on meaning, not forms. After 20 years learning English, I put priority on meaning over forms. Overall, these two things (Learner-generated attention and TL knowledge-based interest to input) gave me a very clear answer.
But... I still have a question. According to Swain in Output hypothesis, output helps learners progress from SEMANTIC to SYNTACTIC processing over time -focusing on form, instead of meaning. Why is that opposite?

Typological distance between L1 and L2

The study(Park& Han, 2007) was conducted with two groups–30 native speakers of Japanese and 30 native speakers of English. Two experimental conditions were set up: Condition 1- with the zero-knowledge state to a Korean text and Condition 2–after exposure six words. The result shows that under condition1, both groups adopted a form-oriented approach to input processing, however, under condition 2, they differed in terms of the additional items they noticed according to typological distance. It confirms that L1 does affect L2 input processing, particularly in the early stage of learning. The L1-English group asked more questions on form and the L1-Japanese group asked more on the meaning.
Looking back my early stage of learning English, I remember that I had a hard time recognizing the grammatical class of word. It was hard to tell which word was noun, adjective, verb, etc. I took the vocabulary test and had to circle the correct world class. I just memorized every single word without understanding. It would have been a lot easier if I had known suffix.
Also, I remember that I giggled that I was able to call my parents, teachers by ‘you’ in English, because it sounded very rude to me. It took some time to adjust calling the older people that way. If the Koreans didn’t have respectful forms, I would have had no problem calling 'you' to older people.

Output focusing on form

I considered speaking and writing as output while listening and reading as input. For example, babies get surrounded by enormous input as soon as they get born. When the input is ready to be pushed out, babies are able to talk and the last stage(final product) to be reached is writing. This is why writing has been regarded as the most important and difficult task. That was my understanding of output and didn’t know that the act of producing language(speaking or writing) could be a part of the process.

Also, it conflicts Krashen’s Input hypothesis that output has no functions in acquiring the target language. Compared to Krashen, Swain believes comprehensible input is not sufficient and requires comprehensible output as well. One of the reasons is that students can fake comprehension but not production.

Output enables learners to test hypotheses and receive feedback. Learners say or write the rules or vocabulary (interlanguage), “I goed to the supermarket yesterday” for example, and the teacher can implicitly or explicitly reformulates the students’ errors. Feedback helps learners move from declarative to procedural knowledge. Error feedback is very effective; however, feedback on grammar comprises such a large proportion since grammar plays a large role in teaching English in Korea. Rather than just pointing out the wrong grammar, the feedback should connect to the meaning in context in some way. Grammar rules without context might be meaningless and not memorable in the long run.

According to Output hypothesis, output helps students progress from semantic to syntactic processing (focusing on form, instead of meaning). However, focusing on form is already a big problem for Korean students when they produce English. Focusing on form is one of the biggest obstacles to make them reluctant to speak out because they are afraid to make mistakes. The monitored form with extra caution cannot fully reflect the learner’s interlanguage. Output hypothesis sounds very plausible because output enables learners to produce language and gain feedback, but it seems to mainly focus on rules. According to output hypothesis, learners’ awareness on form facilitates their output and the output provides learners with opportunities to test hypothesis about language. They can apply a rule to their utterance to see if native speakers can understand what they say and they reflect on their own output. It sounds to me “focusing on form leads to a successful learner”. Rather, I believe that focusing too much attention to forms inhibits learners’ fluency. Their (most of Korean learners, including myself) primary focus is on grammar, but it should be on meaning and communication, using grammar as a tool, not the object.

Psycholinguistic Approaches

1. Learning Turns Into Acquisition?

In Krashen’s view, acquisition is “picking up” a language and learning is “knowing about” a language, known to most people as “grammar” or “rules”. The knowledge acquired through acquisition or learning, remains internalized differently. Knowledge learned through one mean (e.g., learning) cannot be internalized as knowledge of the other kind (e.g., acquisition). This is because the acquired system is used focus on meaning, not on form while the learned system supervises and checks the correctness.

Krashen makes a very clear distinction between acquisition and learning, however, I can’t fully agree with it. I don’t see why acquisition is one thing and learning is the other. Rather, it seems to me more like ‘switchable’. For example, I consciously studied the verb forms in Past and Past participle. My teacher explained two different tenses and I practiced them with mostly ‘fill in the blanks’ exercises at first. I also took spelling test on past and perfect tense.
It’s been 20 years and since then, I have spoken, seen, read the past tense countlessly. The past tense started off from ‘learned system’ in the first place, but switched to ‘acquired system’ although I felt difficulty in Perfect tense and ended up using Past tense most of time (Avoidance). Perfect tense remains in learned system while Past tense switched learned system to acquired system over time. Similarly, Gass and Selinker viewed language as a continuum because it is easier to conceptualize explicit knowledge becoming implicit through practice, exposure, drill, etc.
For Krashen, the starting point counts (either learning or acquiring), but the ultimate point (internalized into which system at the end) makes more sense to me.

2. Constant, intentional awareness

There are a number of approaches to awareness in learning. American Heritage Dictionary refers ‘attention’ to “the concentration of the mental powers upon an object” and Gass’s (1980a) points “apperceived input” and similarly Tomlin and Villa proposed the stage of attention (detection -registration of stimulus). Schmidt (2001) claims that it “appears necessary for understanding nearly every aspect of SLA” and claims the noticing-the-gap hypothesis.
As for now, awareness plays such an important role in my learning and I intentionally try to aware the gap. I used to focus on memorizing vocabulary and grammar rules, but now I concentrate on how native speakers actually use the words and rules in contexts. Noticing the gap was not necessarily required to memorize words and forms, but I have to consciously keep noticing how native speakers make up the sentence, how native speakers pronounce words differently, how they utilize the same words in different contexts, what kind of expressions are native-like and what expressions are broken English. While overhearing a native speaker’s utterances on the bus, listening to radio, TV or lectures, reading books, I sometimes find myself focusing more on the usages, rather than meaning as paying too much attention to the differences (gaps).
I would say, realizing how differently native speakers and I produce on the SAME meaning is the one I want to know the most. I like getting feedback (either positive or negative) and asking questions when I study, but I have no one to ask :( To fill in the gaps, self-awareness is the most important factor to find the answer as long as high motivation sustains and constant input are provided, of course.

3. Why is the Monitor Limited To the Form?

I sensed that Monitor and Awareness were similar in terms of observing the process of learning and consisting of learned knowledge. However, according to Krashen, they are different in that the Monitor can only be used in production and the only function of learned knowledge is to edit utterances. Krashen claimed that there are three conditions for Monitor use (Time, Focus on form, Know the rule) and Learners will be most likely to use the Monitor in formal exam situations, where their attention has been drawn to linguistic form, and where they have enough time.

One thing I don’t understand is why Krashen limited the Monitor only to the form. Why can't the Monitor be stretched the meaning to the awareness? If so, the Monitor can be applied to the comprehension as well as production. As for me, I not only monitor MY production but also, monitor OTHER production while listening to native speakers, to pick up useful expressions and notice the gap between their utterance and my utterance.

Psychological facotrs and Krashen's hypotheses

Intelligence
Howard Gardner (1993) proposed that individuals have ‘multiple intelligences’ (e.g., abilities in the areas of music, interpersonal relations, athletics or the verbal intelligence) unlike traditional IQ tests that have assessed only a limited range of abilities. However, I believe that IQ may reflect multiple intelligences and affect to language learning as well.
For example, my brother has higher IQ than me. He got the highest IQ at school every time he took the IQ test. His life has been always smoother and easier, but I have to put ten times more effort in everything. He didn’t study English at all since graduated from high school and hardly used English while majoring in electro- technology for his bachelor’s and master’s. I thought I was better than him at least in English because he said he didn't like English.
Last year, he and I took TOEIC test together. It was his first time and I had taken TOEIC test several times. Then… a month later, we got our scores. He got the almost perfect score and I got a loooot lower score. I was proud of my brother, but at the same time I was embarrassed and frustrated. Looking at my brother who always outperforms me, I think IQ reflects multiple intelligences and stretches to learning various subjects.
Intelligence may be distinctive from other variables (Aptitude, Learning style, Personality, Motivation, Attitudes, Learner beliefs, Age factors, etc.) in that it could be the base of learning languages. Based on the given intelligence, other factors could accelerate or decelerate in language learning.

Aptitude
I thought aptitude was more like, how much a learner was into the language at first, however, it is the ability to analyzing languages (analytic ability). Then, it may be co-related to intelligence in some way. I wonder if people were born with certain aptitude like intelligence, or aptitude could be developed with effort. Paul(2005a) viewed that aptitude has several components (1)identify and memorize new sounds, (2)understand the function of particular words in sentences, (3) figure out grammatical rules from language samples.
I think these abilities are subject to change unlike intelligence because learners will improve those analytic abilities to recognize sounds, words, grammar over time.
The savant, Christopher, he must have high aptitude with possibly low IQ. This example shows that an aptitude is independent of cognitive, social, and personality characteristics. But this is such an exceptional case and cannot apply to everyone. In some way, intelligence and aptitude could correlate. When we think of the students who always got the first grade in class, they were good at most of subjects and there were not much in scores although they didn’t like some of subjects.

Personality + Krashen's FIVE Hypotheses
It is often argued that an extroverted person is well suited to language learning. An extroverted person with high-esteem may be not reluctant to make mistakes while talking. In other words, the learner is less likely to closely monitor his/her performance. Relatively, an introverted or reserved learner is more cautious about what she/he is talking and monitoring can be an effective learning strategy. Of course, over-use of the Monitor is counter-productive, but attention to language form or awareness of the learning process could lead to the successful learning (Stephen Krashen’s Monitor Hypothesis).However, Krashen regarded Monitor as a post-learning process and a tool for use of language in certain restrained conditions such as formal exam situations, but I think monitoring works widely from casual mundane conversation to formal test environment as long as it is not over-used enough to prevent communication.
As Krashen’s another hypothesis (The Acquisition/Learning Hypothesis) shows, SLA is the process of paying attention to the second language, which is called ‘learning’ and it enables learners to develop a ‘Monitor’ especially for adult-learners. The acquisition in SLA goes through a series of stages(The Natural Order Hypothesis),similar to developmental sequences (grammatical morphemes order) in FLA and the predictable order is not necessarily same as apparent simplicity to complexity. Selinker points out that the majority of adult learners never achieve full fluency in L2 and almost all of them fossilize at some point or other. And one of the reasons for fossilization is the input way beyond the learner’s present interlanguage. Krashen states the learner needs to be provided with sufficient input that is just a little beyond the present capacity(i+1 input) and this is the only way to learn (The Input Hypothesis). However, input alone is not sufficient. It should be provided under low anxiety and high motivation environment (The Affective Filter Hypothesis).

Developing Basic Conversational Ability

Schmidt & Frota

German is the only foreign language that I learned, apart from English. Looking back my high school days when I learned German, I guess I was affected by my English even when I was quite poor at it. It would be mainly because German is relatively more similar to English than Korean. I remember that I kept asking the teacher if it was the SAME to English or it is DIFFERENT from English whenever I learned the new rule or vocabulary in German. Plus, English pronunciation slipped out of my mouth all the time and intentionally corrected the errors later on. Every class, the teacher called on students and had them read passages from the German textbook and English pronunciation kept popping out.

‘One-way transfer’
Now, I think of it, this possible factor would be called ‘one-way transfer’ that L1 pattern that are marked are unlikely to be transferred (Krashen,1983). The same thing happened to R(Richard W. Schmidt), who was the coauthor of this article as well as the Portuguese learner. More specifically, R had little difficulty with noun-adjective order which is the opposite of English. Considering R is a fluent Arabic speaker, R’s Portuguese was greatly affected by transfer from Arabic. Likewise, R’s major problem was the omission of indefinite article and it, again, holds for the transfer in that Arabic has no indefinite article. On his diary (he had kept a diary about the process of learning Portuguese) compensated that those errors seemed to have no reasonable explanation other than transfer from Arabic. The followings are the excerpts from his diary to illustrate ‘one-way transfer’.

“……L (R’s teacher) corrected my pronunciation to setenta. I realized that I have been saying [sittenta]. That’s from Arabic.”
“..Maybe schema theory fits it best: top-down processing, filling in the Arabic schema once it’s been activated by what I know so far about Portuguese.”

Again, ‘one-way transfer is not the only factor in learning the foreign language, of course. As Schmidt and Frota addressed in the article, the various aspects such as markedness, morphological confusion, psycholinguistic and discourse-based processing difficulties, transfer from the L1, innate developmental patterns, and overgeneralizations of target language norms must be all interwound.

Input frequency hypothesis
Input Frequency is literally what was more frequent in input is more likely to be used. Apparently, R produced what he had heard more. It demonstrates in R’s diary as well.

“….Today in my SLA class I mentioned that some things I was taught I immediately heard all around me, like imperfect, which I heard frequently from the day it was taught….I suggested that perhaps I couldn’t hear the indirect object pronoun structure, but the class said no, the reason I haven’t heard it is that no one says it in Rio.....”

Input Frequency hypothesis asserts that the reason why the learners do not produce what they have heard is that they do not NOTICE the input even when they HEAR. I wonder how learners notice the input if the input is not familiar to them, especially the learner is at novice level. For novice-novice level students, it must be almost impossible to divide the input by chucks or words. R, also finally recognized certain overheard input at the end of staying in Brazil.

I’ve heard that if the learner memorizes a single word without any effort, he/she has to listen to the word around 2000 times!!!

Input frequency hypothesis does satisfy R’s use of ‘perfect, imperfect past tense’. In general, the frequency of the perfect in the input from S(R’s teacher) was much higher than the frequency of the imperfect. On the other hand, some verbs that R used exclusively in the imperfect tense were not present in input either exclusively or overwhelmingly in the imperfect. This article made an assumption out of it: Language learning is subject to the “easy confirmation principle.” Learners look for verification of their hypotheses, not disconfirmation (Schachter 1983)

Socio-linguistics
This article points out the ability to carry on conversations, which is a reflection of grammatical competence and a control of turn taking and adjacency pairings in the new language. It reminded me of Conversation Analysis class. I learned that conversation is the accomplishment by turn taking based on the mutual understanding among speakers, in other words, if one of the speakers fails to understand what the previous speaker has said, the conversation will break down. R’s conversational behavior in the early stages was quite different with the end of his stay in Brazil. On the first conversational tape, he spoke with hesitation and a great deal of difficulty and the conversation didn’t work out well, but R was able to express notions in a smoother and communicatively more effective manner over time. However, I couldn't see that how he got improved that much in only 22 weeks. When he just arrived in Brazil, he couldn't understand a word and felt frustrated because he couldn't even order coffee at the restaurant. and -BAM! after 22WEEKS, he was able to carry on the basic conversation quite fluently. I have learned English for 22 YEARS !!! :(

Thinking of some factors I have learned from Dekeyser’s, it explains to some extent. He must have the high verbal aptitude and problem-solving capacities. And I also remember something that professor mentioned the other day: multilingual person can acquire the new language relatively a lot easier and faster. He learned six langauges although the proficiency for each langauge varies.

Learning Style
One of R’s learning styles is to learn with a preference for a telegraphic style, focusing on the big things (counts words) and letting the details wait. While reading his learning style, I thought of mine. I would say, exemplifying. When I learn a new term, I tend to keep thinking of proper examples because it makes the term easier to understand and better to internalize. When it comes to SLA, I can draw out an example from my learning history. I am lucky(?) in that my bitter moments in learning a foreign language can be utilized in SLA to understand the concepts.

Brushing upon the concepts
One of the reasons why I found this article interesting is that this thick paper went over a wide selection of terms that I have learned in SLA class. For example, when I encountered the term ’one-way transfer’ in class at first, I grasped the only rough meaning of it, however, bumping into the concept again in this article, helped me understand it better. Not to mention other terms that have more frequently appeared in this article like overgeneralization of target language, interlanguage, i+1 input hypothesis, just to name a few. Those overwhelming notions do not seem to give clear-cut definitions at first, but they are getting familiar and more meaningful by reading further articles and linking the new concepts with my previous learning experience.

Interlanguage Variation

(Tarone & Liu, 1996)

Out of three different contexts, Bob produced the most output when he was talking to the researcher who is a friend of the family, where he felt ‘free’ around. Bob pushed the limits of his competence in interaction.

What is it about the context which makes Bob so productive?
One possible reason is that Bob was provided with the better and more complex input which is most suited the Bob’s developmental needs. Another explanation is Bob’s attempts to produce comprehensible output. He pushed the limits of that interlangauge system to make it handle that output, thus keeping the system ‘permeable’ (Adjemian,1976). In the process of producing output, Bob got to recognize the structure in the input.

More specifically, what kind of input is suitable for developing learner’s knowledge?

The appropriate level of difficulty, according to Krashen, is what he calls level i + 1, that is, just a bit beyond the learner’s current ability (i), but not so difficult nor so easy that no new language challenges are encountered. This way, learners are able to infer the meaning and the structures of the input provided by the situation.

Last week, I met my friends and one of them brought her nephew who is 5 years old. My friends laughed when I talked to him because I treated him just like a grown-up. I talked in the very same way with the same speed, vocabulary, structure and tone that I use with adults. Personally I don’t like ‘baby talk’. I am not familiar with simplifying and ‘cutifying’ the talk. Just listening to the baby talk makes me itchy!!!!! Now I have one more reason that I don’t have to baby talk to little people: They need challenge to push themselves beyond their competence!

Interaction of the age and the aptitude

DeKeyser (2000)

One of the frustrating theories in SLA is definitely the Critical Period Hypothesis which is the decline of language learning after a certain age. In other words, I officially lost the chance to ‘master’ English according to the hypothesis! I wish I could go back to my pre-school days and go abroad to ‘master’ English.
Looking at young kids who literally ‘absorb, soak-in’ English with little effort, I assumed that there must be something that they have and adults do not have: implicit language-specific mechanisms, which I got to know from this article. Throughout the essay, my favorite part is that verbal aptitude plays a crucial role in acquiring L2, apart from the age effect. I’m not sure about my analytic ability, but it is good to know that there must be other huge factors to influence the SLA. I was kind of hoping that the result would be confirmed at the end, and it did! 

I’ve made a summary of DeKyser’s article, however, it was just from my jotting-down notepad. I started off taking notes about some key sentences and raised questions because this article seemed hard to understand at first. Then, I happened to make a rough summary :-)

1. The main goal in this article
1)Testing the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Bley-Vroman,1988) by age, verbal aptitude and their interaction
2)Replicate Johnson and Newport’s (1989) study, that ultimate attainment in SLA was correlated with age

2. Review of the literature
1) Age Effects on the Acquisition of Morphosyntax
-The pre-puberty group showed a strong ceiling effect, whereas the ratings for the post-puberty group were normally distributed. The results for a grammaticality judgment test were essentially the same as for the syntax ratings (Patkowski, 1980)
-Even when the L1 and L2 are more closely related, strong age effects have been documented (Coppieters, 1987)
-Those who learned L2 at a later age(after age15) did better than the younger learners, but what the older learners did better suggests only rate advantages for older learners. Therefore, the results do not contradict the CPH (Bialystock,1997)
-Learners past a certain age have trouble learning many structure, not that all structures are problematic for them (White & Geneses, 1996)
: The preponderance of the evidence shows that the critical period effect is pervasive in L2 acquisition.

2) The Role of Verbal Aptitude
Most research found that a high correlation between foreign language learning aptitude and success in the L2 is higher than the correlations between verbal intelligence and success in the L2.
Krashen(1981) claimed that analytic ability(“aptitude”) predicts success in “conscious leaning” whereas affective variables(“attitude”) are the best predictors of “subconscious acquision.” It would follow that verbal ability usually plays a more important role in adult learners who receive traditional form-focused instruction and less a role in informal acquisition by most adults.

: The verbal aptitude would explain the apparent exceptions to a strong age effect. A high level of verbal aptitude let L2 speakers to perform near-natively. One of major goal of this study is to assess the effect of verbal ability that is, foreign language learning aptitude, on ultimate attainment. Studying the effects of age and verbal aptitude, and their interaction should be more revealing them separately.

3. Hypotheses
1) A strong negative correlation between age of arrival and performance on a grammaticality judgment test, but some overlap between child and adult acquirers
2) Those adults who score within the range of child acquirers will all have high verbal aptitude
3) Different elements of grammar will show different correlations with age of acquisition. Not all structures are equally sensitive to the critical period effect.


4. Method
4-1) Participants
57 native speakers of Hungarian. 25 males, 17 females. 42 ppl were older than 16 when they immigrated. The range of age of arrival was 1-40. Have resided in the states for at least 10years. The average length of residence was 34 years. Average age from 16 to 81.
22 felt more comfortable with Hungarian, 20 more comfortable w/ English, 15 felt no difference. The measures for age of arrival, age at time of testing, aptitude, years of schooling, and grammar test scores.

4-2) Instruments
a.Grammaticality Judgment Test: The revised version of Johnson and Newport(1989) adjusting a bit to suit the participants
b.Language Learning Aptitude Test: The test consists of 20 five-way, multiple-choice items. The difficulty level for the 20 items ranged from .23 to .68 with a mean of .52
c.Background Questionnaire: A questionnaire about their language background, educational background, age of arrival in North America, and age at the time of the test.

4-3) Procedure
The grammaticality judgment test -> Questionnaire on backgrounds -> The aptitude test

5. Results
1) The correlation between the grammaticality judgment test score and age of acquisition was -.63. For adult arrivals, the correlation was -0.4.; for participants who arrived before the age of 16, the correlation was -.26
For high-aptitude learners, the correlation between the grammaticality judgment test score and age of acquisition was -.33, for the group with average or low aptitude: -.74
Here, numbers are all confusing!! :-(
2) Aptitude scores did not correlate with age of arrival
3) Low correlations for word-order problems in declarative sentences not involving adverbs, yes-not questions that lack do-support and gender errors in pronouns.

6. Discussion
Hypothesis 1
The hypothesis of a strong negative correlation between age of acquisition and score on the grammaticality judgment test was confirmed, however, the report of Johnson and Newport( an even stronger correlation between age of arrival and test performance for the early arrivals) was not replicated. Also, length of residence turned out not to be correlated with test scores at all

Hypothesis 2
The participants, who started acquiring English after age 16, got a high score on the grammaticality test and all but one had a relatively high aptitude score. This finding is in line with what the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis predicts: analytical, problem-solving abilities for adults

Hypothesis 3
As hypothesized, different structures showed different degrees of correlation with age of arrival. Only basic word order and pronoun gender seemed to be acquired at any age of arrival.

7. Conclusions and Implications
The study provided an explanation for why certain learners and structures appear to be exceptions to the critical period effect: 1) Adults with high verbal ability can use explicit learning mechanisms 2) Certain structures can be learned explicitly by all learners, regardless of verbal ability or age effect
It also provided evidence for Bley-Vroman’s (1988) Fundamental Difference Hypothesis by showing that explicit, analytic, problem-solving capacities makes adults reach a native level of competence in L2. Plus, this study answered Harley and Hart’s (1997) question about the role of language-learning aptitude in naturalistic acquisition by showing that apptitude is a predictor of ultimate attainment in L2.
Lastly,this study suggests that there IS a critical period for language acquisition especially to implicit learning of abstract structures. In other words, adult’s capacity to learn abstract patterns implicitly is extremely limited.

In conclusion, it says that the children should simply learn a foreign language in elementary school rather than high school(Patkowski, 1994) and it sounds perfectly plausible from the results in this study. However, elementary students in Korea seem to have as much difficulty and burden in acquiring English as adults. Since they are not in a native language setting, implicit acquisition requires massive amounts of input (Dekeyser,2000). As a ‘input lover’, I totally agree with the necessity of much input.
More and more Korean parents put their young children into English schools, but still the input is far too little in Korea. Both how to increase the input and what is the efficient way to learn English with limited input should be considered for learning English in Korea.

What makes language acquisition effortless

In the video clips, Professor Neil Smith tried to demonstrate UG with studies of a savant, Christopher who learned tens of languages. I still doubt the existence of UG. In class, I mentioned the wolf-child, who was abandoned in the forest and raised by a wolf, failed to acquire the language. If he had been born with UG, he should have learned the language. I think it’s more like ‘input’, rather than ‘UG’ in terms of the determiner of the first language.

Some argue that the wolf-child had no chance to utilize UG since he was surrounded by only animals in the forest for years. With the strong existence of UG, wolf-child should have learned the language after he moved to the ‘ordinary’ place where people lived and he started to take language lessons. However, he failed it again.

Considering the fact that he already passed the critical period, UG might sound more plausible, but still, I am not 100% positive that people are born with UG. I don’t think there is such thing as ‘Universal Grammar’ shared by all the people from all around the world. Rather, I think that people tend to have languages that happen to have similar features in common.

When we take a look at languages, they are not that different. People say that English and Korean are such two different languages, however, this is because people cannot see the big picture of the languages. Korean and English are almost identical in that two languages have ‘MATCHING’ grammar and vocabulary. I think UG might be called the same rules that all languages have in common, not all people have in common. Focusing too much attention to different features in languages such as pronunciation or word order, they overlook the similarities. For example, from the last reading article, Schachter mentioned RCF, “one of the biggest different features among languages”. Of course, the order of the relative clause IS different but what I was surprised by is that all of the languages DO have the relative clauses formation.

It might not be UG that enables people to learn the language and it might be not UG parameters that multilingual people utilize. I think it is input that enables people to learn the language and it is the same features in all languages that facilitate multilingual people acquire languages.

My L2 learning autography

When I was staying in Toronto, I studied at an English school. This place is where I met Susanna who was my third English teacher in the school. I noticed her first even before taking her class because she was the only African-American at school. While studying with her, I and all my classmates loved her with time. She always tried to create a learner-centered class environment and let us know that English was a mean to communicate, not the object to accomplish.

Instead of teaching in class all the time, she took us to the real-world at times. We went to the book store, museum, a community center, and her workplace to name a few. She worked for a phone company twice a week and one day, we went on the field trip to her company. Some of her colleagues explained about what kind of work they did and showed us around. It was fun and memorable because it was the first time to have a chance to look around the 'real' company in Canada. She tried to put us in authentic places as many as possible and we were able to put English in practice.

I would say, I can do my best and put the most effort into studies when I know WHY I study and I have FUN with it. The English teacher, Susanna fully satisfied with these two things in that I realized that English was a actual tool to interact with others and I definitely had fun in / out of her class.

I guess I liked the class a lot because it was right after the miserable time for the first 8 months in Canada. For the 8 months, I took ESL classes in the morning, went to KOREAN town with my KOREAN friends, and headed for the library to study. It was exactly the same as the way to study English in Korea. I had been so frustrated with my steady, even, still, immovable English ability that seemed 'stuck forever' in the same level. Then, I met Susanna.

When I was taking her class, we got so close and hung out after class too. I was considering changing my Homestay at that time, she asked me to move in her house. Since then, I lived with her and her parents who were also teachers at public school. The house was located in Brampton which was an hour away from Toronto. There was no single ESL school in Brampton, I was the only Asian there. Actually, I was the only one who is not African-American. Sometimes, people looked at me with eyes wide on the street, some of them talked me first and especially children gazed at me. This is when my English seemed to improve dramatically.

Susanna took me everywhere she went and introduced me to people. Almost every weekend, she and her bunch of friends got together and had a party. All of them were very nice to me. Some of them asked me out :-) and some of them became life-long friends. The most importantly, I was impressed by the way they taught me English. Brampton was unlike Toronto that Korean people overflowed, people thought I was very unique and they were willing to teach me English. I remember that some of them not only corrected my English but also wrote them down on my notebook. Also, they helped me out with wrong pronunciation and broken English. I got these instant and effective feedback while we were sitting on sofa eating popcorn or drinking beer which was in such relaxing and zero-anxiety environment.

For the first 8 months in Canada, I spent most of my time taking classes, hanging out with Koreans, studying at the library memorizing grammar and vocabulary which was the pretty same as I did in Korea. However, after moving to Brampton, I was actually able to put my English into practice with real people in a real-world circumstances. Thanks to Susanna who was my English teacher, I got to 'use' English rather than 'learn'.

1st reading log

This article is mainly about acquiring the mother tongue and learning the second language. One of the inevitable by-product of the process of learning a language is the learner's errors. Corder distinguishes between the errors of performance and the errors of competence. The former refers to 'mistakes' and the latter 'errors' which is respectively 'unsystematic' and 'systematic'. This part was the most interesting but, at the same time, somewhat vague to me. Since Corder didn't provide the concrete examples out of them, it was hard to fully understand the terms. I looked up the Internet to get some help and happened to find the article, 'The Insignificance of learner's errors' by Richard Hamilton. Surprisingly, it also argues that Corder didn't give any examples of a systematic error.

From my understanding, errors of performance are subject to change due to memory lapses, tiredness or strong emotion while errors of competence can define the learners' knowledge of the language to date. Corder mentions that it is significant in that it reflects what the learner has been undertaking a systematic analysis. This process of the 'forming grammar' consists of the certain stages that learners go through over time.
If so, the systematic error related to 'the natural order' which is the common type of learners' errors? If not, how are they different?