Key Topics in Second Language Acquisition

By Vivian Cook, David Singleton

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2014 Vivian Cook and David Singleton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78309-179-9

Contents

List of Boxes,
Introduction,
Topic 1: How Do Different Languages Connect in Our Minds?,
Topic 2: Is There a Best Age for Learning a Second Language?,
Topic 3: How Do People Acquire the Words of a Second Language?,
Topic 4: How Important is Grammar in Acquiring and Using a Second Language?,
Topic 5: How Do People Learn to Write in a Second Language?,
Topic 6: How Do Attitude and Motivation Help in Learning a Second Language?,
Topic 7: How Useful is Second Language Acquisition Research for Language Teaching?,
Topic 8: What are the Goals of Language Teaching?,
Epilogue,
Key Topics Glossary,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

How Do Different Languages Connect in Our Minds?

Vivian Cook

What is a bilingual?

Characteristics of L2 users

What are L2 users like?

L2 users think differently

L2 users have a better feel for language

L2 users speak their first language slightly differently

Two languages in one mind

The underlying issue in second language acquisition (SLA) is how two or more languages connect to each other in the same mind. If we speak both English and Japanese, say, do we effectively keep them in separate English and Japanese compartments or are the languages mixed up together? This question is the raison d’être of SLA research and distinguishes it from first language acquisition research: when you have one language already in your mind, what happens when you acquire another?

What is a bilingual?

A starting point is the concept of bilingualism itself. This term means very contrary things to different people. Your answer to Question 2 in Box 1.1 gives away which of the meanings you subscribe to.

A general definition of bilingualism might be that offered by Uriel Weinreich, a Yiddish-speaking American linguist, in 1953: ‘The practice of alternately using two languages will be called bilingualism and the persons involved, bilinguals’. But for most purposes this begs the question as it does not say how much, how often or how well the bilingual speaks the two languages. If I go into a restaurant in Florence and say buona sera does that make me a bilingual? If you can follow an Italian film without reading the subtitles are you a bilingual? In short, how much of a second language do you need to know to count as a bilingual?

If you agreed with answer (A) that a bilingual is ‘a person who knows two languages equally well’, you are adopting the definition of American linguist Leonard Bloomfield, who said in the 1930s that bilingualism is ‘native-like control of two languages’. Probably the most common idea of bilingualism is that it means being able to speak two languages fluently in all circumstances. In this view, bilinguals can use both languages equally effectively and can readily pass for native speakers of either – balanced bilingualism in which neither language is dominant in the mind. This is sometimes called the ‘maximal’ definition of bilingualism: you couldn’t have a higher target than perfection in both languages.

Such balanced bilinguals are hard to find. For one reason, bilinguals tend to use their two languages in different situations or speak them to different people rather than cover all occasions and all people with both languages. If you play tennis with a German-speaking partner and golf with a French-speaking partner, your use is likely to be skewed between the two languages. You may be good at writing essays in English but bad at writing them in your first language, or so Greek students in England have told me. It is hard to think of many people who use both languages equally for all of the possible ways they can use language. Balanced bilinguals in this sense are thin on the ground.

But there may be more maximal bilinguals around than one suspects. After all, if people are truly bilingual in this maximal sense, you won’t be able to tell they are not native speakers in either language: they are invisible bilinguals. The film star Audrey Hepburn for example was bilingual from birth but one would never have known from her films; Prince Philip, the Queen’s Consort, spoke English, German and French in childhood (and was christened Philippos). Presumably secret agents need this ability to survive undetected; certainly the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett successfully worked with the French Resistance in German-occupied France in World War Two.

If you agreed with answer (B) that a bilingual is ‘a person who can use another language effectively’, you are on the side of Einar Haugen, a Norwegian American, who claimed that bilingualism starts at ‘the point where a speaker can first produce complete meaningful utterances in the other language’. When an English speaker says Bonjour in a shop in France, they are using language bilingually: what they are saying is complete, meaningful and appropriate to the situation, even if totally predictable and banal. Bilingualism is a question of being able to use the second language in a meaningful way for certain things, not of being able to do everything.

Such a bilingual would have no chance at all of passing for a native speaker. They are nonetheless using the second language perfectly adequately for their own needs. I can get by as a visitor in restaurants and shops in Italy using hardly any Italian; if I lived there, I would doubtless need to expand my repertoire considerably. This is then the ‘minimal’ definition of bilingual; one couldn’t imagine a lower target for learning a second language. Such bilinguals are extremely common around the world; indeed, on some counts, there are more people who use second languages in the world than there are pure monolinguals.

While we can all agree with Weinreich’s definition of bilingualism as alternating between languages, the two opposing common meanings of the word bilingual are difficult to reconcile. The maximal definition is a virtually impossible counsel of perfection that can at best apply to a handful of people and tends to make people feel inferior who are in fact perfectly adequate second language users; they may be ashamed that their accent gives away that they are not native speakers even if this doesn’t interfere with their communication. The maximal definition is thus too exclusive. The minimal definition on the other hand includes all the people in the world who have ever tried to communicate something in another language, which amounts to almost everybody. The minimal definition is then far too inclusive. The problem is you often don’t know which of the senses of bilingual a particular person intends.

To avoid this dilemma, SLA researchers tend to employ the alternative term L2 learner, which has no overtones of either maximal or minimal bilingualism. But in my view L2 learner does have the implication that people who speak a second language will never finish learning it; you are condemned to be an L2 learner all your life apparently, never getting to the state of having learnt the language. Can someone who has been using a second language for decades like Swedish-speaking Björn Ulvaeus of Abba really still be called an L2 learner of English?

Hence I prefer the term second language (L2) user for ‘somebody who is actively using a language other than their first’. This does not pin down a particular minimal or maximal use of the second language. L2 user is a convenient term for people who know more than one language without the overtones that cloud the words bilingual and learner. It involves making a distinction between using a language and learning a language; some people are indeed L2 learners in classrooms who do not use the other language for any real everyday purpose, say English children learning French; others interact each day of their lives with other people through more than one language, say the inhabitants of multilingual cities like Toronto, Berlin or New Delhi. Of course in some cases both learning and using are going on at the same time. A Polish worker coming to Ireland is doubtless both learning English and using it from the moment they arrive in Dublin, probably having been a school learner for many years. L2 learner in this book is complementary to L2 user, one concerned with the process of acquiring another language, the other with the process of using it. This does not, however, mean that we can totally avoid the term bilingual, partly because it is used in so much of the research. Nevertheless we will try to draw a line between L2 users and L2 learners wherever possible, even if many people are effectively both, like the Polish worker.

Characteristics of L2 users

So what are L2 users actually like? In one way the question is as meaningless as asking what human beings are like. L2 users come in as many shapes and sizes as monolinguals. Any generalisation is going to have to cover the whole gamut of human beings.

There are certainly a great many L2 users about. The figures in Box 1.3 give some idea of their numbers. The authoritative online reference source for information about languages is Ethnologue. To calculate how multilingual a country is, they use a statistic called the linguistic diversity index (LDI) invented by Joseph Greenberg. The LDI represents the odds of meeting someone in your country who speaks a different language from you. In Papua New Guinea, where 830 languages are spoken, you have a likelihood of 99 in 100 that a random stranger will speak another language; in Cuba, where four languages are spoken, there is only a one in 1000 chance. In between is China (296 languages) with a 51 in 100 chance and Japan (16 languages) with a three in 100 chance.

If you assume that more languages means more L2 users, this gives some measure of how multilingual a country is: Papua New Guinea should have very many L2 users, Cuba rather fewer. The LDI is, however, based on the proportion of monolinguals of different languages in a country and makes no claims about their use of a second language. So it cannot easily be applied to countries which have several languages that are spoken in different areas, since the speakers may not actually mix with each other. For example, Switzerland has an LDI of 55 in 100 but the French, German, Romansch and Italian speakers live in geographically different segments of the country. Similarly Canada has an LDI of 55 out of 100, despite the two official languages, French and English, being in separate provinces (with the exception of bilingual New Brunswick). Nevertheless this does suggest that the majority of people in the world probably use more than one language successfully in their everyday lives, even if they are far from maximal bilinguals.

People who speak only one language tend to assume that bilingualism is a problem. Yet there is no more a problem of bilingualism than there is a problem of monolingualism. L2 users don’t have any more mental or social problems, or educational difficulties than anybody else. Claims to the contrary are usually based, not so much on their bilingualism per se – a phenomenon involving language – as on the emotional, social and economic plights of immigrants or minority groups – largely social and economic deprivation.

Parents often worry about whether it is a good idea to bring up their children bilingually. There is no evidence that bilingualism itself harms a child; many argue that it brings unique advantages to the child in their ability to use language, to reason and to understand other people, as we will see later. For example Canadian children in bilingual schools were better able to communicate an idea to a blindfolded person than monolingual children; they were more sensitive to people’s communication needs. In England the advice used to be to avoid using two languages with Down’s Syndrome children as it confused them; yet an Indian visitor told me how her Down’s Syndrome child naturally speaks the four languages that surround him.

What are L2 users like?

So what are the characteristics of this diverse group of L2 users? Let us look at them as people in their own right, not just as people who are poor imitations of native speakers. Here are some of the ways in which L2 users are unique.

L2 users think differently

When you learn another language, you start to think in slightly different ways. A traditional reason for teaching children another language was that it trained their brains. In England it was Latin that was supposed to do the trick. Boris Johnson, the current Mayor of London, has pronounced ‘Latin and Greek are great intellectual disciplines, forcing young minds to think in a logical and analytical way’. But all learning of another language probably changes people’s thinking to some extent, not just classical languages; L2 users no longer see the world in quite the same way as monolinguals. As the Italian film director Federico Fellini is supposed to have said, ‘A different language is a different vision of life’.

For example, speakers of English have a single colour which they call blue, whether it’s the blue of the sky or the blue of a sapphire. Speakers of some other languages see two colours, corresponding to English light blue and dark blue, called ble and ghalazio in Greek, azzurro and blu in Italian and sinij and goluboj in Russian. Where an English eye sees one colour, speakers of other languages see two. The way you perceive colours goes with your language. Just compare a street scene in Tokyo with one in Kuala Lumpur or one in Oslo to appreciate people’s different ideas of colour.

Learning another language, however, brings the two colour systems into conflict; will you change your perception of colour to fit the new language or will you perceive the same colours when you speak the new language? When Greeks learn English, they have to collapse two colours into one and this affects the way they see colours, not just their words for the colours. Their first language meanings for ble and ghalazio are subtly different from those of monolingual Greeks, as they are for Russian and Japanese speakers who know other languages. Learning another language infiltrates many areas of your mind, not just those devoted to language.

Some researchers have investigated the changes in thinking in L2 users through the stories that bilinguals tell of their lives. Take an important concept like ‘friend’; do you change your idea of friendship when you have to take part in another culture or do you stick to the same idea? Mary Besemeres looked at a range of these bilingual histories and found the information displayed in Box 1.4.

The English concept of ‘friend’ reflects ‘values of autonomy and self-reliance, as well as egalitarian non-exclusivity’. To a Pole however the concept conveys ‘strong loyalty and attachment bordering on love’. A Polish person learning to live in an English-speaking society has therefore to tone down the strength of meaning of ‘friendship’. The Russian concept similarly has stronger overtones – a ‘covenant of family’ – than English. To a Chinese person a friend is so close you do not need to distinguish him or her from yourself; you wouldn’t thank yourself for something so you don’t need to thank a friend. In most of these languages the casual English use of the word friend for Facebook contacts would be unthinkable. Complex changes in thinking are necessary to function effectively in another society. A young Polish girl in Canada was asked by another girl if she would be her friend and she replied that she didn’t know her well enough yet: the two concepts of friendship had collided and the Canadian girl was upset at the apparent rejection.

L2 users have a better feel for language

One of the obvious changes in people who know more than two languages is a better feel for language in general. One sign is the number of bilingual writers: Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita in Russian and then did his own version in English; Samuel Beckett first wrote Waiting for Godot in French. André Brink, the South African novelist, writes his novels switching between English and Afrikaans when he feels like it; after he has finished, he decides which language should be used for publication. Seventeenth century English poets like Milton and Dryden often wrote in Latin; Milton was made ‘Secretary for Foreign Tongues’ for the Cromwell government: Dryden earned a living as a translator for some years. Artistic creativity with language often goes with bilingualism.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Key Topics in Second Language Acquisition by Vivian Cook, David Singleton. Copyright © 2014 Vivian Cook and David Singleton. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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