Primero Hay Que Aprender Espa ñol. Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen. - NYTimes.com

Brian MacWhinney macw at cmu.edu
Fri Dec 31 17:48:50 UTC 2010


Tom,

     Right.  This is second year Spanish.  Two years sounds like a lot of time, but if you look at how much time these students have had actually using and listening to comprehensible and useful Spanish, it is probably not more than 60 hours.  A native-speaking baby gets as much in two weeks.  Of course, babies don't comprehend everything either, but parents take great pains to tailor the input to their learning level.  And they provide complete emotional support and clap with pride when the baby gets a word right.  And there is often just one student in the classroom.  If there are more, then the others are also advanced learners (brothers and sisters) who provide good input.   Second language learners, on the other hand, receive correction, chuckles, or else perfunctory "muy bien" and "hen hao".  Moreover, adults have an attitude problem.  They think that, because they are adults, they shouldn't act like children.  Big mistake.
   When the tempo of the conversation picks up, the three-year-old also starts to have problems, unless they can use well practiced phrases in well understood situations.  Perhaps some of us remember how useless it was trying to follow adult conversations even at age 5.
   It is not surprising to find that the top students in second year Spanish have only achieved controlled (as opposed to automatic) control of L2.  What is surprising is how well they do given this minimal input.   If you give them the additional 8,000+ hours that a three-year-old has had with full emotional and motivational support and situated language use, they will soon move to more automatic processing.  But, Tom is right that adults will never capture the full automaticity of the L1-learning child.  Although language becomes proceduralized, there was too much of a battle during that process with the entrenched L1 to allow for a fully smooth resolution.  Even proceduralization can't solve this problem.
   But now back to the theme of why L2 and multilingualism are important issues to include in texts about linguistics.  It seems to me that understanding the shape of L2 learning is itself a great exercise in linguistics.  For those aspects of L2 learning that are common across learners from different L1s, we can think in terms of Universal Grammars, Bioprograms, and things like that.  For those aspects that differ depending on your L1, we can think about transfer, cue strength, and contrastive analysis.  Without reference to both linguistic and psycholinguistic theory, all of these patterns are just mysteries.

- Brian MacW

On Dec 30, 2010, at 11:17 PM, Tom Givon wrote:

> 
> 
> Sometime in the early 1990s, when Linda Cruz Givon was teaching 2nd year Spanish at U. Oregon, we did an experiment. We gave her class a test under two conditions: (1) do the task (written translation of a text) in class, under realistic (for native speakers) time-pressure. The results were collected & score. Then we gave it back to them & told them "Now you can take it home and correct it at your leisure, and your grade will depend only on the corrected version". Then we score only the students who were getting a cumulative A in their last (6th) quarter of Spanish (2 year college req.). Their in-class performance was uniformly a mess, pidgin grammar. Their home-corrected versions were perfect. They got their As. Our conclusion was that the A students do well with time-pressure, when there are no strong attentional demands, so that they can process consciously, NOT automatically. Under realistic production-rate demands, they can only do pidgin. Not enough time for attended processing. Since grammar is a highly-automated production system (like phonology), it is fairly clear that there is a significance critical period. Tho a small percent of the population manages to circumvent it (the famous/infamous Herman Pevner, perennial undergrad in linguistics at Berkeley in the 1960's, took 9 years to get his BA, was one case I know. Ken Hale was another. My friend Fransesc Queixalos is another).  Cheers,  TG
> 
> ============
> 
> On 12/30/2010 8:58 PM, Eve Sweetser wrote:
>> There is of course the added practical fact that American college instruction (including language teaching) is overall pretty good, while our K-12 system (despite a lot of good and dedicated individual teachers in there) does not overall hold up well to international comparison.  I've known many college students who had had multiple years of Spanish or Chinese in K-12 and had almost no control of the language.  And I've also known many students who quite effectively (though OK, not "semi-natively") acquired their first second language in college - including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or other languages typologically more distant from Western European grammars.  It'd be great if those students had gotten more languages earlier (which is also Kristof's point, I'm sure) - but till they do, the Berkeley campus is still busy teaching languages, and sending students on years abroad too.
>> 
>> 
>> On 12/30/10 6:47 PM, Tom Givon wrote:
>>> 
>>> Brian
>>> 
>>> I goofed on the dates. The first paper is Neville, Mills & Lawson (1992), the second Neville (1995) in the Gazzaniga volume (first edition of The New Cognitive Neuroscience). What they dis was a comparison between 3 populations:  (i) English native speakers, (ii) fluent non-natives who learned English before puberty, and (iii) fluent non-natives who learned  English after puberty. The brain activity of the first two groups were identical, with stong IFG (Broca) activity. The third group shows much reduced IFG activity, compensated by a much higher R-cortex parietal activity--the attentional system. So, while Kissinger, Schwartzeneger (and myself) may be fluent, we do it at the cost of much more attentional demands. I know this from personal experience-- it is much easier to disrupt my grammar fluency by attentional distractors (including emotional ones) that would be much easier to handle for a native speaker.  Cheers, TG
>>> 
>>> ===================
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 12/30/2010 6:28 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote:
>>>> Tom,
>>>> 
>>>>      What Weber-Fox and Neville showed was that two-year-olds have different brain responses to the learning of new words from adult second language learners.  I don't think we need to interpret this as showing critical period effects as much as the effects of trying to learn a second language after the first has been entrenched for say 16 years.  In fact, adults and older children pick up vocabulary and aspects of pragmatics and syntax considerably faster than children, as Swain, Ervin-Tripp, and others have shown.  Where young children excel is in their ability to acquire and hold a native-like accent in phonological output.  It does seem that motor programs have something like a critical period effect, producing cases such as noticeable accents for Henry Kissinger or Arnold Schwarzenegger.  But, in my book, both of those late learners did a fine job of learning English.
>>>>     Still, I can't disagree with your conclusion that we are often wasting our time in instruction at the college level, but this is probably not because of critical period effects, but rather because of poor pedagogy, inadequate contact with native speakers, and sometimes weak motivation.  Does this mean that teaching English in the preschool is universally effective?  Not unless it is accompanied by solid and continual support from both within and outside school.  In Hong Kong, all the children learn English, but not always willingly.  Hungarian children did a great job not learning Russian.  Starting early is a good thing, but the crucial studies that we need to evaluate its relative effectiveness, particularly in the Far East where it is so popular, have not really been done.  It is not totally clear how well the work that was done in Montréal can extend to all cases of early L2 school-based learning.
>>>>    Does the complexity of this debate undercut the importance of L2 and multilingualism as a part of the "message of linguistics?"  In my mind, not at all.  Rather it should be a way of motivating interest on the part of students and further research.
>>>> 
>>>> -- Brian MacWhinney
>>>> 
>>>> On Dec 30, 2010, at 7:14 PM, Tom Givon wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> With all the fuss about what linguistics is good for, there's always the old tried-and-true: Second language&  multilingualism. Nick Kristoff (see URL) may preach about it, but we (hopefully) know about it. And one of the thing we know, and can tell whoever would care to listen, is that starting instruction at high school  or college is a colossal waste of time, money and hope. All you get, in 95% of the cases, is pidginization. Want them to be fluent, grammatical bi/multi-lingual? Catch them at kindergarten&  elementary school. There are some nice neuro-ling papers by Helen Neville&  colleagues from the mid-1980s about the neurology of critical period. This is such a well-known secret, yet most US investment in second-language instruction is blown at the high school&  college level. Those would make sense--only if we start the kids earlier.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Happy New Year,  TG
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/opinion/30kristof.html?ref=opinion
>>>>> 
>>>> 
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