25.640, Review: Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Linguistic Theories; Syntax; French: Ayoun (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-640. Fri Feb 07 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.640, Review: Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Linguistic Theories; Syntax; French: Ayoun (2013)

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Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2014 10:23:27
From: Melissa Whatley [melwhatl at indiana.edu]
Subject: The Second Language Acquisition of French Tense, Aspect, Mood and Modality

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-3227.html

AUTHOR: Dalila  Ayoun
TITLE: The Second Language Acquisition of French Tense, Aspect, Mood and Modality
SERIES TITLE: AILA Applied Linguistics Series 10
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Melissa Whatley, Indiana University Bloomington

SUMMARY

In the preface of “The Second Language Acquisition of French Tense, Aspect,
Mood and Modality,” the author, Dalila Ayoun, indicates that previous studies
of the acquisition of temporal-aspectual systems have largely focused on
past-time expression and rarely include modality in their analyses. The goals
of this book are three-fold: (1) to contribute to previous literature on the
acquisition of tense-aspect as well as modality from a generative perspective,
(2) to connect linguistic theory with second language (L2) acquisition, and
(3) to make findings accessible to instructors of French.

Chapter 1, entitled “Tense, temporality and aspect,” gives a general overview
of the concepts of time, tense and aspect, including a brief discussion of how
researchers have previously operationalized tense and aspect as well as
Vendlerian aspectual class. The remainder of the chapter describes and
elaborates on the temporal-aspectual systems, including past, present, and
future forms, in both French and English, and highlights the differences
between the two systems. Chapter 2, “Mood and modality,” does the same for
French and English mood, in the case of French, and modality, in the case of
English systems, and compares and contrasts the two.

Chapter 3, “Tense, aspect, modality and the minimalist program,” gives a
comprehensive historical overview of Generative grammar, beginning with
Chomsky’s initial proposal that humans possess an innate language faculty,
then walking the reader through Principles-and-Parameters Theory, and finally,
introducing the Minimalist Program. The author spends considerable time
outlining the main concepts behind grammatical features, focusing on
interpretable and uninterpretable syntactic features incorporated into a
discussion of functional categories. This section is then followed by an
application of these Minimalist assumptions specifically to tense/aspect and
mood/modality systems, in general, and later with a focus on these systems as
instantiated in both English and French, in particular. The author introduces
multiple theoretical approaches that have been proposed to account for the
temporal, aspectual, and modal (TAM) differences that exist between these two
languages. Once this background information about how TAM is viewed within a
Minimalist framework is presented, the author goes on to apply these
theoretical assumptions to language acquisition with a focus on the assembly
of feature bundles. This chapter also summarizes the multiplicity of
theoretical models of second language acquisition within the Generative
framework, which are divided into two groups: impairment hypotheses and access
to Universal Grammar hypotheses. The author is rather critical of the
literature claiming support for impairment hypotheses, and this criticism
extends to a discussion of the Critical Period Hypothesis, which forms part of
the basis for impairment hypotheses. This chapter concludes with a brief
discussion of hypotheses claiming access to Universal Grammar, which appear to
be more favorably received by the author.

Chapter 4, “The second language acquisition of tense, mood and aspect,” gives
an overview of the literature investigating the acquisition of these three
verb forms in L2 French. The chapter is divided into two sections:
non-generative approaches and generative approaches. Main trends emerging from
the literature review from non-generative perspectives are that: (1) in
past-time, perfective forms emerge before imperfective forms, (2) in the
future, learners are able to use several morphological forms, and (3)
subjunctive accuracy is very low for most learners. In general, these studies
indicate that learners can and do acquire native-like verb systems with
success. Since very few studies of the acquisition of TAM from a generative
perspective for L2 French exist, the second section of the chapter is
supplemented by generative studies from other L2s, including English, Spanish,
and Portuguese, as well as work on heritage learners of Russian and Spanish.
The focus of this section is on whether or not native-like attainment is
possible in the acquisition of L2 tense, aspect, and modality systems. As with
non-generative studies, the main focus of these generative studies is the
acquisition of tense and aspect distinctions. The majority of these studies
find that native-like temporal and aspectual systems are attainable for
learners, while only one claims to support an impairment hypothesis. Studies
on heritage speakers indicate that TAM systems can undergo attrition and are
also vulnerable to incomplete acquisition.

Chapter 5, which is divided into three sections (5.1 “Methodology and
findings: Production tasks,” 5.2 “Findings: Cloze tests,” and 5.3 “Findings:
Sentence completion tasks”), presents the results of a study analyzing both
free and controlled production data from a group of beginning, intermediate,
and advanced learners of L2 French. Participants completed free production,
sentence completion, and cloze tasks designed to elicit subjunctive, past
tense, future tense, and modal verbs in written form. The study was designed
to answer four main research questions:  1) Does learner interlanguage display
contrasts and systematicity?, 2) Does learner performance improve with
proficiency level?, 3) Do learners use inflectional morphology appropriately?,
and 4) Is there a task effect and, if so, does task interact with proficiency
level?

The first section of Chapter 5 presents the results from four production
tasks, all produced by learners within a five-week period. The first
production task was designed to elicit the subjunctive, while the second
attempted to elicit future verb forms and third person past verb forms. The
results from these tasks show four main trends: 1) participants overwhelmingly
used present indicative forms even when the tasks were designed to elicit
other types of verb forms, 2) all three proficiency groups use a wide variety
of morphological forms, 3) verbal morphology is in general accurate, even for
the beginning proficiency group, and 4) the most frequently used forms are the
same for all three proficiency groups.

The second section of Chapter 5 presents the results from the cloze tests; one
was meant to elicit future time forms and the other two intended on eliciting
past temporality. These tasks indicate that as proficiency increases, accuracy
on all three tasks improves, with better overall performance on the
future-time task than the past-time tasks. A comparison of Vendlerian lexical
classes (i.e. state, activity, and telic) within each task indicates that
learners are more accurate on states than activity and telic predicates, both
in future- and past-time contexts.

The third and final section of Chapter 5 presents results from two sentence
completion tasks; one elicited the subjunctive and the other elicited modal
verbs. The results from the two sentence completion tasks show two clear
trends: an increase of accuracy with proficiency level as well as an effect
for modal verb, with some modals more accurate produced than others. Within
the subjunctive sentence completion task, accuracy varies for all three
participant groups according to the type of trigger used to elicit the
subjunctive. The findings for the modal verb sentence completion task indicate
that multiple verb forms may be considered correct in the minimal contexts
provided by a sentence completion task, thus adding to the complexity of this
set of verbs.

The final section of Chapter 5 synthesizes the results from all three task
types by answering each of the four research questions individually. As far as
research question one was concerned (i.e. Does learner interlanguage display
contrasts and systematicity?), the results indicate that learners do display
contrast and systematicity in their use of perfective and imperfective forms
in the past tense, but this performance is much better on the free production
task than on the two, more controlled tasks. Learners overall perform better
with aspectual contrast than they do with mood contrast or with modal verbs.
Research question two asked if learner performance improved with proficiency
level, and the answer to this question is ‘yes.’ The more advanced learners
consistently performed better than the intermediate and beginner learner
groups on all tasks. The third research question asked if learners used
target-like verbal inflectional morphology, a question that the author answers
positively. Finally, the fourth research question was concerned with task
effects.  Results indicate that learners were generally more accurate on the
production tasks than the cloze tasks and that beginning learners were more
sensitive to task effects than the higher proficiency groups. In conclusion,
the author relates the findings of the study presented here with the
minimalist perspective of second language syntactic development. She notes
that the learners participating in this particular study generally performed
poorly on low frequency forms as well as on morphological forms situated at
interfaces. This latter finding supports the main claim of the Interface
Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011).

Chapter 6, “Pedagogical implications for foreign language teachers and
learners,” reviews the application of second language research to language
teaching pedagogy. The author points to a tension between experimental SLA and
language pedagogy, indicating that recent SLA research may ease this tension
as it often focuses on language pedagogy. The opinion of the author is that
collaboration among researchers, teachers, and learners is the key to more
successful investigations. The second section of this chapter summarizes
current pedagogical issues, particularly pertaining to the acquisition of TAM.
The author points towards multiple empirical studies that indicate that the
rules to which learners are exposed in their textbooks, as well as textbook
explanations of TAM, often do not accurately reflect the target language and
fall short of giving learners the tools to differentiate among verb forms in
the target language. This section offers suggestions for improvements language
pedagogues may make in order to resolve this shortcoming. Section 3 of this
chapter reviews selected literature on classroom-based studies of TAM in both
Canadian immersion settings as well as the North American classroom. These
studies point to the great variety of instructional approaches to teaching
tense, aspect, and mood as well as to the difficulties of measuring their
efficacy.

Section 4 of Chapter 6 discusses the importance of input, saliency, and
frequency for the acquisition of TAM, indicating that the most infrequent
forms are also often the more difficult to acquire. This section includes a
discussion particularly addressing the complexities of the “futur antérieur,”
indicative-subjunctive alternation, and modal verbs. The chapter continues
with a section devoted to effective pedagogical approaches for teaching TAM
that briefly discusses the various factors influencing acquisition in a
classroom setting, including an innate language acquisition device, learners’
cognitive abilities, as well as a variety of affective factors. The author
continues with a discussion of four basic elements of a foreign language
learning context:  input and interaction, feedback, output, and intake. These
subsections summarize previous research, specifically as it pertains to TAM
when possible. Chapter 6 continues with a discussion of current instructional
approaches and hypotheses, including processing instruction, focus on form(s)
and focus on meaning approaches, and also a discussion of several hypotheses
and theories about language learning in the classroom setting, including the
Counterbalance Hypothesis, the Teachability Hypothesis, Processability Theory,
and the Competing System Hypothesis. The chapter concludes with a discussion
of the use of modern technology in the foreign language classroom and also
offers several practical suggestions for classroom teachers.

In Chapter 7, the concluding chapter of the book, the author gives a brief
overview of each section of the book, summarizing and highlighting the most
important points of each, and then offering directions for future research.
Several verb forms are highlighted as fertile ground for future
investigations, including present temporality, future temporality, mood and
modality, and modals and modal expression. This chapter concludes the book
with a discussion of methodological issues for the investigation of the L2
acquisition of TAM.

EVALUATION

The goals of this book, clearly stated in its introduction and conclusion
sections, were to contribute to the impressive body of research on the L2
acquisition of tense, aspect, and mood/modality, to bridge the gap between
linguistic theory and second language acquisition, and to make empirical
findings more accessible to language instructors. This evaluation will focus
on how these goals were addressed and whether or not they were met.

The first goal, to add to the body of literature on the L2 acquisition of
time, aspect, and mood/modality, was evidenced by the various sections of
Chapter 5 in which the author presented results from a research project using
multiple means of elicitation. The use of multiple elicitation tasks most
certainly offered the triangulated data lacking in many studies of L2 TAM, as
studies tend to focus on the results of a single task. One wonders, however,
whether or not several of the claims put forth by the author were, in fact,
substantiated empirically. In this section, the author referred to learners’
use of a variety of verb forms as either native- or non-native-like, but did
not offer data from native speakers to support this interpretation. The same
can be said of claims about the influence of frequency, put forth in both
Chapters 5 and 6. While several researchers have investigated the frequency of
verb forms in native speaker production, as cited in this book, current work
on the frequency of verb forms in input directed to foreign language classroom
learners of French is lacking. Future work in these two areas, the use of
these verb forms by native speakers, and their frequency of use in the
classroom, is necessary for  advancement in the field devoted to studying
their acquisition. Additionally, the author of this study made reference to
correct and incorrect forms produced by learners, but offered no account of
how these forms were identified.

The second goal of this book, to bridge the gap between linguistic theory and
second language acquisition, was addressed at the end of Chapter 5 where the
author integrated findings from her empirical study with minimalism. This
section very clearly linked findings with theoretical principles, but could
have benefited from a more in depth explanation of these connections.

Finally, the third goal put forth by the author for this book was to make
empirical findings more accessible to language teachers. It was here where the
author succeeded the most, as the beginning sections of the book did an
excellent job of explaining difficult concepts in a manner that is accessible
to readers who do not necessarily have extensive experience in linguistics.
Chapter 4 was especially accessible to the novice reader. The practicality of
empirical investigations to language pedagogy was clarified yet again in
Chapter 6, where the author made very clear connections between language
science and language pedagogy, and even offered practical applications of the
previously presented empirical study.

Not only is this book an interesting read for researchers who investigate the
L2 acquisition of tense and aspect, but Chapter 6, in particular (“Pedagogical
implications for foreign language learners and teachers”), is particularly
applicable to the classroom. The ideas explored in this chapter provide the
foreign language instructor with the opportunity to reflect on the impact of
linguistic input in the classroom on learners developing interlanguage
systems. Finally, sections of this book may be appropriate for an overview
course on French second language acquisition or a seminar on the acquisition
of morphosyntax.

REFERENCE

Sorace, A. (2011). Pinning down the concept of interface in bilingualism.
“Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism,” 1, 1-33.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Melissa Whatley is a doctoral student in Hispanic Linguistics at Indiana
University whose research interests include second language acquisition with a
special emphasis on learning context, the L2 acquisition of past-time
expression, and the L2 acquisition of sociolinguistic competence.








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