28.5293, Review: Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition: Tsang (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-5293. Wed Dec 13 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.5293, Review: Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition: Tsang (2016)

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Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2017 17:04:13
From: Carmen Ortiz Granero [ortizgrc at tcd.ie]
Subject: Crosslinguistic Influence in Multilinguals

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-5159.html

AUTHOR: Wai lan  Tsang
TITLE: Crosslinguistic Influence in Multilinguals
SUBTITLE: An Examination of Chinese-English-French Speakers
SERIES TITLE: Second Language Acquisition
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Carmen Maria Ortiz Granero, Trinity College Dublin

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

“Crosslinguistic Influence in Multilinguals: An Examination of
Chinese-English-French Speakers” by Wai Lan Tsang is based on a research
project funded by the Research Grants Council of the Government of Hong Kong
that examines the possible effects of L3 French in L2 English acquisition of
L1 Cantonese speakers in the setting of multilingual Hong Kong. 
Its structure resembles that of a dissertation, in which the first chapter
provides an introduction to the research project; the second chapter
corresponds to the study design and its methodological implications; Chapter 3
is devoted to the review of the literature; Chapters 4, 5 and 6 present the
results of the study; and Chapter 7 offers a conclusion and future directions.

In Chapter 1 “Overview”, Tsang begins by providing an introduction to the
concept of multilingualism, and presenting Hong Kong as the perfect
multilingual setting to study Second Language Acquisition (L2A), and more
concretely to carry out research in the flourishing field of Third Language
Acquisition (L3A), justified by the fact that more than a third of the
population speak at least three languages. The chapter continues by presenting
an insight into the three key theoretical concepts germane to the present
research project: L3A, reverse transfer, and the Interface Hypothesis (IH); as
well as a review of the literature of L2A from the generative perspective,
which constitutes the grounds for the study. 

Chapter 2 “Design of the L3 French-L2 English Project”, as its name suggests,
aims at presenting the design of the research project and its methodological
dimension, involving research questions and hypotheses, setting, research
instruments, and methodological limitations. Within the foundational research
question of the possible influence of L3 French on L2 English, the study
focuses on two main concerns: 1) the effect of L3 French on CEF
(Cantonese-English-French) participants based on the comparison with CE
(Cantonese-English) participants, which is grounded on the reverse transfer
theory; and 2) the influence of L1 Cantonese on CEF and CE participants by
comparing them to the L1 English native group, built on the Interface
Hypothesis. The study looks at three language features (i.e. nominal plural
marking, past tense marking, and adverb placement) hinging on an analysis
conducted as part of the study, that compares the three languages involved and
identifies similarities and differences that might result in any kind of
language transfer. The author employed three timed offline experimental tasks,
making use of the triangulation method, two focusing on the receptive aspect
of language structures (i.e. a grammaticality judgement-correction task, and a
multiple-choice cloze task), and one on the productive aspect (i.e. a free
writing task).

In Chapter 3 “Target Structures of the L3 French-L2 English Project”, the
three structures targeted in this study are examined. This brief chapter
explores the similarities and differences among the three languages (French,
English and Chinese), serving as an introduction and providing the basics of
the structural background before the results of the project are presented in
the three consecutive chapters. Thus, according to this comparison, L3 reverse
transfer might have a positive effect on English nominal plural marking and
English past tense marking, but a negative impact on English adverb placement.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are presented following the same structure. Each chapter
begins by presenting the set of hypotheses specifically devised to investigate
each of the three structures and answer the overall research question and main
hypotheses proposed in Chapter 2. This is followed by a more in-depth
comparison among the three languages in each of the features, and a review of
the theories connected to those; finally the chapter presents the results
drawn from the research project and their implications for further research.

Chapter 4, entitled “Nominal Plural Marking”, focuses on English number
agreement. Tsang relies on Lardiere’s Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, in which
the learners’ failure to reassemble L1 syntactic features in their acquisition
of L2 syntactic features would result in ungrammatical forms; and the
connection between English plural marking and Sorace’s Interface Hypothesis,
according to which English plural marking would present a vulnerable area for
L1 Chinese speakers, in order to illustrate the difficulty of nominal plural
marking for L1 Chinese speakers. The results obtained do not reveal any trace
of L3-L2 transfer among the participants in the two receptive tasks; however,
the number of missing ‘-s’ plural forms and redundant ‘-s’ forms in the
production task may lead to speculations of the possible role of L3
proficiency.

Chapter 5 “Past Tense Marking” corresponds to the second phase of the L3
French-L2 English project. Past tense marking is explored taking into account
the way in which its two structural features, tense and aspect, have been
studied from functional and generative perspectives. Tsang pays special
attention to the challenges that L1 Chinese face in the acquisition of the
English tense-aspect morphology; as well as the link between English past
tense marking and the IH, by addressing both, the syntax-morphology interface
and the syntax-semantic interface. As in the previous chapter, no evidence of
L3-L2 transfer was found at the receptive level, but the productive task
revealed some statistical differences. Tsang found that not only the CEF group
produced significantly fewer ungrammatical regular verb forms than the CE
group, but also those CEF participants with higher L3 proficiency produced a
lower proportion of ungrammatical instances when compared to the other CEF
participants.

Chapter 6 “Adverb Placement” continues the investigation of the possibility of
L3-L2 reverse transfer by examining another structure of the syntax-semantics
interface, namely placement of frequency adverbs. The two main schools of
thought on adverb placement across languages, semantic and syntactic
perspectives are reviewed. Even though the author addresses both perspectives,
special attention is placed on the syntax-semantic interface due to the role
of IH in the main concern of the project. In this section, the results on
English adverb placement did not show indication of reverse transfer among the
participants, which the author attributes to the high English proficiency of
CEF and CE groups, and the similarities between the L2 English and L1 Chinese
adverbial structures. 

Chapter 7 “Conclusions: The Way Forward” aims to offer an overall discussion
of the findings in the previous chapters in terms of the core research
question and hypotheses stated in Chapter 2. The chapter begins with a summary
of the major findings in terms of the key research questions and concerns, in
which the author attempts to validate the two hypotheses: possible L3-L2
reverse transfer, and possible vulnerability of the internal interfaces. The
receptive tasks did not reveal any significant differences, suggesting the
absence of both reverse transfer and possible vulnerability of the two
internal interfaces; however, the free writing task revealed several
differences in two of the structures. The author does not consider those
differences sufficient to support reverse transfer from the generative
perspective, and instead, suggests a sequence of factors or potential forces
that might be involved in the interaction between L3-L2 and, therefore, might
be considered triggers of such interaction: 1) L3 proficiency, grounded in the
notion that advanced L3 speakers might be able to compare L3 with L2 and L1
and work out the similarities and differences, which leads to conjecture that
L3 will be activated in the learning and use of L2 and enhance interaction
among the two languages; 2) the linguistic feature, since should L3 and L2
share identical or similar properties for a particular structure, transfer
would be more likely to take place; and 3) the differences between productive
and receptive results, which might imply that L3 status is differently
perceived or is activated differently at the two levels. At the end of the
last chapter the author devotes a section to the suggestion for further
research based on the implications stated at the end of chapters 4, 5 and 6.
Tsang proposes the use of more language patterns and more rigorous tests
especially at the receptive level, and provides specific examples of possible
research, highlighting the role of further research on the interaction between
L3 and other languages in benefiting learners and educators.

EVALUATION

The study addressed in this book not only can be considered as innovative and
one of the most sophisticated of the studies examining the phenomenon of
reverse transfer to date, but it also constitutes the first project analysing
crosslinguistic influence in the L1 Chinese-L2 English-L3 French context. It
provides an exceptional contribution to the study of the acquisition of
grammatical structures from the typological perspective, as its author relies
on the contributions of Cenoz (2001) and de Angelis (2007) on second and third
language acquisition as the cornerstone for the study.

It is unfortunate, however, that the amount of null results (i.e. no trace of
transfer at the receptive level and adverbial structure) and the wording
chosen when reporting the findings (e.g. ‘likely’, ‘may’, ‘possible’),
together with the ever-present suggestions for further research, make the
study appear inconclusive and in need of further exploration, especially
Chapter 6 in which no statistical differences are found and which does not
corroborate the results obtained in the two previous chapters. As the author
considers in the last chapter, these limitations are possibly linked to
methodological issues, principally due to the nature of the tasks (i.e. more
controlled vs. less controlled, or receptive vs. productive). These issues
could have been avoided at the time of the research, by either conducting an
exploratory pilot study prior to the data collection, as suggested by Galloway
(2017), or questioning and adjusting the research tools, as proposed by Briggs
(2017).

Although the book is most appropriate for professionals or researchers in the
field of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) and multilingualism, due to its
technicality, it could also be regarded as  a valuable source of insight for
undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics, since it provides an
extensive introduction to the concepts of multilingualism and L3A and
illustrates and synthesises the latest trends and relevant literature on the
topic. 
Part of project had been previously reported in two articles (see Tsang, 2015;
and Tsang, 2016). In 2015, Tsang delved into the relationship between language
learning and perceived language differences based on a placement questionnaire
and a questionnaire in linguistic perception, in which she observed that
higher proficiency in the L3 might result in an enhanced crosslinguistic
experience, as it has been lately reported in the book. In the later article
(Tsang, 2016) explores the role of L3-French on the acquisition of English
nominal plural marking, by comparing the CEF and CE groups performance in the
grammaticality judgment-correction task and the free writing task. As
highlighted in Chapter 4, results from the free writing task show possible
traces of L3- French influence on L2-English. Overall, these two articles
offer a more detailed account of the methodological dimension, including
participants, research tools and the data collection process, which could be
useful for researchers.

The author endeavours to contribute to the field of second and third language
acquisition in three aspects: theoretical, exploring the notion of reverse
transfer in the CEF context for the first time; methodological, through the
exemplification of which tools could be used for the study of reverse
transfer; and pedagogical, by offering suggestions for educators that deal
with multilingual learners. The theoretical and methodological goals are
undoubtedly well covered, yet the pedagogical contribution seems to be very
limited, as Tsang only dedicates a paragraph at the end of the last chapter in
which she mentions the importance of the role of awareness among students and
educators, but fails to provide specific information or concrete examples.

REFERENCES

Briggs, J. G. (2017) Grappling with originality and grounding in qualitative
data analysis. In J. McKinley and H. Rose (eds) Doing Research in Applied
Linguistics: Realities, dilemmas and solutions. Routledge: London.

Cenoz, J. (2001) The effect of linguistic distance, L2 status and age on
cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition. In J. Cenoz, B.
Hufeisen and U. Jessner (eds) Crosslinguistic Influence in Third Language
Acquisition: Psycholinguistic Perspectives (pp.8-20). Clevedon: Multilingual
Matters.

De Angelis, G. (2007) Third or Additional Language Acquisition. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters.

Galloway, N. (2017) Researching your own students: Negotiating the dual
practitioner-research role. In J. McKinley and H. Rose (eds) Doing Research in
Applied Linguistics: Realities, dilemmas and solutions. Routledge: London.

Tsang, W. L. (2015). Learning More, Perceiving More? A Comparison of L1
Cantonese–L2 English–L3 French Speakers and L1 Cantonese–L2 English Speakers
in Hong Kong. International Journal Of Multilingualism, 12(3), 312-337.

Tsang, W. L. (2016). Acquisition of English number agreement: L1 Cantonese–L2
English–L3 French speakers versus L1 Cantonese–L2 English speakers.
International Journal Of Bilingualism, 20(5), 611.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Carmen Ortiz is a PhD candidate based in the Center for English Language
Learning and Teaching at Trinity College Dublin researching the factors
responsible for the language-related challenges experienced by international
students in Irish institutions. She holds a BA in English Studies from
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha and a MSc in TESOL from Queen’s University
Belfast. Her previous research has focused on Second Language Acquisition, and
more specifically on English-Spanish Bilingual Education in Spain. Overall,
her research interests lie in the field of multilingualism, teaching
methodologies, and language teaching and learning.





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