COURSE 1: KEY CONCEPTS AND ISSUES IN SECOND LANGUAGE/FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

Topic and Sub-topics: Key concepts and Issues in second language/foreign language learning Views on the nature of language Levels of language Competence and performance

Overview Questions: 1. What is the meaning of second language? 2. What is the difference between learning and acquisition? 3. Why do we need theories? Levels of language: Phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, lexis, pragmatics and discourse Definition Phonology: A branch of linguistics which studies the sound systems oflanguages. Out of the very wide range of sounds the human vocal apparatus can produce, and which are studied by phonetics, only a relatively small number are used distinctively in any one language (Crystal, 2008:365). Syntax: the part of grammar which concerns the way words are combined into sentences (Leech, 2006: 110) Morphology: the grammar of word structure; the part of grammar (and lexicology) which analyses the structure of words e.g. inflections (-ed,-ing etc) (Leech, 2006: 65) Semantics: A major branch of linguistics devoted to the study of meaning in language (Crystal, 2008: 428). Lexis: A term used in linguistics to refer to the vocabulary of a language,and used adjectivally in a variety of technical phrases. A unit of vocabulary is generally referred to as a lexical item, or lexeme. A complete inventory of the lexical items of a language constitutes that languages dictionary, or lexicon

a term particularly used in generative grammar: items are listed in the lexicon as a set of lexical entries (Crystal, 2008: 279). Pragmatics: The study of speaker meaning as distinct from word and sentence meaning(Yule,1996: 133). Discourse: a particular way of talking about and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world) (Jrgensen and Phillips 2002:1).

Competence and Performance: By competence Chomsky is referring to the abstract and hidden representation of language knowledge held inside our minds, with its potential to create and understand original utterances in a given language. Language performance data are believed to be imperfect reflections of competence, partly because of the processing complications that are involved in speaking other forms of language production, and which lead to errors and slips. Firth: this dualism is such a quite unnecessary nuisance. In the Firthian view, the only option for linguists is to study language in use, and there is no opposition between language as system and observed instances of language behavior; the only difference is one of perspective. Competence and Performance-How do they differ? Competence: Within Chomskyan linguistics, competence is the implicit and abstract knowledge of a language possessed by native speakers. We say implicit because speakers generally are unaware of this knowledge and, even if aware, cannot articulate its contents. We say abstract because it does not consist of rules such as verbs must agree with their subjects, but instead, of other syntactic operations that yield sentences that can be described as having verbs that agree with their subjects. What is more, competence contains information that not only generates grammatical sentences, but also informs speakers of what is impossible in their languages. For example, the native speaker of English has competence that allows the sentences: i. ii. iii. John thinks Mary brought Competition Model what? What does John think Mary brought? John wonders who brought Mary what?

But disallows the sentence i. What does John wonder who brought Mary?

As another example, the simple definition of subject of a sentence eludes the average person. A subject is not the doer of the action, as verbs such as s eem do not have doers but entities that experience something. For example: ii. iii. What did John do? He ate. But not What did John do? ?He seemed sad.

A subject is not the thing that comes before the verb in English as demonstrated by John comes to class and Here comes John. In short, the notion of subject of a sentence is an abstract and implicit notion, and yet, every English speaker intuitively knows what a subject is, or would not be able to make well-formed sentences in English. Again, competence is not a list or set of rules and grammatical forms, but instead a complex interaction of abstract constraints and principles of language that interact to make sentences look the way they look to us. Competence is often contrasted with performance. Performance refers to how people use language in concrete situations. For example, whether or not people contract want to to wanna in Do you wanna go? is a performance matter as Do you want to go? is equally possible. Both are allowed by competence, but people may use one or the other in concrete situations. However, no one would say Who do you wanna tell Bill hes fired? under any circumstance because competence bars contraction of want to in this particular instance. Competence has become a central concern of scholars applying linguistic theory to SLA. One of the main concerns is to what extent learner competence resembles or can resemble native speaker competence, and how to measure it (Van Patten and Benati, 2010:73,74). Performance: Performance is a term that stands in direct contrast to competence or underlying mental representation of language. Whereas these latter terms refer to implicit knowledge that speakers have about language, performance refers to what people do with language when communicating. A speaker knows what a language allows and disallows, even though through that persons speech, one might not be able to discern the full range of allowances and disallowances. Recursion is one example. Recursion refers to embedding as in i. The horse fell;

ii. iii. iv.

The horse that was raced past the barn fell; The horse that was raced past the barn that was built by Farmer McKenzie fell; The horse that was raced past the barn that was built by Farmer McKenzie who was killed in 2009 fell; and so on.

A speaker knows all these sentences are possible and that theoretically one could indefinitely embed. However, in terms of performance, no one embeds indefinitely. Performance is limited by such things as working memory (how much information can be stored on a millisecond by millisecond basis), fatigue (resulting in slips of the tongue, errors in usage), style of language, and so on. In other words, there are performance factors that limit what people do with language even though they know more than what they can do. In research, the distinction between competence and performance becomes important because if the researcher is interested in what an L2 learner implicitly knows about language, then speech may not be the best indicator of that underlying competence. Just because a learner doesnt produce something doesnt mean he or she doesnt know something. As for understanding what learners competences disallow, collected speech samples would not reveal such information. A researcher can only find out what learners competences disallow by creating tests that specifically tap that knowledge. (124 -125) Source: Crystal, David. 2008. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Victoria: Blackwell. Jrgensen, Marianne and Louise Phillips. 2002. Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London: Sage. Leech, Geoffrey Leech. 2006. A Glossary of English Grammar. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mitcell, R. and Florene Myles.2004. Second Language Learning Theories. London: Hodder Arnold. VanPatten, B and Alessandro G. Benati, 2010. Key Terms in Second Language Acquisition. NewYork: Continuum. Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.