L2 endstate and_dynamic_l2_interlanguage.edited

L2 Endstate: a non-age based theory Dynamic interlanguage systems and usage-based learning mechanisms By Nigel P. Daly

Today’s plan 1. Dynamic systems 2. Article Language learning mechanisms L2 language learning mechanisms  limited endstate 3. Discussion 1: IL as Dynamic systems 4. Discussion 2: EFL Pedagogy?

Issues and Questions Dynamic systems (DS) … linear vs nonlinear Is a classroom (with ss and T) dynamic? HOW? - - - - -

Issues and Questions Dynamic systems (DS) … Dynamism: the systems change over time Adaptation and learning: complex systems change in response to environmental conditions to retain coherence Heterogeneity of elements/agents: interacting parts may be of different kinds and components of different systems Openness: energy or influence comes from external sources or systems Nonlinear: causes of changes are not necessarily proportional to their effects (from Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, p. 22-36)

Issues and Questions Dynamic systems Dynamism: changes in time Adaptation and learning: complex systems change in response to environmental conditions to retain coherence - Heterogeneity of elements/agents: interacting parts may be of different kinds and components of different systems Openness: energy or influence comes from external sources or systems Nonlinear: causes of changes are not necessarily proportional to their effects Classroom  diff targets, mats, activities, moods  T & ss interact, e.g., T spends more or less time on certain learning  Diff people, materials, activities, TBs, tests  Ss and T bring experiences and language from outside  Low salience, require more time to learn

Traditional disagreement to understanding social phenom. Social scientists and educators have been interested in social phenom to Understand it, and/or 2. To develop models of efficient or optimal conditions for working, managing, producing or learning.

Traditional disagreement to understanding social phenom. Perhaps the biggest challenge is to resolve the macro-micro relationship. Or, How do we understand individuals and society/group?

Traditional disagreement to understanding social phenom. Social theorists have traditionally seen this as an either/or problem. SOCIETY OR INDIVIDUAL (totality of individuals) (socialized, society microcosm)

Traditional disagreement to understanding social phenom. Structuralism Soc  inds (social determinism, Marx) Inds  Soc (methodological individualism, classical economics [Hayek]) Response to this approach? Interactionism Interaction of ind and soc  inds & soc (Foucault “discourse”, Bourdieu “habitus”)

Synthesis? – Sawyer’s DS Thesis: Marx (ind = soc) or Hayek (soc=ind’s) Antithesis: Interaction determines Soc and inds (Foucault, Bourdieu) Synthesis: Sawyer, R.K. (2005) Social emergence: Societies as complex systems. Cambridge: CUP.

Language as a DS Revision: Interaction: Syntax, semantics, phonology in communication Individual: Words, morphemes, phonemes

Usage-based and form-focused language acquisition “ Handbook” Article (general overview) in 2 halves dealing with L2 learning: 1. Systematic influences of frequency , contingency , semantic complexity (multiple cues) and broader aspects of salience and syntactic category 2. L1 entrenchment leads to interference, overshadowing, blocking, and perceptual learning , i.e., the prevention of input from becoming intake for certain “fragile features” of L2

Question Leo: It seems to me that the associative learning of linguistic construction puts emphasis on learners’ experience of encountering/using the language and accumulation of prior experience. Such being the case, in addition to the factors discussed in the article, do we need to consider other factors like social and environmental factors?

Language learning Factors that affect both L1A and L2A

Frequency Learners need to learn the probability distribution P(interpretation / cue, context) : “ the probability of an interpretation given a formal cue in a particular context, a mapping from form to meaning conditioned by context” (p.374)

Frequency Input serves to create form-function mappings that (in optimal situations) lead to a concordance -type of retrieval system

Cue and outcome learning is not just frequency-based, … but also depends on the contingency of the cue-outcome rel’ship

Contingency Stimulus-response  Reliability of the language form to predict interpretation that determines its acquisition

Contingency P = P(O/C) – P(O/-C) = a/(a+b) – c/(c+d) Shows probability of the outcome of cue (P/O/C) minus the probability of the outcome without cue (P(O/-C) Outcome No outcome Cue a b No cue c d

Contingency P = P(O/C) – P(O/-C) = a/(a+b) – c/(c+d) ∆ P = 1 presence of cue increases likelihood of outcome (+ assoc) ∆ P = 0 cue may equally  outcome or no outcome ∆ P = -1 presence of cue decreases likelihood of outcome (- assoc)

Contingency Not always clear 1:1 mappings with cue and grammatical interpretation Ex homophone morphemes “s” (or allomorphs of “s”) Contingency analysis: plural “s” cue is made less clear (some plurals don’t require “s”) and thus reduces ∆P, suggesting they will not be readily learnable

Contingency The fuzziness and complexity of mappings , such as plural “s” or “the” explain why their hard to acquire

Cues rarely exist in isolation, … so learner has to decide from multiple cues which ones are predictive …

Multiple cues, the PCM, and Cue-competition Step 1: select most valid cue using statistical contingency analysis Step 2: introduce cues thereafter on the basis of their potential to decrease error Probabilistic Contrast Model (PCM) MacWhinney’s Competition Model

Multiple cues, the PCM, and Cue-competition Early Language learners only focus on 1 cue at time Children 1. earlier - focus on the cue that has the highest validity measured by its availability (freq) x its reliability (∆P) high availability is the natural cue for children, over reliability 2. later - children can factor other cues into the interpretation equation, like reliability

Question: usage = input + output)? Glavine: In 2.3, I feel confused about the idea mentioned by Ellis: “the cue that children first focus upon is that which has the highest overall validity as measured by its availability times its reliability.” Does this idea refer to input, or linguistic development?

Salience of cue and importance of outcome are other factors

Salience Strength of conditioning between and cue and outcome depends on relative physical intensity, Salience = “intensity of the subjective experience of stimuli” (p.379)

Salience Rescorla and Wagner (1972) verified the following equation from several empirically rigorous experiments: dV = ab(L-V) V = associative strength of outcome to cue; dV = the change in V occurring in each trial of conditioning a = salience of outcome b = salience of cue L = amt of processing given to a completely unpredicted outcome

Salience dV = ab(L-V) low salience cues with low outcome importance – especially for “everyday communicative survival”, dV on any learning trial will be trivial and may never be acquired Ex 1. 3 rd person “s”, 2. grammatical function words and bound inflections tend to be short and low in stress and thus hard to recognize (NS only hear 40-50% in clipped speech, bottom-up vs connected speech top-down)

Salience Children L1 studies: only after critical mass of words are known can they start to perceive grammatical words to right or left of content words Lenition can occur in language learning to language change: one’s own l2 life (Chinese prosody) in a generation of language users (a-wight) and over generations to the modification of the language itself (Latin  French)

Interacting factors G oldschneider & Dekeyser (2001; G&D) proposed acquisition order is not just a frequency effect, but a combination of 5 determinants: 1. perceptual salience: # of phones in functor + presence/absence of vowel + relative sonority of functor 2. semantic complexity 3. morphological regularity: phonological variation and allomorphy (e.g., plural “ s ” sound) + contractability (multiple forms of cue) + homophony 4. syntactic category 5. frequency

Interacting factors D&G (2001) Data from 12 studies, with 924 participants were analyzed: 3 factors significantly correlated with acquisition order: · perceptual salience r=0.63 · frequency r=0.44 · morphological regularity r=0.41 Multiple regression analysis: 3 factors + semantic complexity + syntactic category  71% of the variance in acquisition order (salience having highest predictive power on its own)

L1 (& L2) Language Learning DS

Factors specific to L2 learning Why is Nativelike competence rare for adult L2 learners? Or, What prevents input  intake ?

Limited endstate of usage-based SLA Associative language learning from naturalistic usage  “ Basic Variety ” of IL: ok for everyday communication with mostly nouns, verbs and adverbs, but with little or no functional inflection, and few subordinating elements, determiners and prepositions

Interference interactions of memories of similar experiences  memory failure retroactive interference: remembering new  forget old Proactive inhibition : prior learning inhibiting new learning Adding new associations  forget others ( “ Response competition model ” ): “ when multiple traces are associated with same cue, they tend to compete for acc ess to unconscious awareness ” (p.384)

Interference Lado ’ s Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH): L1 interferes with L2 Proactive inhibition = negative transfer from L1 to L2 ( faux amis or typological diff), but positive edge can be seen with cognates (French and English) Similarities and differences between L1 and L2 influence the acquisition of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation Word learning principles from more general aspects of cognition involving associative learning processes like proactive inhibition in learning an L2 word for something that already has an L1 equivalent

Overshadowing and blocking Overshadowing: 2 cues lead to an outcome, but the more salient cue will be more associated with outcome, thus overshadowing the other AND with Rescorla-Wagner equation, the more a cue is associated with an outcome, the less possible it will be for an outcome have additional associations (i.e., cues); latent inhibition makes less salient cues more difficult to learn in future

Overshadowing and blocking Blocking: a type of “ learned selective attention ” due to overshadowing (ie automatically learned inattention)

Overshadowing and blocking Conclusion: “ human statistical reasoning is bound by selective attention effects whereby informative cues are ignored as a result of overshadowing or blocking ” (p.387) Learned inattention can be “ pervasive and longstanding ” and further learning about the cue is attenuated/lessened

Overshadowing and blocking Redundancy of language forms much more import in L2A than in L1A – e.g., children learn adv phrases quite late, unlike L2 learners who quickly learn and tend to focus on use of adv time phrases instead of morph inflections for tense (pace VanPAtten) Also, plural inflections overshadowed by S-V combo

Overshadowing and blocking Non-acquisition of low salient cues due to overshadowing from L1 which may direct learner attention to other areas for cue to interpretation  making redundant all other input and leading to “ fossilized ” or “ stabilized ” basic variety of IL

Overshadowing and blocking Pedagogical response? Retune selective attention (F-on-F or consciousness raising, like VP ’ s PI) to help learners notice the cue and raise it to salience and provide meaningful input

Question … over-optimism? Lily: The author gave various research findings to support other non-age factors, and claimed that L2 learners are actually being “blocked” by these factors rather than “fossilized”. However, can these finding continually explain what happens after they are being “blocked”? How come that after explicit instructions and learning, most L2 adult learners still can not fully acquire the target forms whereas L2 children can? How about automaticity? How come she learned third person singular “-s” when she was six and is now using it without any effort whereas I learned this form when I was 12, and I still have to “think” before I say it?

Perceptual learning Tuning that automatically emerges as a result of exemplars influencing the “organization of the whole system and the dimensions of the underlying psychological space” (p.390) “ Raquel” 

Perceptual learning Example of perceptual learning is “feature imprinting”: People can decompose complex objects based on their experience with the component parts, so once trained to see object in a specific way, that perception will be incremented in subsequent processing episodes. Example 1: training to recognize certain dot formations will influence future dot configuration interpretations Example 2: Chinese and Japanese speakers see characters as wholes, but learners see them as grouping of strokes or components (p.394) (Q: also apply to the writing of characters for NS?)

Perceptual learning Sound categories and categorical perception of L1 subject to perceptual learning Neural state of infants learning L1 is a plasticity, or tabula rasa (blank slate) that later becomes a tabula repleta (full slate) when L1 is learned, causing strong negative transfer , e.g., “l” and “r” in Japanese, and articles for Chinese. Transfer which requires restructuring existing categories is difficult

Perceptual learning “ perceptual magnet theory” (Kuhl and Iverson, 1995) – preexisting categories serve as magnets for items which do not fit categorically in the existing system, and the result is to distort the perception of the new items by attracting them into the vicinity of the original category’s perceptual space. (p.393)

Perceptual learning + Question In normal L1A, input naturally tunes language system, but “sad irony” for L2A is that in normal L2A, “more input compounds the error” (p.394); Sandy: I am not certain of Ellis’ point when discussing the issue of more input will lead to error for L2 speakers (p. 394). Does this indicate that the sensitivity of L2 acoustic cues will interfere with learners’ speaking and listening? What kind of input does the author refer to? [… lead to error = lead to “reinforcement” of error?]

Perceptual Learning McClelland presents a connectionist simulation using a self-organizing map network that verifies “diabolically” maintain tendency [Q: models are programmed with codes, though … so how it represents a closed system = pessimistic if it represents humans and their learning (un)potential]

L2 Morpheme Acq. Order Transfer effects in L2 morpheme acquisition order Influence of L1 on SLA, diff L1’s will have different negative transfer effects Ex article, plural acquisition for speakers of an L1 without these, like Japanese and Korean

L2 Morpheme Acq.Order Dulay and Burt (1974) study suggests that Japanese and Korean L1 children have more difficulty learning indef article and plural “s” than Spanish and Chinese children [Chinese …?!] Results: Differences in rank of order acquis between monolingual NS children and L2 learners of English from diff L1 backgrounds

L2 Morpheme Acq.Order Also overgeneralization errors from L1 influence. Taylor (1975) found that elementary ss made more transfer errors , while intermediate ss made more overgeneralization errors  “two distinctive linguistic manifestations of one psychological process” (Taylor, 1975b, p.87)

Issues and Questions Kate: In factors special to L2, it seems that the major problems of interference, overshadowing and blocking, and perceptual learning result from the fact that L2 is learned after L1. So, if two languages are learned at the same time, do these problems still exist?

Conclusion System is more than the sum of its parts, it is a “highly variable dynamic system” (p.397) “ Every usage is dynamically influenced by the interactions among different parts of the system that are unique in time” (p.396) SLA is not stepwise, but on a multidimensional continuum, e.g., Bayley’s (1994) study of past tense morphology in advanced Chinese learners of English, involving tense, aspects, phonetic saliency, phonological processes that converge with morphological classes, as well as social and developmental factors

L2 IL as DS Ontology of learning and IL? Glavine: According to Ellis, the perceptual systems may alter the sensitivity to stimulus features, and learners can become more sensitive to those which are psychologically significant dimensions of variation among the stimuli. I am thinking about if this perceptual system can be considered as one part, or similar construct of interlagnuage development. If they are similar, how can learners be trained to develop the perceptual system? Only by making mistakes?

Issues and Questions Complex Dynamic Systems 1. Do you think N. Ellis means when he says that the IL is dynamic system whose “whole does not equal the sum of its parts”? Do you agree? Leo: In the section of conclusion, N. Ellis talked about the complex system. According to Larsen-Freeman, SLA can be regarded as a complex dynamic system and learning a language changes the knowledge system , rather than adding to the system. And SLA varies in terms of the nature of the interaction among all the elements, including individual and social factors. SLA is always in movement and never reaches equilibrium . Perhaps this can provide another perspective on the attainment of adult SLA.

Issues and Questions 1. N. Ellis is trying to provide a non-age dependent explanation for L2 limited endstate. That is, he is providing a number of cognitive learning scenarios that he also thinks apply to SLA. Are you convinced? 2. Some researchers, like VanPatten, think that language acquisition cannot be comparable to other forms of skill acquisition. Do you think language learning uses different learning mechanisms or principles than other forms of learning (e.g., learning Tae kwon Do)?

Issues and Questions Pedagogy 1. Lily: If L2 acquisition is proved to be affected by prior knowledge, in particular, our L1, how does this fact challenge teaching? Moreover, how do we deal with the L1-L2 trade-off issue? (Leo Q.7 aslo, how to help ss overcome L1 influence?) 2. How does your awareness of your students’ learning problems (due to your familiarly with Chinese and L1 entrenchment) affect your teaching materials, methods or expectations? 3. Because some educators are pessimistic about L2 endstate (especially for unmotivated High School and College L2 learners), they might lower their expectations or limit their teaching focus to certain aspects of L2 learning. If you didn’t feel you had to teach to a test or teach a fixed curriculum, what would you like to focus on with your students?

Issues and Questions Pedagogy

End Thank you for your attention.

L2 endstate and_dynamic_l2_interlanguage.edited

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