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Plenary speakers
Inge Bartning
Stockholm University, Sweden:
Exploring high level proficiency in SLA - the case of French L2
Michael H. Long
University of Maryland, USA:
Age differences, aptitudes, and ultimate L2 attainment
Silvina Montrul
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA:
Are heritage languages like second languages?
Florence Myles
Newcastle University, UK:
L2 corpora and second language acquisition research
Abstracts
Inge Bartning
Stockholm University, Sweden:
Exploring high level proficiency in SLA - the case of French L2
The talk will take as a starting point a short presentation of the InterFra corpus at Stockholm university (www.fraita.su.se/interfra) and of earlier results of developmental stages in French L2. This presentation also includes an ongoing joint research programme that explores features of non-/nativelikeness, called High level proficiency in second language use at five departments at the same university (www.biling.su.se/AAA~).
In order to contribute to the debate on native-likeness and to explain recent results in the oral production of high level proficiency in French L2 we try to identify domains where there still are interesting differences between L2 users and native speakers, namely formulaic language, organisation of information structure, morpho-syntactic deviances and fluency. The data come from three groups of advanced to near-native speakers (so called ‘late learners’) and a native control group. Our hypothesis is that there may be interesting interdependencies between the four domains that illustrate both resources and fragile zones in the NNS production (Bartning, Forsberg & Hancock 2009 and Bartning, Forsberg Lundell & Hancock, submitted). Furthermore results from a native listener test of ‘passing as a native’ will be presented (cf. Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam 2009). Based on these results as well as on the listener test, a proposition of a new developmental stage just prior to the ‘near-native, will be made. The discussion will also be linked to the ongoing debate of the performance model of CAF (complexity, accuracy and fluency) concerning the interdependence between the three phenomena (Housen & Kuiken 2009). The results will be discussed in the light of other theoretical perspectives such as implicit/explicit knowledge, effects of bilingualism/L1 transfer and ‘optionality’.
References
Abrahamsson, N. & Hyltenstam, K. (2009). Age of L2 acquisition and degree of nativelikeness – listener perception vs linguistic scrutiny. Language Learning58 (3), 249-306.
Bartning, I., Forsberg, F. & Hancock, V. (2009). Resources and obstacles in very advanced L2 French. Formulaic language, information structure and morphosyntax. EUROSLA Yearbook, 9, 185-211.
Bartning, I., Forsberg Lundell, F. & Hancock, V. submitted. On the role of linguistic contextual factors for morpho-syntactic stabilization in high-level L2 French. Studies in second language acquisition, 2012.
Housen, A. & Kuiken, F. (2009). Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency in Second Language Acquisition. Applied Linguistics30/4, 461-473.
Michael H. Long
University of Maryland, USA:
Age differences, aptitudes, and ultimate L2 attainment
Claims for a biologically based schedule for language learning were first advanced 50 years ago. 100+ studies later, debates continue as to the existence, scope and timing of one or more sensitive periods for SLA. I will begin by summarizing the current state of play.
In a recent development, a number of researchers have suggested that the very few learners who achieve near-native L2 abilities do so because of superior language learning aptitude(s). I will review the somewhat conflicting results on relationships between aptitudes for implicit and explicit language learning and levels of ultimate L2 attainment by child and adult learners, and report on some recent findings from a study (Granena & Long, 2010) of 65 naturalistic Chinese learners of Spanish, long-term residents of Spain.
Finally, I will discuss some implications of research findings on these issues for (S)LA theory and for educational policy.
Silvina Montrul
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA:
Are heritage languages like second languages?
In recent years there has been increasing interest in the linguistic knowledge and language learning abilities of heritage speakers. In the context of the United States, heritage speakers are bilinguals who were exposed to a minority language at home (typically an immigrant language), either as the only language or together with the language of the wider speech community. It is common for heritage speakers to experience language shift during childhood, and, as a result, by early adulthood their first language ends up as their secondary and weaker language, while their second language becomes their dominant primary language. Because under these circumstances the heritage language is often incompletely acquired and/or undergoes attrition, it shows many of the structural characteristics typical of second language grammars acquired after the critical period. The differential degrees of linguistic proficiency attained by adult heritage speakers raise several fundamental questions about the stability of early childhood bilingual acquisition and the role of input and use in the development and maintenance of a native language. They also raise key questions about the role of age and experience in the ultimate attainment of early and late adult bilinguals.
Because many college-age heritage speakers turn to the foreign or second language classroom to learn, relearn, or expand their knowledge of the home language, critical questions also arise as to how heritage speakers are similar to, or different from, postpuberty second language learners.
In this talk, I will present recent experimental research addressing the following questions: 1) Which areas of linguistic knowledge are robust and which are fragile under incomplete acquisition in both second language learners and heritage speakers? 2) Does age of acquisition bring an advantage to heritage speakers in terms of native-like linguistic knowledge as compared to late second language learners? 3) Do differences in the language learning experiences of heritage speakers and second language learners play a role in the behavioral manifestations of their linguistic knowledge? And finally, Can a heritage language be successfully reacquired in the classroom after the critical period? While extending research questions and methodologies from second language acquisition has significantly enlightened our current understanding of heritage language acquisition, I will advocate for the fruitful integration of other fields to advance this inquiry and point to potential directions in need of further research.
Florence Myles
Newcastle University, UK:
L2 corpora and second language acquisition research
Learner corpora are becoming a significant asset for second language acquisition research, and are becoming more varied and sophisticated (Pravec 2002, Granger 2004, Barlow 2005, Myles 2005). In the early stages, most learner corpora consisted of written rather than spoken language, and were built at least partly from available material (e.g. examination performances) rather than designed explicitly to facilitate SLA research. Their exploitation also tended to concentrate on error analysis rather than more focussed and theory driven inquiry; finally there was a strong ESL bias in available corpora.
More recently learner corpora have started to appear which encompass a wider range of languages, and which include specially collected oral data using a range of elicitation techniques (e.g. interaction, narrative, tasks focusing on specific linguistic structures, role plays etc.) as well as specially collected written data. The best known corpus to-date probably remains the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) based at the University of Louvain: http://cecl.fltr.ucl.ac.be (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier & Paquot 2009), which mainly comprises written argumentative essays in L2 English by learners from a wide range of language backgrounds. Examples of L2 oral corpora include the French L2 projects InterFra (http://www.fraita.su.se/interfra/), based at the University of Stockholm, FLLOC (http://www.flloc.soton.ac.uk) at the Universities of Southampton and Newcastle/Essex, and a similar corpus for L2 learner Spanish (www.splloc.soton.ac.uk ), based at the universities of Southampton, Newcastle/Essex and York. Further publicly accessible examples of oral corpora for both L2 English and L2 French are available on the Talkbank project website at http://talkbank.org/data/SLA. Researchers associated with Talkbank, FLLOC and SPLLOC are making use of CHILDES conventions and analysis software developed initially for L1 acquisition research to support their research programmes (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu ); others are developing dedicated tools to analyse morphosyntactic and/ or lexical characteristics of L2 corpora (Granfeldt et al 2006; Malvern & Richards 2002).The first part of the talk will briefly review these corpora and their design features.
In spite of this increase in the range of corpora available, however, second language researchers have been rather slow in taking advantage of them and their associated computerised methodologies. The second part of the talk will argue the theoretical and empirical case for the need for SLA research methodologies to move into the digital age. It will then outline the possibilities offered by such tools for addressing varied research agendas, illustrating from the web-based databases of French and Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpora (FLLOC and SPLLOC; Mitchell et al. 2008; Myles 2007a, 2007b), containing over 3 million words (transcripts, soundfiles, tagged transcripts) from learners at different levels (www.flloc.soton.ac.uk; www.spploc.soton.ac.uk). The CHILDES suite of software tools used in these database for storing, transcribing and analysing the data will be presented, as well as some of the adaptations made to it for SLA-specific research purposes. The automatic morphosyntactic tagger will then be demonstrated, as well as searches carried out directly on the morphosyntactic output on large batches of files, in order to address specific research questions.
The last part of the talk will outline how substantive programmes of research on L2 oral and written corpora are contributing to a range of SLA issues, from the overall modelling of stages in learner development (e.g. Bartning & Schlyter 2004) to learner profiling (Granfeldt et al 2006) as well as to research on L2 morphosyntactic development (e.g. Arche & Dominguez 2011; Dominguez et al 2011; Myles 2005; Rule & Marsden 2006), on formulaic language (e.g. Meunier & Granger 2008; Myles 2004), and on L2 pragmatic development (e.g. Belz & Kinginger 2003; Granget 2003; Guillot 2009). The talk will conclude with a discussion of a possible agenda for the further development of corpus-based research in SLA, paying particular attention to issues of design principles, software availability and suitability, bottom up and top down analyses of L2 corpora, ethical and copyright issues in building L2 corpora, and storage and access principles for users of L2 corpora.
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