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了解一些主要的心理语言学和社会语言学的概念,从心理语言学和社会语言学的更广泛的角度看待和分析英语教学和学习的一些突出问题。
Introduction
Course aims
To understand some major psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic concepts
To view and analyse some salient issues of English language teaching and learning from the broader perspectives of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics
To examine those issues with specific references to the context of English language education in Hong Kong
To identify various forces at play and problems relevant to English language teaching and learning in a so-called biliterate and trilingual Hong Kong
Language acquisition
First language acquisition
Second language acquisition
Factors affecting first and second language acquisition
Fossilization
Language acquisition
An impressive and fascinating aspect of human development
Sounds made by a three-month-old infant
Conversational babbling of older babies, e.g. ba-ba, bye-bye
Meaningful utterances or even sentences at later stages
Factors
What pushes children to go through these processes?
Does child language develop similarly around the world?
How do bilingual children acquire more than one language?
Fossilization
A question before elaborating it –Should much freedom be allowed without explicit correction and instruction upon second language learning?
A persistent lack of change in interlanguage patterns, even after extended exposure to or instruction in the target language
Introduction
Language and cognition
Language production and comprehension
The ability to produce and the ability to understand language, e.g. vocabulary, utterances, grammatical structures
Cognitive development
A field of study in psychology focusing on a child’s development in terms of information processing, language learning and many other aspects of brain development in comparison with an adult’s viewpoint
Relation between language acquisition and cognitive development
“They [psychologists] see language acquisition as similar to and influenced by the acquisition of other kinds of skill and knowledge, rather than as something that is different from and largely independent of the child’s experience and cognitive development.” (Lightbown & Spada, 2013, pp. 24-25)
Second language acquisition and individual bilingualism
Relation between first and second language acquisition
Individual bilingualism
The use of two languages by an individual
Additive bilingualism: a speaker adds a second language without any loss of competence to the first language, leading to balanced bilingualism
Subtractive bilingualism: the addition of a second language leads to gradual erosion of competence in the first language
Cummins’ bilingual theories
Childhood bilingualism – BICS [Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills]; CALP [Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency]
Cummins (2000): the language required for academic discourse is more difficult for children to acquire than the informal language of day-to-day interaction
Code mixing and code switching
Language choice
Personal linguistic choices to express individual identities, social identities and relationship with others
By converging towards or diverging from the speech patterns of others
Languages in contact and societal bilingualism
Speech community
Societal bilingualism and multilingualism
Typical bilingual societies in the world
Pidgins, Creoles and lingua francas
Language power and language policy
Linguistic variation and varieties
Vernacular languages
Standard languages and Standard English
Domains, diglossia and triglossia
Majority and minority languages
National languages, official languages, first and second languages, mother tongues and dialects
World Englishes
Increased use of English as an international language
Garcia (2002, p.359): “As globalization takes hold, new communicative functions are created that respond to the movement of capital and people around the globe and a proliferation (increase a lot in number) of new products and services. Speakers who wish to participate in this new world order are then increasingly aware and favourably inclined to learn and adopt the language or language variety that will enable them to partake (take part) of this new economic order.”
English language teaching in Hong Kong
Language policy and language planning
Status and function of English
Government’s language policy
Learners’ attitude and motivation
Language awareness
Language standards
Assessment
Quiz (20%)
One hour in class on 18 Nov 2013
2 short essay questions, with one on psycholinguistics and the one on sociolinguistics
Open book
Term paper (80%)
2,000 to 2,300 words, excluding footnotes, endnotes and references
Proper documentation and references complying with APA style required
Deadline: Monday, 16 Dec 2013 @ 5:30pm
Both soft and hard copies required
Serious penalty for plagiarism
(See course outline for detail)
“F” grade will be given to students who are absent for more than one-third of the classes
English as a First Language
Are the early sounds made by children universally the same? Or do the sounds produced vary with the language community into which the child is born?
What part do caregivers (the usual term for those people who spend most time looking after and interacting with the child) play in an infant’s early language development?
English as a First Language
The linguist Michael Halliday was one of the first to develop an understanding of language development based on analysis of the functions of utterances
During the first year of life, infants produce a range of sounds and begin to indulge in vocal play
The context in which children are growing up is also crucial to communication
Research over the last few decades has shown that babies’ early interactions might be far more important to their development of communication capacities than was previously thought
Learning English Phonemes
Are the early sounds made by children universally the same?
Some take a ‘universalist’ line and state that infants start life able to make all possible speech sounds that a human can make and then cease to make those sounds not found in their particular linguistic environment
Others claim that infants begin with no ability to make sounds other than cries and rely on the environment to provide sounds to learn and copy
Others uphold the ‘attunement’ theory which states that infants start with a basic set of sounds common to all but then build up a repertoire of other sounds found in their own particular environment
Learning English Phonemes
A study was conducted comparing the sounds produced by one US English-speaking child and one French-speaking child
Recordings were made of these children at 5 months, 8 months, 11 months and 14 months
There are specific and known phonetic differences between English and French. There are also differences in terms of prosody (rhythm and intonation)
Learning English Phonemes
Evidence of similar developmental patterns and of the influence of adult language was found.
The sounds produced by the infants were similar in terms of the range of consonants and vowel sounds they produced and in terms of the kinds of consonant sounds they used (i.e. how and where in the mouth they are produced)
This similarity is consistent with the idea that infants from different language communities pass through the same stages of phonological development
Learning English Phonemes
Effects specific to the language environment began to be identifiable at 11 months; the infants’ phonetic inventory began to resemble that of the adult language both in composition and frequency
This finding is consistent with other evidence which points to language-specific influences becoming identifiable towards the end of the first year of life
There is a relationship between the language environment and a child’s early sound-making
Learning English Phonemes
Phoneme (i.e. one of the smallest unit of speech that make one word different from another): the distinctive sounds of a language
The number of phonemes varies from one language to another, and between different varieties of a language
To master English phonology the child must acquire many different phonemes, and one salient characteristic of child phonology is that different phonemes are acquired at different rates
Learning English Phonemes
RATE OF ACQUISITION OF PHONEMES
Visibility
Sounds produced by visible movement such as front labial sounds (consonant sounds made with the two lips) like /p/ are acquired before invisible sounds produced at the back of the mouth like /k/
(2) Complexity
Some sounds are harder to pronounce than others. For example, /t/ is a relatively easy phoneme to articulate since it involves only one movement of the tongue with the alveolar ridge (the hard area behind your top front teeth); in contrast ‘ch’ is a complex phoneme involving two movements, where the tongue must come into contact with the alveolar ridge but there must also be simultaneous contact of the tongue with the hard palate (top part of the inside of your mouth).
Caregiver’s Role
What is the role of a caregiver in early language development?
Much research in this area focus on the pair consisting of the child and the child’s main caregiver
Caregivers often modify their speech in various ways, for instance, by giving it a higher pitch, exaggerated intonation and a slower delivery
Interestingly, older children also modify their speech to younger children in a roughly similar way
Caregiver’s Role
Most researches were conducted in developed countries among English speaking children from the middle class
Studies conducted in other cultures (i.e. Quiche people of Central America and South-west USA) show that caregives do not necessarily modify their speech in the way Western caregivers do
Differences in cultural practices pose challenges to the validity and importance of facilitating a positive development in early language acquisition
Different ways to modify children’s speech in different cultures
Linguistic modelling
Providing experience of the sounds of a language for children
In what way? Through feeding and bathing, opportunities given for predictable exchanges involving language
Question-and-reply sequence repeated
Children’s Early Words
Establishing the idea of sound-to-meaning correspondence is an important breakthrough in developing language
Initial vocabulary development is slow, with children producing about 50 words in the first eighteen months
Utterances are typically one-word structures
Linguists commonly distinguish between lexical or content words and grammatical or function words (words, e.g. a preposition, a conjunction, an article having little semantic content of its own, mainly indicating a grammatical relationship)
Children’s early vocabulary contains words that pertain to things and actions that are of immediate relevance and importance to their lives
The children hear the concrete words which carry the stress, thus perhaps the acoustic salience (i.e. sound prominence) of these items helps the child to acquire them early
The children’s main aim is to communicate, and the concrete words which carry meaning
Children’s Early Words
Early vocabulary development in terms of rate of acquisition
The role of caregivers in the development of vocabulary
Comprehension and Production
What is the relation between comprehension and production indicated by these data?
Is there a difference in the rate of acquisition between comprehension vocabulary and production vocabulary?
Comprehension and Production
Comprehension and Production
The onset of comprehension is about 4 months in advance of production.
It is consistent with the general perception generally held that infants understand more than they can say.
It takes longer to acquire words in production than it does in comprehension.
The size of the gap between comprehension and production for all children varies between individual children.
Overextensions and Underextensions
In early vocabulary development, children tend to overextend a word to refer to objects that lie outside its normal range of application for adults
For example, a child might use the word doggy to refer not only to all dogs but also to cows, horses, sheep and cats
On the other hand, children also underextend some words.
For example, the word animal is typically applied only to mammals at first. They will deny that some birds, fish and people can also be called animals
Grammatical Development
The earliest stage is hardly like grammar at all, as it consists of utterances which are just one word long.
About 60% of the words have a naming function
About 20% express an action
Examples: Gone, Dada, Teddy and Hi
The next stage looks more like ‘real’ grammar because two words are put together to form primitive sentence structures
Subject + Verb: Cat jump or Cat jumping
Verb + Object: Shut door
The next step is the ‘filling out’ of these simple sentence patterns – adding extra elements of clause structure
3-element: Daddy got car
4-element: You go bed now
Grammatical Development
At around 3 years, sentences become much longer as children start stringing their clauses together
Common linking words: and, because, so, then, when, if and before
At the age of 4, children typically do a great deal of ‘sorting out’ in their grammar
Aged 3.5: Him gived the cheese to the mouses
Aged 4.5: He gave the cheese to the mice
They learn the adult forms of the irregular nouns and several hundred irregular verbs
The learning process continues until early adolescence
Imitation or Creativity
Consider the following examples:
Baby drink; a more water
Clearly, the above examples do not appear to be the kind of utterances that the children will have heard an adult say
Children do imitate but this is not the primary route to language development
The evidence from children’s creative use of language allows us to see imitation as only part of the process
The work of Lois Bloom (1973) provided such an illustration
The expression ‘mommy sock’ was used on two separate occasions
The child’s mother was putting a sock on the child
The child had picked up one of her mother’s socks
To understand the extent of a child’s communicative competence, we need to have access to the CONTEXTS in which utterances are used
Imitation or Creativity
Consider some of the possible meanings that might be attributable, depending on context, to the following child utterances. Try to express them in ‘adult’ grammar:
Car go vroom (sound of a high speed car)!
Mommy hat.
No more soup.
All cars go vroom./ This car goes vroom./ This car went vroom./ Make this car go vroom!
Mommy has a hat on./ That’s Mommy’s hat./ Mommy, please put my hat on!/ Mommy, look at that hat!
I have no more soup left./ You have no more soup left./ There’s no more soup in the pan./ I don’t want any more soup.
Concept of Time
The rate of language development varies from child to child
The appearance of tense and aspect markers in English has been a rich source of material for those interested in the development of children’s understanding of concepts of time
In English, the tense and aspect systems are closely related
Tense refers to the location of an event in time with respect to the moment of speech
Present tense: I eat
Past tense: I ate
Aspect refers to the duration or type of temporal activity denoted
I run versus I am running
Concept of Time
The sequence of development of the Standard English tense and aspect systems:
No tense or aspect inflections at first.
Progressive –ing suffix (i.e. he’s playing)
Past tense inflections on regular verbs (i.e. she played)
Irregular past tense forms (i.e. she slept)
Past tense forms of irregular verbs
Both sleep and slept in a child’s language
Past tense forms of regular verbs
All references to the past will use verbs with a past tense inflection, even those irregular verbs which had been in the child’s vocabulary before this time
Slept becomes sleeped
Came becomes comed
Went becomes goed
Grammatical Morphology
Later Language, Narratives and Jokes
The ability to tell jokes is an extremely sophisticated form of verbal behaviour requiring both knowledge of language and the ability to identify and manipulate the mental state of another person
Playing with language demonstrates both the development of language skills and the development of metalinguistic awareness, which refers to the ability to think about and reflect on language itself
The ability to tell jokes illustrates how children become able to manipulate the English language to achieve surprise and amusement and, second, to show how learning to use English creatively in this way depends in part on the learning of certain conventional discourse structures or formats
The development of joking is an area where the development of linguistic skill and social awareness are very closely entwined
Language acquisition
Language acquisition is initially a matter of learning the rules of social behaviour and only later a matter of learning the grammatical rules by which these are realized
In certain contexts it is a matter of learning when not to speak as much as when to speak
Linguistic competence: the knowledge of the language system which speakers of any language possess (arguably in differing degrees), enabling them to distinguish utterances that are grammatical in the language from those that are not
Linguistic performance: the frequently ungrammatical and or imperfectly delivered actual utterances of language in use
Communicative competence: a language user’s grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology and the like, as well as social knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately
Bilingualism: a special case?
There is a direct link between bilingualism and biculturalism
Our legal nationality may not correspond to either our place of birth or our place of residence
All children need to develop in two important aspects:
They need to recognize their various languages or varieties of language as separate systems (of sounds, grammar, meaning, etc.) in order to keep them apart as and when necessary
They need to learn how to use their various languages or varieties of language appropriately, according to who they are talking to and what they are talk about in order to achieve particular effects
‘What distinguishes bilinguals from monolinguals is that bilinguals usually have greater resources… The skilled monolingual is one who is able to summon the maximum of pragmatic resources within one language.’
Bilingualism: a special case?
A major task for both the monolingual and the bilingual child consists in learning which contrasts (phonemic, tonal, grammatical, semantic) within a language are significant in making meaning
The bilingual child must additionally learn in what ways these rules can be generalized across the two (or more) languages and, if not, whether the languages differ in any systematic way
Once a bilingual child has become aware of a particular structure or concept which can be applied to either language, this will be reflected simultaneously in both languages, regardless of the one through which it was acquired
Aspects of language which are specific to only one of the child’s languages will need to be specifically ‘tagged’ to the language concerned
English as a Second or Additional Language
Prefabricated chunks (formulaic speech)
Bilingual children are usually able to deduce the social meaning of these clusters from the communicative context without necessarily analysing them into their component parts
Socially embedded
Highly memorable
Play an important role in motivating the learner
Examples: Come on, please push me, get out of here, goodbye, see you tomorrow etc.
Interference
The transfer of inappropriate features of the first language into the second language
Negative impacts: simplification of grammar or overgeneralization of rules
English as a Second or Additional Language
Error
A sign of active learning – evidence that learners are applying their own provisional rule systems as opposed to merely imitating
Example: The use of the English word “mistake” by a 5-year-old Japanese girl
In English: You made a mistake. (Noun)
In Japanese: You are mistaking. (Verb)
Thus, a large part of the bilingual learner’s task consists in developing a sensitivity to what the two language systems have in common and where they differ
Fossilization
Should much freedom be allowed without explicit correction and instruction upon second language learning?
If it happens, what consequences?
Fossilization
Larry Selinker (1972):
Fossilization refers to the fact that some features in a learner’s language seem to stop changing. They stop learning while their internalised rule system contains rules different from those of the target system.
It is especially true for learners whose exposure to the second language does not include instruction or the kind of feedback that would help them to recognise differences between their interlanguage and the target language.
Most second language learners fail to reach target-language competence.
Interlanguage
Larry Selinker (1972):
Interlanguage is a series of interlocking systems which characterise acquisition.
It may have characteristics of the learner’s first language, characteristics of the second language, and some characteristics that seem to be very general and tend to occur in all or most interlanguage systems (e.g. particular L1/L2 combinations: L1 French/L2 English; L1 Japanese/L2 English).
Interlanguages change when learners receive more input and revise their hypotheses about the second language.
Codeswitching
Codeswitching
Switching between one or more languages, or language variety, in the context of a single conversation
‘May itself form part of the repertoire of a speech community’
Even a single speech act can serve to express multiple identities, and thus to signal ‘double affiliation’
The bilingual child is also learning how to use the languages appropriately, how to manipulate all the available linguistic resources in order to achieve the desired effect: choosing the right language for the right occasion, knowing when to mix languages and when to keep them apart
Social and Stylistic Variation within English
Monolingual English speakers also have access to a range of different language varieties to signal their shifting attitudes and identities and to achieve particular goals
US sociolinguist William Labov pioneered the research on social and stylistic variation in English
Labov’s original hypothesis had been that young children were not sensitive to social variation in language and did not learn to make stylistic choices themselves until early adolescence
He claimed that children pass through predictable stages of linguistic development in the acquisition of Standard English and that it is not until the age of 11 to 12 years that full ‘stylistic variation’ is achieved
Social and Stylistic Variation within English
Criticism: Counter examples have shown that even very young children show themselves sensitive to contextual variation in language
The baby’s first experience of language is likely to be in dialogue with a caregiver
Adults in many English-speaking cultures tend to use a particular style of language when communicating with babies
In fact, older siblings were able to vary their speech to accommodate the communicative needs of younger siblings
Social and Stylistic Variation within English
Some older siblings demonstrate great social sensitivity to the communicative needs of younger brothers and sisters
Two Singaporean brothers, aged 7;8 and 4;5 respectively, are attempting to assemble a plastic skeleton. The older boy is aware of the need to use Standard English with the interviewer, but switches to more friendly Singaporean English to address his little brother
ELDER BROTHER [to adult interviewer]
I don’t know whether he knows how to do it. [3 sec pause]
[then to younger brother]
A – all this are bones ah?
YOUNGER BROTHER Yah.
ELDER BROTHER All this are human bones lah.
English-speaking Girl or Boy
Studies have shown differentiated use of language among boys and girls
Girls (like adult women) in many English-speaking societies revert to more indirect language
Studies have found that certain interactional features (i.e. interruptions, direct requests) are associated more with boys and men, whereas others (i.e. conversational support features such as mmh, yeah and right, and indirect requests) are associated more with girls and women
Girls were also found to be more socially conformed which includes a sensitivity to stylistic variation in language use
Boys were found to have a tendency towards self-assertion and toughness
Concluding Comments
The rate of language development varies from child to child
There is often a rapid development of the sound system at an early age, overlapping with and followed by a rather slower development of grammatical sensitivity, and a development of meaning and the strategies of discourse which continues throughout life
There is a relationship between the language environment and a child’s early sound-making
Imitation is by no means the only route for children to acquire a language as they are capable of creating their own distinctive utterances depending on particular contexts
The ability to tell stories and jokes reveals the development of both language skills and metalinguistic awareness
Concluding Comments
Young speakers may:
Unconsciously adopt (i.e. converge towards) the speech of others because they identify with it
Consciously emulate (copy and try to do) the speech of those groups they wish to be close to or to impress or to get something out of
Consciously mimic (copy and make people laugh) the speech of others – or more precisely, their stereotypes of others – while at the same time distancing themselves from the stereotype
Monolingualism versus bilingualism
Prefabricated chunks (formulaic speech)
Interference
Error
Codeswitching
Social and stylistic variation within English
Gender roles
References
Benedict, H. (1979). Early lexical development: Comprehension and production. In Journal of Child Language, 6, pp. 183-200.
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Cummins, J. (2000). Language, Power and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Garcia, O. (2002). Language spread and its study: narrowing its spread as a scholarly field. In R. Kaplan (Ed.). Language and Social Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ingram, D. (1989). First language acquisition: Method, description and explanation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lightbown, P. M. & Spada, N. (2013). How Languages are Learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mercer, N., Swann, J. & Mayor, B. (Eds.) (2007). Learning English. Oxon: Routledge; Milton Keynes: Open University.
Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. In International Review of Applied Linguistics, 10(2), 209-31.
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