Why I Read This Book
This book was assigned reading for
the Master’s Course in applied linguistics that I did two years ago.
At the
time, I did my best to be diligent with my readings, and I read most of the
book. However some weeks the amount of
assigned readings could be overwhelming, and I would have to resort to skimming
and scanning strategies to get the main idea out of certain chapters without
reading every word.
(Because I’m
a bit anal retentive about this book review project, I only review
books which I have read cover to cover, and so consequently I never blogged
this book at that time.)
However
recently I decided to re-read this book—both because I was worried I was
starting to forget what I had learned in graduate school, and for my own
professional development. And this time
I did it cover to cover.
The Review
This was not an easy read for me,
and I really struggled with sections of this book, but I’m glad I read it.
But let’s
be clear—this book is not supposed to be pleasure reading. It is specifically designed to be a textbook
for graduate level linguistics courses, and it reads accordingly.
One of
things I discovered in graduate school was that all of the assigned articles
were written in a highly technical vocabulary and dense style that made them
very difficult to read. (My first week,
before I learned to just skim over anything I didn’t understand, I spent an
hour in the study room just trying to get through one paragraph from an article
in a linguistics journal.)
Arguably academics
shouldn’t cultivate such an inaccessible writing style, but that’s another
debate for another time. The fact is
that they do, and so if you want to read and write in academic circles you have
to learn to be able to decode this.
In that
respect, this book was good training for me.
It represents a middle ground between the more accessible English prose
that I am used to, and the more difficult style of the academic journal
articles. I struggled a lot with this
book, but I think it got easier as I kept reading.
If, like
me, you’re hoping to use this book as training to read more dense academic
prose, one of the benefits of the book is the way Lourdes Ortega starts out
with a technical definition and then goes on to explain it in simpler
language. She will typically introduce a
topic using highly academic language that made my head spin, but then she will
go on to clarify what she means in language much easier to understand. I think this was good training for me because
I got practice in how to use the academic language, but was also able to
understand the meaning.
Here is an
example from her discussion on Markedness.
First she starts out with the academic language (page 37).
Markedness is another important source of
universal influence when learning human languages that is known to interact
with L1 influences. The term has been used by linguists in a number of
different ways (Batistella, 1996). In SLA, it has been used to denote a closed
set of possibilities within a linguistic system, where the given possibilities
rank from simplest and most frequent across languages of the world, or
unmarked, to most complex and most rare, or marked. In addition, a special
characteristic of many but not all markedness sets is that each marked member
presupposes the existence of the less marked members, and never the other way
around (in other words, the markedness relationship is implicational and
unidirectional).
Okay, so I
don’t know about you, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of that my first time
reading through. But then Ortega goes on to clarify what she means in much
simpler language:
Linguists have found markedness hierarchies
across the world’s languages in a number of key areas of morphology, phonology
and syntax. A good example is relative clauses, which we will examine in
Chapter 6, section 6.11. Another good case concerns the distinction between
voiced and voiceless stops. If you touch your Adam’s apple while pressing and
releasing your lips to produces a clean /b/, you will feel a vibration through
your fingertip, because /b/ is a voiced consonant. By contrast, if you now do the same thing
while trying to pronounce a clean /p/, you should feel no vibration at all,
because /p/ is a voiceless consonant.
Voicing is the main feature distinguishing the two sounds, otherwise /b/
and /p/ are pronounced using the same articulation features of place (both
lips) and manner (a sudden obstruction of air followed by a release accompanied
by aspiration). Voiced stops (as in the
sounds /b/, /d/ and /g/ in ‘tab’, ‘seed’ and ‘bag’) are more marked than
voiceless (as in the sounds /p/, /t/ and /k/ in ‘tap’, ‘seat’, and ‘back’). The
evidence comes from multiple sources. All languages of the world have some
voiceless stops, but only some have voiceless and voiced ones, and no language
exists that has only voiced stops without also having voiceless ones. Children
learning an L1 that has both voiceless and voiced stops will acquire the former
before the latter. There is also a natural phonetic process operating in human
languages called devoicing, by which voiced stops can be pronounced as
voiceless in certain positions, so that a marked feature (voiced) becomes neutralized
and the unmarked one (voiceless) is used instead.
Now, if you
go back and re-read the first paragraph, it makes much more sense. So I think this type of textbook is good
training for reading academic articles, even if it did cause me a lot of frustration
at times.
(There were
a couple of sentences in this book that I never did succeed in making sense of,
despite re-reading them several times.
But only a couple of sentences out of 254 pages. And the fault may well be mine.)
When I was
actually in graduate school, the stress of weekly assignments and weekly
readings would often cause my brain to freeze up and I had a difficult time
concentrating on the readings. But now
that I’m finished with school, I was able to re-read this book at a much more
leisurely pace (I made a goal of only reading 10 pages a day) and I was able to
make it through the whole book easily in a month.
The end of
every chapter has a summary of the important points. This is classic textbook stuff (the mere
words chapter summary conjure up
images of dry academic textbooks) but I actually did find it quite useful to
have the important points highlighted for me at the end of the chapter, and it
helped me to consolidate my knowledge.
I plan to
re-read this book a couple more times to help me internalize all the
information that is in here, but I think this book has given me a good basis for
understanding the field of second language acquisition.
Interesting Things I
Learned From This Book
As someone who struggled for many
years to acquire one language (Japanese) and teach another (English), I entered into my Master’s program hoping to learn all the
secrets of second language acquisition, only to discover that there was no store
of secret knowledge, only areas of inquiry.
When it comes to learning second languages, scholars disagree on just
about everyone it is possible to disagree about.
This is
partly because, as Ortega explains in her book, Second Language Acquisition as
a formal field of academic study is relatively new—only since the 1970s. Also I got the impression (although nobody
told me this in as many words) that we just don’t know enough about how the
human brain works yet, and so consequently can’t yet fully understand how the
human brain processes languages.
Through
this mess, Ortega does an excellent job of conveying exactly what we do know
about second language acquisition so far, where the areas of disagreements lie,
and what questions are ripe for future research.
A few
interesting things that caught my eye as I read this book:
* I had always thought that after early childhood it is
impossible to fluently learn a second language.
I had assumed this was common knowledge.
For the most
part, this appears to be true, but researchers have trouble explaining
why. Some researches think it is a
result of some biological clock operating in our brain, other researches think
the first language is interfering with the acquisition of the second. (Again, it appears we just don’t know enough
yet about how the human brain works.)
And more
surprisingly, there are exceptions which are hard to explain and keep messing
up any consistent theory about age and language learning. In some rare exceptional cases, adult
learners of a second language learn the second language completely fluently to
the point that they are indistinguishable from native speakers. These
type of exceptional learners may be “as
much as 5 per cent to 25 percent of learners how are given a ‘fair chance of
success’ (Birdsong, 1999b, pp. 14-15)” (p. 19)
* Contrary to popular wisdom, adults actually pick up
foreign languages faster than children—at least initially. In naturalistic settings, children will catch
up and surpass adults after about a year, but adults still have the initial
advantage.
However in foreign language classroom
settings, older children and adults have an advantage over younger children
that appears to never go away. Even
after 5 years of instruction, the advantage for older learners still persists.
(This stuck
with me, because I am currently teaching younger children. I complained to a colleague of mine that the
textbook introduced too many grammar points too quickly, and he replied that it
was okay because they were younger so they could absorb this information
quicker. But because of this book, I now
know younger children actually learn slower in a classroom. Since then I’ve been arguing for a slower
paced learning in the Young Learners program.)
* Something else which had a direct effect on my teaching
was that learners discussing in groups can sometimes better learn a new form if
they discuss it together in their native language than if they discuss it in
the target language (from section 4.10 LEARNER-INITIATED NEGOTIATION OF FORM.) This has caused me to be less dogmatic about
English-only in my classroom.
* As someone with an active interest in blogging, I really enjoyed the section about social media and how English
learners were able to gain confidence and find identity through writing and
posting stuff online. (It made me think
about how I might use this in my own classroom.
I’m not in a position to do this now, but if I were ever in a situation
where I had the complete freedom to create a curriculum for a more advanced
class, I would love to experiment with getting English learners to create their
own book and movie review blogs.)
* The scholarly work of Stephen Pinker is cited
briefly. (I enjoyed the non-scholarly
work of Stephen Pinker—TheLanguage Instinct, a fascinating book about how language works that he
wrote for the general public.)
* And, speaking of scholars I am familiar with, from page
77: “In addition, negative and even
confrontational interaction patterns can occur in learner-learner work as well,
as shown in the work of Neomy Storch at the University of Melbourne
I never
actually had a class with professor Storch, but she guest lectured in one of my
courses on this very topic of leaner-learner interaction, and even showed us
some of the learner conversations that seemed to indicate conflict.
Japanese Connections
Finally, as
someone who spent 8 years in Japan ,
the sections referencing Japanese learners of English, or foreigners learning
Japanese, were both especially interesting to me.
From page 231:
Similarly, the identity of speakers as ‘native’
or ‘non-native’ and as ‘novice language learners’ or ‘expert language learners’
cannot be taken as fixed, as CA [Conversation Analysis] has demonstrated how such categories may be
relevant in one interaction event and irrelevant in the next. This was shown by Yuri Hosoda (2006) in her
analysis of 15 video- and audio-taped casual conversations involving 15 L2
Japanese speakers, who had been living in Japan
This may be true of all L1-L2
interaction, but I have specific memories of this happening to me in Japan . When I didn’t know the Japanese word for
something, I would often have to invent it by putting other words together (for
example, “the smell of sweat” instead of “body odor”.) Instead of giving me the correct Japanese
word, my Japanese interlocutor would often adopt themselves to my vocabulary,
and re-use the word that I had invented.
* Japanese speakers tend to add a lot of extra vowels to the
ends of words when speaking English. But
interestingly, Ortega cites some research that shows this isn’t purely just
because of linguistic incompetence.
Rather, when speaking English, Japanese people will often use an extra
vowel at the end of an utterance to show that they’re not done speaking yet,
and they have more to say on the topic (and to prevent another speaker from
taking the floor.)
I would
never have picked this up on my own, but once I read it, I decided it does
resonate with my experience of Japanese English. Rethinking some of their speech patterns, I
think maybe they do in fact often emphasize the vowel sounds to show that they’re
not done speaking.
* This is something I found funny:
In Japan ,
women will often use high pitched voices to sound cute. (Or, as Ortega puts in a way that is characteristic
of her academic writing style “the
contention that in Japanese a high-pitched voice is a recognizable marker of
femininity” (page 246).)
Western
females learning Japanese will often fail to add the high pitch to their voice,
but it isn’t because they are ignorant of how pitch works in Japanese. On the contrary, they are often “acutely
aware of the cultural significance of pitch” (p.246). They just refused to do
it. From the data, one Western female
says:
“Sometimes it would really disgust me,
seeing those Japanese girls, they were not even girls, some of them were in
their late twenties, but they would use those really high voices to try to
impress and make themselves look real cute for men. I decided that there was no
way I wanted to do that.” (p. 246)
* At one point in the book it is theorized that the reason
foreigners seldom learn polite speech and Japanese honorifics properly is
because of the Japanese reluctance to correct foreign speakers. From page 247:
Siegal suggested that this response may have
been motivated in the Japanese nationalist discourse of the henna gaijin or ‘strange foreigner’, which construes
Japanese as a difficult language that foreigners cannot and need not master; it
would be only an oddity for foreigners to learn Japanese things too well or
become too Japanese.
This is
often true. Of course, from a foreigner’s
perspective, it’s not always a bad thing.
It means that in interactions between foreigners and Japanese, even
within Japan
itself, the Japanese person considers it their responsibility to adopt
themselves to the foreigners’ language and customs. So even within their own country, a Japanese
person will seldom demand that the foreigner speak Japanese, but instead
apologize for their own limited English.
(Contrast this with the American attitude, if you will.)
Of course
when it comes to correcting a foreigner’s speech, another equally important
factor may be the Japanese concern with politeness, and their concern that they
will cause the foreigner to lose face if they overtly offer correction.
(Although actually now that I’m thinking about it, when I’m outside of the classroom I don’t go
around correcting the grammar of everyone I talk to either. If a Japanese person or Cambodian person is
talking to me in English, and I can understand the meaning, I don’t offer
correction on their grammar unless I’m explicitly invited to. Maybe instead of just assuming this is a
Japanese thing, it would be interesting to do comparative studies on how often
native speakers of other languages offer unsolicited correction.)
Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky in conversation with Jonathan Freedland
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