Teacher Discussion Forums

What are the differences/similarities between first and second language acquisition?

Can anyone here refer me to any pertinent sources on this topic?

Thks.

Allow me to ramble on for a bit.

I was discussing this with another teacher recently. I pointed out how many 'teaching' hours a L1 speaker naturally gets compared to a L2 speaker. In some ways I think it's crazy to expect a L2 learner to pick up a language in a matter of months. Especially when they only study for a few hours a week.

I've met some native-like speakers here in Mexico. I ask them how long they've been studying English. Usually, the reply is "all my life". These students have been given the drip-feed method of learning English. But over the course of a decade or longer they've managed to attain a extensive language abilities.

I would argue that to be a sucessful L2 learner i.e. attain native like abilities the students has to immerse themselves in the L1 language and culture - thereby becoming a L1 student. Teachers can certainly help L2 students by giving them a leg-up, but the class time is never enough to produce the goods, with the exception of the life-long learner I mentioned above.

Iain

What kind of similarities/differences are you looking for? I'm thinking about how to answer but it isn't at all easy to do.

Obviously L1 is your 'mother tongue'. I cannot think of any exceptions to this. L1 is usually the language you'll speak with your family members (and sometimes friends or other examples of intimate conversation) because it is the language you were brought up in before any actual schooling or classroom settings.

You can have more than one L1 given the right circumstances and child language development strategies between two parents. I have known individuals who could not answer the question "What language is your mother tongue?" because they spoke the 2 equally as well, had parents who each spoke their own L1 and spoke English as L2, and had no way of knowing which one came before the other (= two L1s)

L2, on the contrary, is the language you usually learn after having a strong developed competence in L1 (or L1.1 and L1.2 as in the example above). L2 is simply the language(s) you learn after developing a native language. Usually, achieving a competence in L2 that is equal to your competence in L1 is quite difficult and is not too common. A person's L2 is usually more or less the 'weeker' language.

Before a student becomes really confident in L2, this student will probably think in L1 while trying to speak L2. "Bonjour (what do I say next), comment ca va? Ca va bien (whats the next word?), merci."

Sometimes L1 is heavily used, or even abused, in trying to facilitate the learning of L2. A francophone using the latin-based vocab of his L1 to learn Italian or Spanish is a good example. This can haved mixed results and, on occasion, the francophone will simply be able to speak French with a Spanish accent. L1 can sometimes provide many difficulties when the syntax, morphology, and phonetic system of L2 is quite different. An anglophone trying to learn Japanese that has no previous knowledge of the language will have many obstcacles to overcome in trying to learn his/her L2.

All this seems incredibly obvious just by the titles you supplied in your question, and you probably already knew most of what I said. Is there any way you could narrow down exactly what you need to know? I'll search for sources in the meantime.

I do not wish to prolong a discussion on the perceived and real existing differences between L1 and L2 acquisition, but I think most people discussing this topic ignore that language acquisition is more than learning how to speak a language; it also is a unique way of conceptualising the world. Thus, learning a language is learning to think in one distinct and particular way. This becomes obvious when we are dealing with students who translate from one language into another and vice versa. A case in point: The Chinese.
I am perfectly trilingual, and I do not think that French and English share more than, say, English and Chinese do. This is because each language has what I can only call by a French term - 'genie', something like 'spirit', or 'anima'. Look at the versatility of the English word - it can easily function as a noun, adjective and a verb; in French, there are far fewer verbs, so action tends to be verbalised in a rather formalistic way ("faire du velo" - 'to bicycle/to ride bicycle'). In my view, any interested student should read Benjamin L. WHorf on this subject - not necessarily to engage in the now almost extinct debate between Saprio/Whorf and the rest of the linguistic community, but to get an observer's view on how languages reflect culture and lifestyles.

For further reading (but not on B.L. Whorf or others), I suggest:
- Foreign and Second Language Learning by William LIttlewood
a Cambridge book for language teachers.
- An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Research by Diane
Larsen-Freeman and Michael H. Long

Not conclusive reports, but nice summaries and good bibliographies.

Thanks.

I'm just trying to put together a short paper comparing and contrasting first and second language acquisition.

I was just interested in hearing from any linguists or EFL'ers working in the field that could offer me some direction and info on additional sources.

Since posting my question, I picked up a book by Rod Ellis: Second Language Acquisiton and one by Brown on the subject.

Thks again. - Will also look into the sources you recommended Roger.

Sorry Roger, one of your statements is so strange that I must ask a question just to clarify. It's regarding the following statement: "I do not think that French and English share more than, say, English and Chinese do."

The question that must be asked in order to make any sense of this statement is 'what Chinese are you referring to?' Because for all I know, there's a language out there that's not at all related to Cantonese or Mandarin or Hakka or *beep* or the other languages in China that we label as 'Chinese'. Perhaps this language follows the same syntax of SVO that French and English share? Is it tonal like Chinese or is it not, like French and/or English? Is it still a Sino-Tibetan language? or is it Indo-European like French and English? Does this new Chinese language share the same Roman alphabet that English and French share? Or does it use the idiographic writing system of other Chinese languages?

Because the truth is, Roger, that French and English share all the aspects above that Chinese doesn't share with English or French. They share the same alphabet, a similar syntax, similar morphology, their both under the same family of languages… I didn't even mention the Norman Conquest that had such a magnificent effect on the English lexicon in 1066 that lasted about 2 centuries (even Richard the Lionhearted spoke French). Or the Latin influence both have (although I would never argue that English has the same heavy Latin influence that French does).

Of course each language can be said to have its own ‘genie’, but that doesn’t change the fact that some languages have tight relations with others that can sometimes cause difficulties to the student who learns one Indo-European language as L1 and another as L2.

(By the way Roger: Parles-tu français? Si oui, je ne comprends pas comment tu peux faire des commentaires bizarres comme celui que t’as fait au sujet de la langue chinoise.)

Ah, oui, je parle le francais, merci de ton interet!
But on the topic of differentness/likeness of English/French, I do maintain that you can easily construe a claim that English and Chinese have a lot in common that both of these languages do not share with, say, French or German (the English language's closest cousins). What I meant was that modern English, as distinct from older variants, has developed a distinct tendency towards monosyllables. There was a book around twenty years ago that said you can teach your students 800 monosyllabic words, and that would be more than enough for the average speaker to communicate with native speakers. It has to be pointed out though that the English pronunciation does not always walk in tandem with spelling, so you see words that are composed of two syllables although only one is pronounced, as for instance 'house', 'mouse', 'come', 'have' etc.
The monosyllabic character of English brings it rather much in line with Chinese (not all Chinese words are monosyllables, granted!).
Another point is the grammatical versatility of the English vocables as mentioned in my previous post - again very close to how Chinese words often function. I am not contending here that Chinese grammar is identical or anywhere near identical to English grammar, but compared to French grammar or German grammar the English and Chinese languages have more in common than English and French. Conjugation of verbs in Chinese is nonexistent, in English it is rudimentary (see modal verbs!). Chinese too follows the SVA agrement patterns of many English sentences.

I do not understand what you mean by Chinese "languages" and your questions: do they use Roman writing etc. There is only one written form of the language native to Chinese although there are many different ways of pronouncing words and several different tonal systems, to be sure; these are dialectal variants whose syntax and grammar are virtually identical although they are mutually unintelligible in spoken forms.
There is some dichotomy between Taiwanese/Hong Kong written Chinese and PRC Chinese, the latter being the product of a government fiat (reform) that simplified everyday speech ('putonghua', or 'the common people's Chinese') and writing (adopting simplified characters). Still, Taiwanese Mandarin and PRC Mandarin are one - Chinese. Of course, the Chinese script has never been replaced by Roman letters. Romanisation is done in several different ways depending on where you go, with one official version being the only accepted form in the People's Republic of China, a special form being used in Hong KOng (transliterating the local vernacular of Cantonese rather than Mandarin), a third one in use in Macau (slightly different from Hong Kong's Romanisation), and at least two in use in Taiwan.

Let's not quarrel over categorisations here; I fully know that Chinese is not an Indo-European tongue, and I am rather familiar with a number of European languages. Maybe we should focus on why speakers of other languages find it easier to acquire English as a second tongue than English native speakers find it learning French or German (it would seem far fewer English speakers excel at any European language than vice versa). In my experience (living in China, having lived in several European countries), English speakers acquire Chinese fairly eaisly, perhaps more easily than they do French; Chinese definitely learn English fastest. Germans that I know in China took 5 years or so to acquire total proficiency in English; spoken Chinese some acquired in 3 years (in Germany, not in China), while writing and reading inevitably is a never-ending learning job. .

My whole rant about Chinese languages was a joke, simply stating that unless there's some language called 'Chinese' that is somehow more related to English than French is, to explain it to me. The answer is 'no' for all the reasons I supplied.

Your entire theory, as far as I can understand, is then that:

a monosyllabic lexicon = a stronger relation between Chinese and English = 'easier for an Anglophone to learn Chinese than French'

Correct?

If an Anglophone learning French wants to translate the words 'pork', 'beef', 'dictionary' and... let's say... 'power', all he/she has to do is learn the words 'porc', boeuf', dictionnaire' and 'pouvoir'. Now, what you're saying is that Chinese is easier to learn even though French and English share such a considerable bond? Are you really saying that just because the Chinese equivilant might only have one syllable that an anglophone student of CHinese is going to find those words easier than...say.. their French equivilant which are almost identical? (Please keep in mind that with these four examples, each word has the same amount of syllables as it's translation, whether 'monosyllabic' or not. So each word is equally 'economic' in syllables in both languages) I think it would be a stretch to agree.

wjserson, I got the joke

Roger, I must admit your theory seems counter-intuitive and off the wall to me. (What a combo ) I don't even know where to start, but I'll try!

I too have studied both French and Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese). (I admit that I started French in high school and Chinese was later on.) The tonal system of Chinese alone is a great source of difficulty for English speakers. What Chinese lacks in verb conjugation you get back with particles at the end of verbs, which we don't use in English. Then there's the problem of placement of words like "before" and "after" which occur after the clause instead of before. (How's that for a sentence?) and the problem of answering negative questions, and...well you get the point.

I bet you could find similarities of structure (at least superficially) comparing any two languages, but the differences to me are far more massive between Chinese and English than between French and English

Great minds, Lorikeet, great minds...

dduck wrote:Allow me to ramble on for a bit.

These students have been given the drip-feed method of learning English.
Iain

I'm sorry, I don't quite understand what it means "drip - feed method".

Wow, I wrote that ages ago.

Drip feed - I was considering that some students only learn a foreign language for a few hours a week. I used to have Spanish lessons for three hours a week, and I read a bit, it's very bity. I was trying to contrast this type of learning with the constant learning that a child has when surrounded by their first language. It's a whole different world!

I think in general, drip feed is to only give a little bit at a time:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/25/D0392500.html

Iain