Does cross-language transfer exist?

[I actually wrote this about 6 months ago and I'm not sure why I didn't publish it. I've read it over and it looks finished to me...]

It's always seemed weird to me that some people claim that L2 errors are not related to the form of the learner's L1. Surely it's common sense? For instance, a speaker of Chinese, or Polish, or any other language with no articles is going to have a problem learning when to use "a", when to use "the" and when not to use an article at all in English, right?

But of course, common sense is only common sense until it's proven wrong. It was once common sense that the sun went round the Earth and that there was such a thing as "races" of people -- scientific study has since shown us otherwise.

So language must be open to scientific study, and teachers must be open to the results of study. And there are plenty of studies that purport to disprove the idea of cross-linguistic interference.

For example, I'm currently skimming through bits of the book Understanding Second Language Acquisition by Lourdes Ortega. There's a chapter on "cross-linguistic influences" (they reject the term "interference", because they reckon it puts too much blame on the L1) and they open by looking at a couple of studies that show that the similarities and differences between languages have less influence than might be expected. The first of these is to do with the placement of negatives in Swedish, where they find that learners on the whole tend to incorrectly place negatives before the verb, even if their own language also places negatives after the verb. [Hyltenstam, K., 1977. Implicational patterns in interlanguage syntax variation. Language learning, 27(2), pp.383-410.]

What questions does this raise? First I would say that negation is an undeniable universal of language, so here we're talking about a linguistic concept that is already known to the learner, and the only variable under examination is word placement -- syntax. There is no examination of usage -- for example, what happens with complex clauses? In English we most commonly say "I don't think so", but some languages are more likely to say "I think not", which now sounds quite old-fashioned. It's far more likely that a native English speaker would say "I don't think he's coming" than "I think he's not coming", but "creo que no viene" is perfectly normal in Spanish. It's readily apparent that this sort of transference occurs at the phrasal level, and this is the sort of thing that is often never taught and simply left to the student to work out. It is also readily observable that learners make errors handling polysemy (multiple meanings of a single word) -- again, looking at Spanish "esperar" is to wait, to hope and to expect, and it doesn't take long in the company of Spanish learners of English to hear someone pick the wrong one of the three.


I haven't had a chance to read the original paper yet (I'm not familiar with my new university's online search and I'm feeling too impatient today to start hunting) so for the moment I'm just thinking about what I'll be looking for when I get round to reading it (which might not be for a while!). First up, is there anything that goes deeper than simple word placement? Secondly, as a tangent to the point about cross-language transfer, and continuing the thread on slots, does something change when it's a multi-part structure, with the two sections separated by other language content?

Besides, is negatives even a fair example? My gut reaction is that in every language that I've come across a sort of "Tarzan speak", the stereotypical form is for pre-negation ("me no hurt pretty pretty" and the like).

The second paper cited discusses object pronoun placement in French-speaking learners of English and English-speaking learners of French. [Zobl, H., 1980. The formal and developmental selectivity of LI influence on L2 acquisition. Language learning, 30(1), pp.43-57.]

Again, I've not read the paper yet, but the summary in the book baffles me a bit, because it seems somewhat obvious. We have the example of the pair "je les vois"/"I see them" and it is observed that English speakers often erroneously say "*je vois les", but French speakers don't tend to say "I them see". This is not a symmetrical error, but then, this is not a symmetrical pattern. As I see it, the difficulty for the English speaker isn't simply one of the absolute position of the pronoun, but the fact that pronouns appear in a different place from explicit noun phrases as object -- je les vois vs je vois des hommes. The English speaker learning French has the difficulty that he sees pronoun noun phrases and explicit noun phrases as subcategories of a single thing that share a position, and in order to learn French accurate must learn a fundamentally new distinction between weak pronouns and other noun phrases. The French learner of English, conversely, doesn't necessarily need to learn the English speaker's categorisation, and can maintain the French distinction and notion of two slots, and can then simply focus on the syntax, learning two different positions that happen to be the same. It feels to me that focusing on the superficial differences here has failed to account for the real underlying difference.

Another question this leaves in my head is about my own observations from dealing with Romance speakers. I recall hearing a lot of them dropping weak pronouns altogether, and my first reaction is that the article focuses on the lack of examples of "*I them see" as proof that there's not a problem, but doesn't comment on the presence or absence of examples of pronounless renderings (i.e. "I see", with no them). My observation from my own pupils was that several of them had learned not to place the pronoun before the verb, but if the verb in Spanish would be the last word of a sentence, they'd just stop without including the pronoun at all. I'm now left second-guessing my own recollection here, though, as recently I only recall hearing this error with Spanish people saying "I like" for "me gusta", and of course there's no explicit "it" in the Spanish, so that's a different issue (but still cross-linguistic).

This is an issue that intrigues me, and I hope to revisit it during the year when I'm working on cross-linguistic issues as part of my masters. For now, though, I just wanted to get my thoughts jotted down for future reference.

Answer in sentences II: Death to abstraction!

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how the standard practice of forcing beginners to answer "in sentences" seemed to devoid the grammar of meaning.

It was inspired by trying to teach past continuous (he was running etc) and revise times (target: at five o'clock, he was running in the park, at half past eight, he was eating dinner in the dining room etc). Unfortunately, the weaker students would look at a time and say "it's five o'clock", and they would look at the action and say "he's running", and they would look at the location and say "he's in the park". The he's, it's etc structure was drummed so heavily into their heads that they didn't dare diverge from it.

This week, I observed a related problem, as I was giving an exam to some secondary school pupils.

They're preparing for a Trinity GESE exam (spoken English), and one of the features of the level they're at is that they're expected to answer to prompts that aren't actually questions. "Tell me about a time when you..." etc. This is considered a more advanced function because it requires abstraction.

But isn't it true that when we teach students to "answer in sentences", we do so by training them to recycle the words of the question...? Well, guess what. My students were regurgitating my words. I wrote Write about a past holiday, and many of the answers started In my past holiday... Obviously this is not natural English.

Is it the student's fault? Is the student incapable of abstraction? Certainly not! Instead, it seems to me that we as teachers actually train abstraction out of our students as soon as we start this "answer in sentences" thing, because it's a skill they have already learned in their first language, and we actively militate against them using it in the new language.

On the occasions where we do answer in sentences, natural language often uses non-symmetrical forms, such as answering What is your name? with I'm Niall.

Our second-language instruction, then, seems to teach language in a way that is quite contrary to nature....

A wrod on errors

Since I started learning languages, I've had lots of discussions, both online and face-to-face, about the nature of errors. What always surprised me was how blasé many people were about errors -- including teachers.

There are two particular philosophies that I find quite worrying.

First:

"Errors take care of themselves."

The belief expressed by many is that there's no need for any systematic correction of errors, as the learner will work them out given enough time and contact with the language.

In the extreme case, this means no correction whatsoever, leaving the student to pick it up from input.
In the more moderate case, the teacher is expected only to give minimal correction, relating to the very specific error.

But isn't it self-evident that this is not the case? Hasn't everyone met at least one immigrant who still speaks with errors that are systematic and predictable? It's easy to dismiss this as an immigrant "language bubble", with the immigrant living and socialising within his minority community, but that only works in a major urban area, where there is enough of a concentrated population for clique community to form. But when you get to a rural community, and there's only one or two minority families in the area, why is it that a pensioner who has lived in the country for half his life still sounds decidedly foreign? And not just in accent, but in language patterns too?

Errors do not take care of themselves.

So on to the second:

"Errors don't matter - native speakers make mistakes too"

This one I've heard in many situations, but the most potentially damaging of these is in the learning of minority languages, because in those instances, it is argued that a learner who has failed to learn correctly is somehow equal to a native speaker.

This is a pretty insidious leap of logic, and confuses two issues.

First up, you have the distinction between two classes of errors: systemic errors where the speaker doesn't know the correct structure or word; and performance errors, or "slips", where the speaker stumbles during speech, despite being perfectly comfortable with the correct form.

Then we've got that hoary old chestnut of "bad grammar". Apparently, when we split our infinitives, or end a sentence with a preposition, or use "who" for a grammatical object, we're natives making errors. Well, no. People "break" these rules all the time, so they are in fact not errors. At worst, they are variant forms and therefore a correct form; at best they are the most common forms, hence the correct form.

In truth, the only type of error a native can make is a slip, a performance error, because a native has a full internal model of their language (in a particular dialect), assuming we are talking about someone without a mental or learning disability.

As many linguists say: there is no such thing as a common native error.

Non-native errors are real, and informative

But common non-native errors do exist, and we do a disservice to ourselves and/or our students by ignoring them, as errors provide a very useful insight into what's wrong with a learner's internal model of the language.

The main inspiration for this post was an error I noticed recently in my own French.

It was something along the lines of *ça ne me rien dit, which should've been ça ne me dit rien. I noticed the mistake immediately, and what I said was the corrected version, but my brain had initially formed the sentence incorrectly.

Why? What was the underlying cause of the error?

For those of you who aren't familiar with French, basic negatives traditionally consist of two parts: the particle ne before the verb and any clitic pronouns, and a second particle (pas=not, rien=nothing, jamais=never etc) after the verb. Or rather, I should say "after the first verb", which is more correct, even if some teachers don't bother to go that far.

You see, in French, there is very often only one verb -- where we add "do" in the negative (I do not know), the French don't (je ne sais pas -- compare with the archaic English I know not).

As high school had drummed this into me in simple (one word) tenses, I initially had great difficulty in correctly forming compound verb structures -- I would erroneously place the "pas" after the final verb:
*je ne peux voir pas instead of je ne peux pas voir
and
*je n'ai vu pas instead of je n'ai pas vu

That was a diagnosable error, and having diagnosed it, I consciously worked to eliminate it, and now I have no problems with ne... pas.

And yet I made this mistake with the placing of jamais, even though it's the exact same structure... and when I made this mistake, I recognised that it was something I struggle with frequently. Furthermore, I make that mistake with every negative word except "pas".

So I have a diagnosis for this error: my internal model has incorrectly built two structures where it should have created one, because a native speaker has only one. It is clearly, therefore, a non-native error.

(Actually, there's a longer story about a series of errors and corrections, but let's keep it short, shall we?)

Taking action...

What can we do as teachers?

Well, it's not easy, but we have to monitor our students constantly to identify consistent errors. Moreover, we have to look out for apparently inconsistent errors -- I say "apparently" inconsistent, because there really is no such thing as an inconsistent error. If it appears inconsistent, it means that the learner has done what I did with French negatives: used two rules where one should be used. It is then the teachers job not to correct the broken rule, but to guide the student to use the correct rule.

The more you spot these errors, the more you'll see them recurring in different students, and you'll find that they're actually pretty common errors. The fixes you implement for your students will feed into your initial teaching as a way to avoid the errors in the first place, and everyone wins in the long-term.

The filter of perception

I've been a bit preoccupied with exam season and have been putting off many things, including blogging.  But I'm going to try to get back into it, and I'm going to try to get this blog back on the language track, and I'll mostly be posting my thoughts on MOOCs elsewhere.

So here for your perusal is some recent thoughts on the filter of perception, and how it affects notions of learning by absorption.

During a recent break, while I was holed up at my parents' house due to a foot injury (a pratfall in a doorway), I started studying German with one of the free interactive web courses.  I'm relatively happy with the course itself, although there are (as with any course) some rather stupid things in it.

There are various types of questions in the course, including translation, multiple-choice and taking dictations.

So there I was, and I heard the computer say to me:
"Liest du Büchen?"
which I started typing.  But then I stopped, because I'd made a mistake with this before.  The form I should have been typing was "Bücher".  I knew this.  But I'm telling you, I heard Büchen.  Yes, the computer said Bücher, but I heard Büchen, clear as day.

The brain is a remarkable thing, and what we perceive is not always what hits our eyes or ears.

There are rules to the universe, and once our brain knows the rules, it filters what we receive to produce a perception that matches our expectation of the universe.  If we see a man standing half-hidden behind a wall, we don't perceive "half a man", we perceive "a man that we can see half of".  We make a rough guess at the hidden bits based on proportions relative to what we can see and the many hundreds of humans we've seen in our lives.  If you see a man with a hand over one (presumed) eye, you assume there's an eye underneath, and you would only be surprised when he moved his hand if there wasn't an eye there.

In language, this is particularly useful as it lets us understand dialectal variation without too much effort, and crucially without ever having to truly "learn" the dialect we're trying to listen to. 
If an Irishman said to me "ten times tree is tirty", I might well perceive "ten times three is thirty", and if the conversation was quick enough, I might not even be consciously aware that he had said T sounds instead of TH.  And if I said to him that "ten times three is thirty", he wouldn't have any problems understanding me, just because I used the "extra" TH sound that isn't in his inventory.

But while that's good for the fluent speaker, it's a potential pitfall for the language learner.  In the case of my German lesson, I had an unconscious rule in my head that said "-en is the German plural suffix" and that filtered the received "Bücher" and gave me the perceived "Büchen".  Now before anyone blames "rules" for my error, let me make it clear that this was an internalised, procedural rule rather than a conscious, declarative one.

Had I never been punished for perceiving it wrong, my ear would probably never have been learned to perceive the difference, because there would have been no impetus to do so.  (Say, for example, I was only asked to translate from German to English.)

And so it is for anyone living through a foreign language.  I recall one interesting experience when doing a listening lesson with two private students (I thought I'd mentioned this here before, but I can't find it in my posting archive).  There was a gist-listening exercise with comprehension questions, and then there was a series of close-listening tasks consisting of a sentence or two of audio and a fill-in-the-gaps version of the sentence on the worksheet.  As they whittled away the gaps word by word, they were left with two gaps, but that wasn't enough, because every time they listening to the recording, they heard three words: "prices of houses".  I replayed the file several times, watching them in fascination: "prices of houses", "prices of houses", "prices of houses".  How was it that even when they were listening very, very closely, they couldn't perceive the simple phrase "house prices"?

As far as I can see, it comes down to this:
that structure wasn't part of their language model, and continued exposure to the language only trained their ability to filter the input to adapt it to their structure, rather than adapting their structure to match the input.

If we comprehend input by mangling it to match our internal model, then accurate acquisition by comprehensible input alone must be an impossible dream.