HLA: ‘Between’ SLA and Studies of Bilingualism - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

HLA: ‘Between’ SLA and Studies of Bilingualism

Andrew Lynch

University of Miami

Slide2

How do we define a HL?

“A defining distinction between heritage language and foreign language acquisition is that heritage language acquisition begins in the home, as opposed to foreign language acquisition which, at least initially, usually begins in a classroom

setting.”

(

UCLA Steering Committee

2000

)

Slide3

HLA vs. SLA

What do heritage language learners acquire?

How do they acquire it?

What differences are there in the way in which individual learners acquire a heritage language?

What effects does instruction have on heritage language acquisition?

(Lynch 2003)

Slide4

HLA vs. SLA

“In

many respects, L1 loss in a bilingual context is the flip side of the L2 acquisition

coin.” (

Montrul

2005)

“… it is fair to say that heritage speakers provide a crucial missing link

between

competent L1 learners, balanced bilinguals, and possibly L2 learners”

(

Polinsky

2008)

“Russian heritage speakers may indeed be ‘lost in between’ in the continuum of language speakers

.” (

Isurin

&

Ivanova

-Sullivan

2008)

Slide5

Bilingualism vs. SLA

Context of acquisition

: Did the individual acquire both languages in naturalistic settings (i.e. at home) or in institutional settings (i.e. in the classroom)

?

Age of acquisition

: Did she acquire both languages during early childhood or was one of the two acquired later, i.e. during adolescence or adulthood?

Slide6

Bilingualism vs. SLA

Degree of proficiency

: Does

the individual

demonstrate basic or low-level abilities within limited topic ranges or does she produce complex and sophisticated discourse on a wide range of topics?

Slide7

Bilingualism vs. SLA

Identity

and ‘native’ or ‘native-like’ qualities

: Does

the individual

self-identify as a ‘speaker’ of both languages, laying some sort of personal claim to their use, and do other ‘in-group’ speakers of both languages also consider her as such? Does she ‘sound’ or behave like an imagined native speaker, or does she give the impression of someone who is ‘foreign’ or ‘nonnative-like

’?

Slide8

Context and globalism

Language as construct (language ‘in place’)

Language as practice (language ‘in motion’)

“…the

mobility of people also involves the mobility of linguistic and sociolinguistic resources,

‘

sedentary’ or ‘territorialized’ patterns of language use are complemented by ‘

translocal

’ or ‘

deterritorialized

’ forms of language use, and

the combination of both often accounts for unexpected sociolinguistic effects”

(

Blommaert

2010)

Slide9

Context and process

“The difference that everybody can observe within one and the same immigrant family, where the children soon overtake their parents, reflects

implicit acquisition processes

only; adolescents and adults do not have any more problems than children with the kind of learning that is typical of most foreign language learning, on the contrary”

(

DeKeyser

2013)

Slide10

Age

Is

an apparent ‘critical period’ attributable to maturational phenomena of cognition and experience, to biological constraints posed by

neuro

-anatomical development, or to social phenomena of identity

and

opportunities for exposure, input and use?

Or is ultimate attainment determined by the complex interplay of all of these factors?

Slide11

Age

A

cross

studies, there is a wide range of conceptual and methodological approaches, and conclusions are based on highly disparate samples taken from very limited strata of the population (mostly classroom L2 learners

).

Across studies, there is lack

of control of fundamental variables, similar instrumentation, and methodological

procedures.

Slide12

Age and socio-cognition

Different than what has previously been conjectured in cognitivist and generativist accounts of language acquisition, recent

neurolinguistic

research suggests that social constraints (degree of exposure and level of proficiency) are in fact more essential or ‘critical’ than biological constraints (age of acquisition

).

Slide13

Age and the brain

“

The available evidence indicates that an L2 seems to be acquired through the same neural structures responsible for L1 acquisition. This observation extends to grammar acquisition in late L2 learners contrary to what one may expect from critical period

accounts.”

(

Abutalebi

et al.

2009)

Slide14

Age

“

[

R]

esearchers

should put more effort on extended longitudinal investigations addressing the natural course of L2 acquisition (i.e., follow-up studies in L2 teaching classrooms). To date, the course of language acquisition has mainly been documented for specific components (such as grammatical rules or a limited lexicon) using experimental conditions...

.” (

Abutalebi

et al.

2013)

Slide15

Age

“

Of course, these studies are highly informative...but they do not represent the natural course and environment of L2 acquisition and so may not reveal the real-life mechanisms.... Likewise, we emphasize that there is an apparent lack of interest toward one of the factors that crucially influences the neural basis of L2 processing: the relative exposure toward a language

.

” (

Abutalebi

et al.

2013)

Slide16

Proficiency

“Language

attrition in societal bilingualism is in fact to a large extent the mirror image of development in

creolization

, and in first and second language acquisition.... This correspondence may in fact reflect the freezing...of the bilingual’s secondary

language” (Silva-

Corval

án

1990)

Interlanguage

(

Selinker

1972)

Slide17

Proficiency

Simplification

Overgeneralization

Transfer

Code-switching (language mixing)

Great

variability

Slide18

Variability

F

ree

variability

ʻserves

as the impetus for

developmentʼ

in L2

acquisition (Ellis 1985)

L2

is

directly affected by the social setting, in the use of linguistic variants tied to code-switching, attention to form vs. meaning, and the appropriation of ‘voices’ associated with particular group roles and identities

(

Tarone

2010)

S

table

patterns in language

ʻemerge

through an iterative

processʼ

(Larsen-Freeman 2010)

Slide19

Markedness

(

Mougeon

et al.

2010

)

‘

Marked informal variants

’

(

toi

and

moi

as [

twe

] and [

mwe

] rather than

normative

[

twa

] and [

mwa

])

‘

Mildly marked informal variants

’ (absence of particle

ne

in negative sentences)

‘

Neutral variants

’ (

auto

to refer to a car rather than the markedly informal

char

or the markedly formal

voiture

)

‘

Formal variants

’ (

demeurer

[to reside] rather than the more informal

rester

)

‘

Hyper-formal variants

’ (

ne…

que

rather than

juste

to express

restriction)

Slide20

Proficiency and identity

“…judgments

of proficiency are themselves always relational and socio-ideologically positioned, and in a great many interactions the fact that one participant learnt to speak the language in use later in life is irrelevant to the

encounter.” (

Rampton

2013)

Slide21

Proficiency and ‘passing’

“

T

he

passing performance is just the highest form of linguistic performance that expert L2 speakers are capable of but it does not involve any sort of mistaken identity at all. The audience knows that the performer is a highly skilled bilingual and native or non-native identities just do not matter in this

context.” (

Piller

2002)

Slide22

Proficiency and meaning

“An audience will listen with interest, satisfaction and involvement to a discourse by a foreigner using the native language of the group he is addressing…. [M]

eaning

is transferred to receptive minds without consideration of barriers that in instructional settings would be causes for

failure.” (

Roeming

1966)

Slide23

Proficiency and status

Consider the ways in which speakers classify

themselves and the ways that they are classified by local

others.

Take into account the

speech of those who inhabit the same

environment.

S

ituate

expectations with regard to particular interlocutors, interpreters, analysts, genres and

footings. (

Rampton

2013)

Slide24

Future research

directions

HLA situated in practice, social networks,

communities (globalism)

Relationship between communicative competence (social use of language) and grammatical competence

Socio-phonetics

Socio-cognition

(

Batstone

2010)

Role of output in HLA

Agency

and

opportunity (globalism)