Second Language Acquisition (6)

PSYCHOLINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF INTERLANGUAGE

A.    L1 Transfer

L1 transfer refers to the influence that the learner’s L1 exerts over the acquisition of an L2. This influence is referred to as negative transfer. The habits of the L1 were supposed to prevent the learner from learning the habits of the L2. In the belief that interference, thereby learning difficulty, could be predicted by identifying those areas of the target language that were different from the learners’ L1, comparison of the two languages were carried out using contrastive analysis.

Transfer is governed by learners’ perceptions about what is transferable and by their stage development. It follows that interlanguage development cannot constitute restructuring continuum. When language transfer takes place there is usually no loss of L1 knowledge. This obvious fact has led to the suggestion that a better term for referring to the effects of the L1 might be ‘cross-linguistic influence’.

B.     The Role of Consciousness in L2 Acquisition

Stephen Krashen has argued the need to distinguish ‘acquired’ L2 knowledge (i.e. implicit knowledge of the language) and ‘learned’ L2 knowledge (i.e. explicit knowledge about language). He claims that the former is develop subconsciously through comprehending input while communicating, while the latter is develop consciously through deliberate study of L2.

The nature of learners’ explicit knowledge is that the most learners are only capable of learning fairly simple rules. But it may aid learners in developing implicit knowledge and helping to process input and intake.

C.     Processing Operation

1.  Operating Principles

The study of the L1 acquisition of many different languages has led to the identification of number of general strategies which children use to extract and segment linguistic information from the language they hear. This operating principle provides a simple and attractive way of accounting for the properties of interlanguage.

2.  Processing Constraints

Processing constraints govern when it is possible for a learner to move from one stage to another. For example, learners begin by adopting the ‘canonical order strategy’. This prevents them from interrupting the basic subject-verb-object word order. Later they develop the ‘initialization/finalization strategy’ which enables them to move elements at the end of a structure to the beginning and vice versa but prevents them moving elements within a structure.

D.    Communication Strategies

As anyone who has tried to communicate in an L2 knows, learners frequently experience problems in saying what they want to say because of their inadequate knowledge. In order to overcome the problem they resort some communication strategies. They are:

1.  Avoiding problematic items

2. Borrowing a word from L1

3.Paraphrasing the meaning of the word

E.     Two Types of Computational Model

a.       The black box houses some kind of apparatus that extracts information from the ‘input’, works on it, store it, and subsequently uses it in ‘output’.

b.      Information is processed in a series of sequential steps and results in the representation of what has been learned as some kind of ‘rule’ or ‘strategy’.

The alternative type of apparatus involves the idea of parallel distributed processing. This credits learners with the ability to perform a number of mental tasks at the same time, for example the ability to attend to both form and meaning while processing input. Models based on parallel distributed processing reject the whole notion of ‘rule’.