autonomy of language - A Dictionary of Language Acquisition

guage and other languages and (2) the more motivated he will be to pursue learning. Taking responsibility for one’s own learning, and making choices in every area of learning and assessment were key principles in early repre-sentations of language learner autonomy. However, even supporters of au-tonomy admit that the term continues to lack precision. Little consensus has been achieved on whether autonomy is an individual learner trait or whether it is a state that manifests itself in reaction to institutional contexts; whether autonomy is a psychological phenomenon that can be nurtured by teachers or whether it is an inevitable product of the socio-cultural situation in which the learners find themselves. Most recently, there has been a focus on learner autonomy’s interdependence with teacher autonomy (i.e., freedom from in-stitutional and national constraints to develop reflective and experimental practice). Despite more than two decades of researcher and practitioner in-terest in autonomy, the construct has failed to achieve a high status in the research evidence and internationally has not made much headway in terms of influencing pedagogy. It is argued that this lack of progress is possibly due to the threat autonomy poses to the educational status quo.

 Benson 2001; Holec 1981; Lamb & Reinders 2008; Macaro et al. 2010 autonomy of language

the view that the human LANGUAGE FACULTY is independent of general men-tal and cognitive abilities. A young child is obliged to spend years learning to make sense of the world it is born into, and at the same time it must learn its first language. For decades there has been a controversy, sometimes called the nature-nurture debate or the content-process debate, over whether children are born with a distinctive and largely independent faculty for learn-ing language, or whether they simply acquire a language in the same way they acquire other kinds of understanding and skills, by using their general all-purpose cognitive abilities.

The first view—represented by such proposals as the GENETIC HYPOTHESIS OF LANGUAGE and the INNATENESS HYPOTHESIS—is probably supported by a ma-jority of linguists; certainly by Noam Chomsky and his followers, but also by others who have limited sympathy for Chomsky’s ideas. The second has been supported by a number of psychologists, notably by Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner, and more recently by Elizabeth Bates and her colleagues.

The first view holds that children are born with specialized structures or are-as in their brains which are dedicated to the learning and use of languages;

Chomsky’s version further holds that important information about the nature of human languages is already present at birth. The second view denies this, and sees language acquisition as not different in kind from, say, learning to judge size and distance; some versions go further and claim that learning a first language is not different from learning to ice skate or to drive a car.

This last, extreme, view can probably be disposed of: the abundant evidence for the CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS, demonstrating that first-language

ac-avoidance 35 quisition is rapid in children but impossible in adults, surely demonstrates that learning a first language is very different from learning to ice skate.

Otherwise, though, the debate is still very much alive.

Linguists like to support the first view by pointing to the evidence from lan-guage disability: some disabilities, such as the WILLIAMS SYNDROME, appear to leave the language faculties intact while severely damaging other mental faculties; others, such as SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT, chiefly affect only linguistic behavior while leaving other mental faculties largely unscathed.

 Bates 1976; Bates et al. 1979; 1988; Jackendoff 1993; Macwhinney & Bates 1989; Pinker 1994b; Trask 2005

auxiliary language

a second language that learners need to know for some official functions in their immediate sociopolitical setting, or that they will need for purposes of wider communication, although their first language serves most other needs in their lives. For learners of an auxiliary language, the target language grammar, for example, may not be that of native speakers, but of educated users of the L2 in their own country; learners may not wish to identify with or fully participate in a language community for which the L2 is politically dominant.

see also HERITAGE LANGUAGE, BILINGUAL EDUCATION

 González 2008; Kachru 1986; Macaro et al. 2010 avoidance

a term most often used in the context of learner strategies (see LEARNING STRATEGIES) and particularly as a COMMUNICATION STRATEGY in that it is a conscious mental act with a language use goal. Avoidance behavior occurs when L2 learners attempt to avoid using structures in their production that are difficult as a result of (perceived) differences or similarities between their L1 and the target L2. Although avoidance is a complex phenomenon to describe, scholars in SLA have attempted to address the complexity of this phenomenon by identifying three main types of avoidance:

1) when learners know or anticipate that there is a problem and have at least some, sketchy idea of what the target form is like. This is the min-imum condition for avoidance;

2) when learners know what the target is but find it too difficult to use in the particular circumstances (e.g., in the context of free-flowing conver-sation);

3) when learners know what to say and how to say it but are unwilling to actually say it because it will result in them flouting their own norms of behavior.

36 awareness

In all three cases it is clear that much more is involved than the learner’s L1.

The extent of learners’ knowledge of the L2 and the attitudes learners hold toward their own and the target-language cultures act as factors that interact with L1 knowledge to determine avoidance behavior.

Avoidance can be broken down into several subcategories. The most com-mon type of avoidance strategy is syntactic or lexical avoidance within a semantic category. Consider the following conversation between a learner and a native speaker:

L: I lost my road.

US: You lost your road?

L: Uh,... I lost. I lost. I got lost.

The learner avoided the lexical item road entirely, not being able to come up with the word way at that point.

Phonological avoidance is also common, as in the case of a Japanese tennis player who avoided using the word rally (because of its phonological diffi-culty) and instead opted to say, simply, hit the ball.

A more direct type of avoidance is topic avoidance, in which a whole topic of conversation (say, talking about what happened yesterday if the past tense is unfamiliar) might be avoided entirely. Learners manage to devise ingen-ious methods of topic avoidance: changing the subject, pretending not to un-derstand (a classical means for avoiding answering a question), simply not responding at all, or noticeably abandoning a message when a thought be-comes too difficult to express.

 Brown 2007; Ellis 2008; Kellerman 1992; Macaro et al. 2010; Scovel 2000 awareness

cognizance of linguistic, mental, or emotional factors through ATTENTION

and focus. Awareness refers to consciousness, i.e., the degree to which peo-ple are conscious of what they are doing or learning. Three main criteria to describe awareness have been identified. Individuals are considered aware of a given experience if they can (1) show that a change (cognitive or behavior-al) has taken place as a result of that experience, (2) report that they are aware of what they are experiencing (e.g., they report noticing linguistic fea-tures in the INPUT), and (3) describe their experience (e.g., verbalize an un-derlying rule of the L2). Also, three levels of awareness have been identi-fied: perception (we might perceive a stimulus but not be aware); noticing (we are able to bring a stimulus into our focal attention); and understanding (we are able to analyze and compare a language feature with what we have already stored in our memory).

Scholars disagree about the role of awareness in SLA. Some scholars have held that acquisition is mainly an unconscious process, and conscious learn-ing has only a monitorlearn-ing function (see MONITOR HYPOTHESIS). These

schol-awareness 37 ars have argued against the key role of awareness in language acquisition as the acquisition of a second language can happen without awareness. Others have argued that awareness at the level of noticing (see NOTICING HYPOTHE-SIS) is a necessary condition for acquisition.

However, what we are learning from these studies is that learners can indeed benefit from raised awareness of their own processes of learning. Undoubt-edly, there is an optimal level of awareness that serves learners. In other words, too much awareness, too much explicit focus on grammar, or too much devotion to rules, coupled with not enough intuitive, subconscious communication, will smother learners’ yearning to simply use language, un-fettered by overattention to correctness. But some levels of awareness are clearly warranted, i.e., strategic awareness, the conscious application of ap-propriate strategies.

see also CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING

 Brown 2007; Lightbown & Spada 1990; VanPatten & Benati 2010

babbling

a prelinguistic stage when young children produce sounds which resemble adult consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. Children begin to babble at about 6-10 months; and the stage lasts for up to 9 months. Two types of babbling are observed: reduplicated babble, with the same CV sequence repeated (e.g., bababa or babababa) and variegated babble, with different CV sequences combined (e.g., bamido). Both sometimes adopt an intonation pattern which resembles adult speech. As these babble sequences become longer and more frequent, infants may display a preference for one consonant-type over oth-ers, with some favoring mainly m-sounds, others b-sounds, and others still g-sounds.

They soon vary the intonation contours of babble sequences too, matching the rises and falls of intonation patterns in the language around them. They also start to vary the syllables within a babble sequence, for example, baba-ba-mamama, mememe-dede, baba-dadada. It is harder to tell whether infants vary vowel-like sounds systematically because there tends to be more varia-bility in these than in consonant-like sounds. For consonants, there is distinct closure for stops (e.g., p, b, t, d, k, g) at different places in the mouth and discernible near-closure for fricatives, where the sound is produced with au-dible friction (e.g., s, f, v), so it is possible to identify the general place and manner of articulation for babbled syllables. By ten to twelve months of age, many babbled sequences sound compatible with the surrounding language, using similar sound sequences, rhythm, and intonation contours.

There are conflicting views as to whether babbling contributes to phonologi-cal development. A discontinuity hypothesis claims that there is no link.

Exponents point out that some children undergo a SILENT PERIOD between babbling and the emergence of speech and that, regardless of target language (TL), there seems to be a set order in which phonological features are ac-quired. A continuity hypothesis maintains that babbling is a precursor to speech, enabling the child to practice a range of potentially useful sounds, which increasingly resemble those of the TL. The CV syllables produced during later babbling are said to recur in the child’s first words; and there is said to be a strong correlation between the frequency of sounds in babbling and their frequency in the TL. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the om-nipresent English sound /ð/ emerges late, as do fricatives in general.

balanced bilingualism 39 see also COOING, FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, PHONOLOGICAL PRODUCTION

 Clark 2009; De Boysson-Bardies & Vihman 1991; Elbers 1982; Field 2004; Ingram 1989;

Vihman 1996 baby talk

another term for CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH back channels

a term identified by Duncan to describe feedback that is given by a hearer in order to indicate that they are attending to someone else’s speech. They can be (1) nonverbal, for example, consisting of nods, gestures or facial expres-sions, or (2) verbal, for example, words like yeah, right, okay or vocaliza-tions like mm and uh-huh. They can also include cases where a hearer com-pletes part of a speaker’s turn.