COMPETENCIES AND DEVELOPMENTAL ORDER IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND LEARNING

The learner whose mother tongue is different to English, as the LoLT of the school, is still expected to possess not just communicative English proficiency, but academic English proficiency (Hawkins 2005: 31). This refers to the knowledge of academic language, such as mathematical and scientific terminology, and the knowledge of specialised subject matter (Gibbons 2002: 4, 5). Guerrero (2004: 183) defines this simply as the language needed to understand content.

The field of second language acquisition should address both proficiency and communicative competence. It should also enable learners to use language in a way that is context appropriate (Cho & O’Grady 2005: 507; Hawkins 2005: 31). To illuminate the concept of competence, Cho and O’Grady (2005: 508, 509) list four competencies:

• Grammatical competence, which is the knowledge of the core components of the grammar, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. • Textual competence, as it refers to a text as not just consisting of a sequence

of grammatical utterances, but also to the rules that string sentences together to combine it into a well-formed text in the spoken or written language.

• Sociolinguistic competence, referring to second language learners’ need to be able to produce and comprehend a variety of social dialects. These dialects refer to an ESL learner’s ability to understand and produce language within a specific context and social setting.

• Illocutionary competence, which is the ability to understand a speaker’s intent, and to produce a variety of syntactic structures to convey a particular intent in various circumstances.

Second language acquisition usually proceeds by following a predicted developmental order (Cho & O’Grady 2005: 521; Ellis 1997: 12). The complication facing the learners who form the focus of this study, namely ESL learners, is that they do not always have the opportunity to acquire English as a second language along normal acquisition routes. They are required to start learning ‘in’ English before understanding the language and before being able to use it to communicate for academic purposes (Guerrero 2004: 177). Their exposure to the LoLT is often confined to the classroom and, to a lesser degree, the school environment (Hawkins 2005: 33, 34). Krashen and Terrell (1995: 19) use the term “incomprehensible input” and explain it by using the example of someone hearing an unfamiliar language on the radio. This incomprehensible input does therefore not provide an opportunity to acquire the language. Krashen and Terrell (1995: 210) indicate that “comprehension precedes production”. Unfortunately, many ESL learners are often required to produce academically demanding assignments before really understanding English. Many learners exit Grade Three with limited English competence and are then expected to deal with the academic demands of Grade Four.

In this regard Hawkins (2005: 35) mentions how complicated it actually is to achieve conversancy with academic texts before the target language’s concepts and vocabulary are acquired. From these statements it can be deduced that learners in similar situations do not always have the opportunity to acquire grammatical structures necessary for fluent academic functioning. Grammatical structures are acquired in a predictable order, and Cho and O’Grady (2005: 521) list them as:

• The present participle affix.

• The copula ‘be’, for example: I am late. • Articles.

• The auxiliary ‘be’, for example: She is reading. • The plural ‘s’.

• The irregular past tense verb, for example: He taught Latin. • The regular past tense.

• The third person ‘s’, for example: She sings beautifully. • The possessive ‘s’, for example: The boy’s crayon.

The ESL learner does not always have the time to acquire these competencies naturally. They are often expected to deal with a high level of academic English proficiency before these basic structures have been internalised.

For the ESL learner in South Africa, it is often difficult to listen to English, as its phonological system, phonotactic rules and tone may differ from the first language (Nel 2005: 152). Stress is not phonemic in the indigenous South African languages and they follow the phonological rule of lengthening the penultimate syllable. In speaking and reading, the Sotho languages deal with a seven-vowel system and a complex consonantal system. This may, for example, result in the pronunciation of a trilled /r/ sound or the consonant cluster /kl/ pronounced as /tl’/. English, on the other hand, has twelve vowels and nine diphthongs (De Klerk & Gough 2002: 5).

Wissing (1987: 40 – 166) investigated these differences already in 1987, and discusses the following linguistic errors made by ESL learners who are mother tongue speakers of South Africa’s indigenous languages:

• Spelling: The orthography of the indigenous languages are more uniform than English, where spelling can be logical and phonetic but can also appear as having little correlation with its pronunciation. A typical error example is the vocalic error bed / bad.

• Nouns: The indigenous languages are all based on the system of dividing nouns into classes while English works on three genders. A typical error example is found in the use of the pronouns him / her.

• The article: There is no equivalent in the indigenous languages for the articles of English. A typical error example is that articles are therefore often omitted. • Concord: In English the number of the subject influences the tense marker.

This does not happen in the indigenous languages. A typical error example is found in the following sentence: My problem are why she decide to go there.

• Verbs: English has a variety of verbs to indicate similar ideas, for example, the verb ‘may’ which can indicate possibility, expressing a wish, request or permission. A typical error example would be the sentence: I have take the keys. The participle ‘taken’ is not used.

• Syntax: Indigenous speakers often use the syntax of their own languages when thinking and writing in English. A typical error example to highlight this would be the sentence: I think I cannot do this work.

In addition to these examples, Wissing (1987: 80, 108, 151, 166) mentions, because of English-indigenous language differences, how ESL learners struggle in English with lexical errors, punctuation, prepositions and conjunctions. A lack of vocabulary and reading errors results in poor comprehension (Nel 2005: 152). Mispronunciation, as in the classic example “She took a ‘sheep’ (ship) from Durban”, can seriously hamper comprehension.

The learner whose mother tongue is different to English, as the LoLT of the school, is still expected to possess not just communicative English proficiency, but also the level of academic proficiency which will make optimal learning possible. As explained by Guerrero (2004: 183), this is basically the language which learners require to comprehend academic essence. For the South African ESL learner to build up a competent linguistic repertoire that is required for coping adequately with the academic demands of Grade Four is quite a daunting task. The differences between the phonetic systems and grammatical structures of a learner’s mother tongue and English as the LoLT of the school add to an already complex situation.