Natural Acquisition or Formal Instruction?

Natural acquisition or formal instruction? As stated above, the formal instruction seems to be quite powerful following the developmental procedural skills. However, it has been shown from the analysis and the previous discussion that the acquisition speed of Harry is obviously faster than his classmate Marlene’s, and was even faster than the second year student Fran’s during the acquisitional process. Since Harry had

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been to China for nearly three months immediately prior to commencing Chinese learning at Newcastle University, the natural input he received probably had an unpredictable influence on his language development, which therefore resulted in him having both better comprehension and performance than Marlene. This fact proves that the natural acquisition with proper contexts could somehow positively promote the language learning. Will this also demonstrate that natural acquisition could benefit students’ L2 acquisition over formal instruction?

According to the data analyzed in my study, although some structures may not occur as a teaching objective, some of my subjects may still have exposure to them due to their frequent contact with native speakers of Chinese in and out of university, or from their personal Chinese-related backgrounds. Obviously, the learners who have a lot of exposure to the target language show overwhelming benefits compared to the ones without natural input, especially in Rachel’s case.

Rachel had one year of teaching experience in China before she enrolled on the Chinese programme at Newcastle University, plus she worked in a Chinese resturarant when she studied in Newcastle. Meanwhile, she has made many Chinese friends who she always contacted in her spare time to practise her Chinese. In this circumstance, she has a very strong natural input in the Chinese language which contributed to her gaining the top Chinese competence among my research participants. Compared with the other students, her Chinese vocabulary knowledge, expression skills and her grammatical structure comprehension are all outstanding.

In fact, a previous investigation has already revealed the benefits of natural input and formal teaching. Pienemann quoted Pica’s research undertaken in 1982. Pica established an implicational scale for three groups of students from a naturalistic setting, a mixed setting (naturalistic and instructive) and a formal instructive setting. The results of the experiment showed that the learners in different groups acquired the proposed structures in the same order and that the implicational scale is consistent in different linguistic contexts (Pienemann cited in Hyltenstam and Pienemann, 1985). However, the acquisition speed varied among the three groups. Learners from an

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instructed environment progressed a little more quickly than those learners in the other two settings. Obviously, this study was conducted over 20 years ago and the formal teaching methods were not clearly stated in the research, so the findings should be analyzed from a broader perspective.

Moreover, Long (1993), in a review of 11 studies comparing naturalistic, classroom or mixed exposure to L2s, noticed that six of them proved that the students’ language development was faster with instruction compared to the ones in other groups. According to Long’s (1993) research and subsequent studies, Ellis (1990: 133) concluded that ‘it seems reasonable to assume that formal instruction is of value in promoting rapid and higher levels of acquisition’.

Pienemann (cited in Hyltenstam and Pienemann, 1985) has also declared that the external factors might have a certain influence on the learning process, but it is still determined and constrained by the set of principles in a PT-derived L2 development in both natural and instructed settings.

All in all, in natural settings, SLA has been determined by the necessary prerequisites for processing the items to be learnt within the environmental contexts – the learning process may take more time. While in the formal contexts, the instructed contents underlying the teaching curriculum could somehow boost or obstruct the learning outcomes, even though the learners may make varying amounts of progress under the natural contexts. Consequently, previous studies have suggested the unique employment of formal teaching to help learners’ language acquisition, but I still recommend that it is suitable to use a combination of natural input and formal instruction based on PT procedural skills, since the L2 learners with different personal backgrounds and linguistic competence could benefit from this approach.

6.6 Summary

Taking into consideration of the syllabus, the PT-based predictions and the acquisition profile of the informants in previous CSL studies, it is reasonable to suggest that the processing constraints had played quite an important role in SLA.

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The data to date has demonstrated that the acquisition of Chinese grammatical forms, defined by the emergence criterion, preceded in an orderly sequence as predicted in PT. Most of my participants followed the proposed PT stages in their L2 development. Even though these participants are from complex backgrounds, they still presented identical and consistent development, based on the hypothesized processing order. In other words, the observed developmental course shown in my research is compatible with the PT-motivated processing hierarchy.

A further proposal of the grammatical structures in Chinese following the processing hierarchy has been made, which could enrich the grammatical presence in each stage. bei structure and the other forms of topicalization in Chinese have been revealed according to my data sets and then added to the current developmental stages.

However, exceptions did exist due to unexpected drawbacks in research methods and influential factors discussed in this chapter. From another angle, these ‘mysterious’ exceptional cases may be seen as the evidence which is to challenge PT. Further work is definitely required in this case. Moreover, one issue addressed is that the CSL acquisition sequence was not violated by delayed emergence of certain structures or cases, nor was it invalidated by indistinguishable stages found in the data.

The current findings also revealed that one does not always learn what one is taught. The syllabus facilitates learning unless there is an identical order between the syllabus and the developmental course of the given grammatical items in L2 Chinese. The learners’ language progress could be evidently stimulated under both PT-driven instructions and natural input. All these statements have been proved through the data collected from my research participants.

Pienemann (1998b:11) has emphasized that obviously, ‘there is no a priori way of knowing how closely related L1 and L2 are. Learners therefore have to be equipped to bridge maximal typological gaps in their L2 acquisition’. As such, some practical strategies should be employed to facilitate the teaching and acquisition process

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which could thereafter narrow the gaps. Details will be discussed in the next Chapter.

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