Documents C.L.C.S. Occasional paper 40 résultats

It is a commonplace that the major theoretical issue in the domain of language acquisition is the question of whether or not language development is independent of other aspects of cognitive develop-ment. The issue of the separateness or otherwise of the 1anguage faculty" or "Ianguage module" also arises in respect of language processing, and in this co nnection different interpretations of cer-tain lexical phenomena have figured prominently in the debate. This in itself seems a good reason to consider the arguments for and against modular processing in any treatment of the mental lexicon. How-ever, it is not the only reason.
Neglected though it has been in some recent publications on the mental lexicon (e.g. Aitchison 1994; Schmitt and McCarthy 1997; Schreuder and Weltens 1993), the modularity debate goes to the very heart of the large questions that researchers working on lexical issues face constantly, whatever their particular interests - questions about the distinguishability of "linguistic knowledge" from "pragmatic" or "encyclopedic" knowledge and about how and where to situate different aspects of lexical knowledge in relation to any putative lin-guistic "core". Obviously, these questions are every bit as relevant to second language lexical research as to first language lexical research. In the case of the former there is the added complication that some theoreticians have wished to make a qualitative distinction between knowledge of second language acquired beyond the childhood years and/or in a formal instructional setting and linguistic competence proper stored in the language module.
This paper begins with a historical contextualization of the modular view of the mind and a general discussion of language processing from a modular perspective. It then considers and critiques some arguments in favour of modularity based on neurolinguistic data, before examining the case for and against the notion that the formal aspects of lexical processing are informationally encapsulated. Finally, it discusses the relevance of the modularity concept to lexical processing.

This paper is concerned with the acquisition of pragmatic cornpetence by second language leamers in the target language environment; its empirical component focuses on learners taking a course in English as a foreign language at a language school in Dublin. The paper takes as its starting point the hypothesis that learners who perceive social or cultural distance between themselves and the target language culture, will have greater difficulty in achieving pragmatic competence and in developing cultural and pragmatic awareness, than those who do not perceive this distance. While certain cultures are "obviously" distant such as those of Japanese and Arabic learners, other learners from. apparently similar cultural backgrounds, such as Spanish or Gennan, may also experience difficulty in appreciating the general appropriacy of language to situations which are culture-bound.
The first section of the paper considers the question of the relation between language and culture and then examines the principal theories of communicative competence and the position of pragmatic compe-tence within these theories. The organization of knowledge into schemata is discussed, in terms of the influence this may have upon a learner, particularly one who lacks the schernata appropriate to new cultural situations. Social distance is described as it applies to the language learner, and the stages through which a learner may pass in the process of acculturation are also considered. The phenomenon of culture shock and the influence of the stage of anomie as a potentially greater cultural understanding, critical period for a learner are examined. The second section considers the theory of Speech Acts and their realization in the achievement of communicative competence. Grice's Conversational Maxims are discussed, and the difficulties which can occur in crosscultural communication are described, particularly in relation to indirect speech acts. A number of studies concerned with the realization of speech acts are examined, relating both to native speakers and language learners. The third section introduces the empirical study and describes the individual subjects involved and the instruments used, while the fourth section presents the findings of the study. The fifth section outlines pedagogical proposals prompted by the results of the study.

In scientific circles today there is an ongoing debate about science as a method of finding objective truth. Some scientists say that there is no such thing as scientific fact, only reahties socially and histori-cally constructed by those in power, who happen to be mostly privi-leged, white, Eurocentric males seeking to remain in positions of power. In response to this, other (mainstream) scientists claim. that science as an objective enterprise cannot be subjected to cultural and political critique. In a similar manner, there is the general view that .second language research, for the large part is related to ways of thinking and acting that are natural, neutral and beneficial" (Penny-cook 1994). On the other hand, there is the less widely held view that second language research should be concerned with the socio-his-torical and political implications of its impact on language education. According to Latour (1991), "for each concept/idea we must look at content in terms of context: sociocultural, historical and political". My concern is with this latter view.
In other words, 1 want to focus on some famihar assumptions in second language research and examine how some concepts get taken up that have influenced researchers' ways of looking at second lan-guage development.
In examining these positions, I am guided by the following ques-tions: what assumptions are being made about language and language theory? More importantly, what are the implications of those assump-tions for language learning and language teaching? Moreover, whose interests are being served by promoting theories about language that propriation of words and s)
impact significantly on language education. 1 believe that as in all my work, 1 must do my own socio-historical and political memory work as a researcher; that is, 1 must trace the personal development that has brought me to ask the questions 1 am seeking to answer. My background has been in psycholinguistics, an area heavily weighted in quantitative experimentation. My research in first and second language development is related to linguistic awareness, fiteracy and academic achievement. I continue to do thesetypes of studies. However, statistical methods of means/median, standard deviations, individual differences, and outliers mask a lot of the issues 1 am thinking about. Let me explain. My subject population has been children, adolescents and adults in a second language
context a minority-ethnic background, or in a language-minority setting. Interpretations of my results could not proceed if they precluded any socio-cultural variables. They were there as an added-on component. Psychohnguistic models I am famihar with marginalize sociocultural contributions to the mind. 1 was growing dissatisfied with my perceptions and interpretations of language and literacy. With standardized tests, norms are imposed. With individual differences, group means, it is established who is in and who is out who has the knowledge and who doesn't, who is included, who is excluded. Who is marginalized in this process? The disenfranchised.
I am reflecting on these issues at a time when many refugees are coming to Canada, because of civil war, drought famine, and froin cultures with behefs and values not part of Western ways. Moreover, 1 am doing research in the Franco-Ontarian community, a vibrant community that historically has been subjected to assimilation through legislation by the dominant majority group. It became increasingly tiny. difficult for me to look at issues of language and literacy unless I also examined socio-historical and political issues. This process led me to see social inequalities and to understand that the relation between power and knowledge is linked to institutions. Institutions, positioned as vehicles of power, regulate knowledge. My question then became: how do I link these concerns of mine in studying language and cognition?
Some of my mentors in this process have been:
* Vygotsky (1978), who led me to Bakhtin (1981). Vygotsky was con cerned with the socio-historical processes that underlie cognition. Bakhtin was interested in the socio-historical process in the ap propriation of words and symbols,

* Scribner and Cole (1981), whose work among the Vai have led me to re-think the concept of literacy as one embedded in a socio-cultural context;

* S. B. Heath's (1983) ethnographic study on language and literacy in an American mill town;

* Gee's (1991) view of discourse as ways of being in the world, and his development of primary and secondary discourses through an apprenticeship model;

* Freire's (1972) and McLaren and Lankshear's (1993) concept of critical hteracy with its socio-political underpinnings;

* Lave and Wenger's (1991) historical-cultural theory of Limited Pe-ripheral Participation.

How have they influenced my way of asking questions in research? In this paper, I originally started out wanting to look at certain as-sumptions in second language research in applied linguistics and psycholinguistics. 1 began working with the latter, being more farnü-iar with that knowledge base. As the paper began to unfold, 1 found myself reflecting on psychological, linguistic and semiotic theories that are rooted in structuralism, neo-structuralism, behaviourism, cognitivism, positivism, and contemporary linguistic theory. These "isms" are grounded in 17th-century thought. My intention is to con-centrate on how some psycholinguistic concepts, socio-historically constructed, have informed second language teaching and second language learning. I am referring to the Affective Füter Theory, the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, and metalinguistic awareness. They have been -influential in developing language policy both in Canada and in the United States, for instance, and require closer scru-tiny.
I will argue that it is necessary to question assumptions about these theories and hypotheses. Philosophically, they are based in a modern rationalist, positivist perspective. I want to propose the postmodern view that allows for other forms of knowledge to be validated. Within the postmodern perspective, researchers position themselves ideo-logically by the type of questions they ask, and how they ask them. The postmodernists would argue that second language education is political. Others, who deny its political nature, take up an ideological position in favour of the status quo, where certain forms of knowl-edge are privileged over others and dominate the research agenda. This is known as interested/situated knowledge. All knowledge is interested/situated. Knowledge is socially, historically constructed and represents particular ways of seeing, understanding and explaining the world. It therefore reflects the interests of certain individuals or groups and is tied to power (Pennycook 1994). The assumptions will bring forward from second language research are sociohistori and politically constituted. My intention is to problematize some of these assumptions.
The research traditions 1 am farniliar with are moulded in modernism. The key terms I would use here are: foundation of knowledge, universality, biologically necessary, rationalism, positivism, observable performance, and normalization. 1 want to take up the post modern view that proposes that cognitive representations of the world are socio-historically and linguistically mediated. Key terms are: multiplicity, plurality, differences, and identity formation. Accordingly, the postmodern view abandons the rational subject postulated by modern theory in favour of a socially and linguistically diverse "hybrid" subject.

My aim in this paper is to explore, in a fairly speculative man-ner, the fascinating theme of consciousness and attention in sec-ond language acquisition. In the last few years there has been a surge in interest in this area. A number of experimental studies have tried to find out whether instruction that focuses the learn-er's attention on grammatical form can actually boost learning (see, for example, Ellis 1984, Lightbown and Spada 1990, VanPatten 1990, Doughty 1991, Fotos 1993, VanPatten and Cadierno 1993). This is, of course, to be set against a background of general scepticism in the research community about the usefulness of formal grammar teaching, especially of the traditional type.' In any case, if focus on form is to be avoided, then the teacher's role has to be recast as that of a manager, creating and maintaining a communicative en-vironment where learners are concerned with producing and un-derstanding messages rather than practising grammatical construc-tions. Explaining the grammar becomes a taboo.

For about a hundred years, if not longer, linguists have offered competing explanations for the sources of Hiberno-Enghsh. From at least as early as an 1896 article by William Burke, some have attempted to account for the distinctiveness of the English of Ireland largely in terms of retentions of patterns found in the dialects of Britain. Yet about as early as Burke, other observers have looked to Irish as a major source, as seen, for example, in the writing of P. W. Joyce (1910/1988).' To this day, different explanations continue to be offered, and now universalist arguments are among those seen in the literature (e.g. Guilefoyle 1986). The diversity of opinions is all the greater since some scholars have opted for extreme positions: Blîss (1984), for example, insisted on the primacy of the Irish substrate, whereas Lass (1990) has been just as convinced about the primacy of the British Enghsh superstrate. Many more researchers, however, have invoked multicausal arguments, as seen, for example, in articles by Harris (1984, 1986). Those familiar with other language contact situations such as Caribbean creoles can easily recognize how similar the issue of sources is in many historical periods and in many parts of the world (e.g., Thomason and Kaufman 1988, Mufwene 1990,1993,1994).
Although scholars disagree about the importance of substrate influence in Hiberno-English, they usually agree on what the Irish
pattern is that is hypothesized to occasion the influence, as seen, for example, in the discussion by Harris (1986) of habitual verb
phrases. Whether or not everybody agrees with Harris that the habitual tenses of Irish contributed to the rise of habitual do constructions, most researchers probably concur on what the verb patterns in Irish are that may have occasioned cross-linguistic influence. Without such agreement, it would be much more difficult to determine the merits of substratist and other positions.
Unfortunately, there exist some cases where it is not so easy to assume what Irish pattern may be the source for a Hiberno-English construction. One instance of this is seen in the use of the form sorrow as a negator, which is the topic of this paper. The discussion
to follow consists of five parts: 1) a description of the basic characeristics of sorrow negation; 2) a survey of the reasons for believing
that substrate influence is involved; 3) a look at forms in Irish and Scottish Gaelic that may be the basis for sorrow negation; 4) a provisional explanation for the diffusion of substrate influence in the use of sorrow in Hiberno-English; 5) a surnmary and some thoughts on the implications of this problem.

In this paper I argue that an integrated language and cultural studies syllabus offers the best opportunities for achieving a genuinely communicative approach to school-based language learning. In the first section 1 suggest that meaningful language use can be consistently sustained in the classroom only if a coherent syllabus of knowledge is studied through the target language. 1 also suggest that the most appropriate subject for such study is one where the target language offers the students learning opportunities not available through their Ll - a requirement met by comparative cultural studies. In the second section 1 discuss some of the issues involved in designing a programme for cultural studies. In the third section 1 present an integrated syllabus for the junior cycle of secondary school and in the fourth section 1 discuss the implernentation of the syllabus.

This paper raises the question whether avoidance is an appropriate terrn to describe the linguistic behaviour in which the learner with particular Ll background tries to underproduce or underrepresent a particular L2 structure (Schachter 1974; Kleinmann 1977,1978). From a psychological standpoint, the term is clearly defined as a genuine phenomenon resulting from the organism's realization that specific forms of input data are avoided (on the levels of concrete representation and/ or abstract mentalization) simply because such forms are difficult to restructure or reorganize in the output * , and thus an alternative 'strategy' should be employed to fill in the consequential gap. However, the individual's resorting to this alternative 'strategy' does not imply his /her 'ignorance' of the avoided form, as misinterpreted by James (1980).2 Rather, the individual is said to have sorne sort of knowledge of the avoided forrn because it is obvious that one cannot avoid what one does not know, a truisrn that has repeatedly been emphasized by researchers like Seliger (1989). For this, reason, an attempt will be made to identify the sorts of knowledge that may lead to the nonuse of a given L2 structure on either of the two levels: concrete representation and abstract mentalization, or to its use but with erroneous manifestations from an L2 perspective, sirice recent research has shown that even Schachter's original study provides insufficient insights into the concept of avoidance (cf. Kaminoto et al. 1992). Furthermore, Kleinmann's account particularly of the passive construction in the case of Arabic-speaking learners of English, will be reconsidered in the light of this identification and the potential frequency how certain linguistic representations must be if certain assumptions about the mental operations that predetermine them are true.
how certain linguistic representations must be if certain assumptions about the mental operations that predetermine them are true. Thus, consideration of the natural consequences leads to a scrutiny into one of the major logical connectives that are familiar in the propositional calculus, viz. conditionals or'if... then'statements. Such connectives describe theoretic possibilities and possible worlds which, in turn, appear to provide this kind of description with perceivable substance. But how linguistic representations (or in fact anything) may be, and how they must be, are above all ontological matters, matters concerning what there is, that feed real conundrums.
The study falls into three main sections: the first section seeks to establish the general psycholinguistic principle which determines avoidance in the process of L2 acquisition. It will draw heavily on what the term 'avoidance'precisely means within the framework of behaviourist psychology, whose historical-conceptual antecedents can be traced back to the empirico-rationalist psychology of the seven-teenth century. A circumscription of the same paradigrns (Le. the para-digms of avoidance delineated by the behaviourists) with a cogni-tive aura will help to understand the phenomenon from a deeper perspective through their application to the process of learning or acquiring a particular L2 structure. The second section goes even more deeply into the ontological dimension of cognition that predetermines the general psycholinguistic principle discussed in the first section. It will thus be a conceptual extension of the sort of cognitive ordi-nance that the avoidance of a given L2 structure presupposes. From an epistemological standpoint, the ontology of this ordinance will be explained in terms of Bergson's notion of 'intuitive knowledge' but with some modifications. The third and final section will be an ex-tensive critical survey of an'avoidance classic', namely, Kleinmann's account of the passive construction in the case of Arabic-speaking learners of English and some of Schachter's speculative conclusions. It should be noted, however, that the choice of the passive construc-tion here is a matter of pure coincidence, and that the conclusions drawn in this critical survey are to be taken as a typical exemplifica-tion applicable to any structural device that exists in any two lan-guages instantiating parametric variation in that device.