Linguistics

III
Lightbown’s ten generalizations about
Second Language Acquisition

Barrionuevo, Maricel
Egea Pato, Andrea
Lazarte, Abrill Meliza
Páez, Patricia

-2016-
1- Adults and adolescents can “acquire” a second language.

Explanation

The Critical Period Hypothesis is the academic name for what most of us have come to
believe about adults and language learning. Its basic outline is that there’s a fixed
period of time in which you can really learn a language and learn it well. This critical
period is supposed to run from when you’re born to sometime during adolescence,
when you’re around 15 years old.
However, adults and adolescents are more willing and able to learn in a formal
learning environment and they make use of the part of their brain in charge of higher
cognitive functions—the part of the brain that develops later.
They have a ton of knowledge already. And that can be both a bad thing and a good
thing.

It depends on:

 The degree of motivation adolescents and adults have;

 Why they want to acquire this new language;
 Personality factors, such as risk-taking, shyness, willingness, hard-worker, etc.

Examples in the language classroom

2- The learner creates a systematic interlanguage which is often characterised by the
same systematic errors as a child makes when learning that language as his/her first
language, as well as others which appear to be based on the learner’s own native
language.

Explanation

Corder (1967) suggested that learners’ errors provided insight into the system
underlying their language use, and innumerable studies have confirmed that learners
develop an “interlanguage” (Selinker, 1972) with systematic properties that are not
explained in any simple way by the input learners have been exposed to. Even when
students are exposed to the L2 primarily in structure-based classes, they create
interlanguage patterns that do not match what they have been taught (Lightbown,
1991).

Lightbown (2003) mentions countless studies showing interlanguage as being part of a

learner’s development. This interlanguage system contains patterns which are not
reflective of the types of patterns offered during instruction and cannot be explained
in any straight forward manner.

It depends on:

 Interlanguage as part of the learner’s development,

 Interlanguage system patterns,
 Learner’s features preserved of his\her L1,
 The utterances produced by a learner that are different from those native
speakers would produce.

Examples in the language classroom:

Many students, for example, tend to extend the regular form of the simple past tense
to irregular verbs much the same as children learning English as their first language.

Articles
In Spanish the indefinite article (un, uno, una) is not used before nouns describing
profession, occupation or social status:
_Our uncle is doctor.
_Our uncle is a doctor.

Question formation
Spanish Word order: _Has seen Mary the movie?
English Word order: _Has Mary seen the movie?
3- There are predictable sequences in acquisition so that certain structures have to
be acquired before others can be integrated.

Explanation
Students learning a second language move through five predictable stages:
Preproduction (minimal comprehension), Early Production (limited comprehension,
uses keywords and familiar phrases, uses present-tense verbs), Speech Emergence
(Good comprehension, production of simple sentences, grammatical and
pronunciation errors), Intermediate Fluency (excellent comprehension, few
grammatical errors), and Advanced Fluency (native-like level of speech).

It depends on:
 Level of formal education,
 Family background,
 Length of time spent in the country.

Example
For each stage of second language acquisition, an ESL teacher asks the following
questions:
 Preproduction: Ask questions that students can answer by pointing at pictures in
the book ("Show me the wolf," "Where is the house?").
 Early Production: Ask questions that students can answer with one or two words
("Did the brick house fall down?" "Who blew down the straw house?").
 Speech Emergence: Ask "why" and "how" questions that students can answer with
short sentences ("Explain why the third pig built his house out of bricks." "What
does the wolf want?").
 Intermediate Fluency: Ask "What would happen if …" and "Why do you think …"
questions ("What would happen if the pigs outsmarted the wolf?" "Why could the
wolf blow down the house made of sticks, but not the house made of bricks?").
 Advanced Fluency: Ask students to retell the story, including main plot elements
but leaving out unnecessary details.

4- Practice does not make perfect

Explanation
Practice is an essential component in learning a foreign language. However, practice
alone is not sufficient. In Lightbown’s original 1985 article, practice refers to audio-
lingual type pattern and drill. If material is based on memorised chunks, beyond the
learners’ level of development, they have difficulty in recognising the actual
components of their utterances.

Caveats or “it depends” statements

There is much more to language learning than practice, but it is a vital part. Equally,
there is a lot more to the kind practice we do. By far the best kind of practice is
to use the language. In actual usage, we integrate the skill into who we are, into our
emotions, our thoughts, our beliefs, etc. With many conventional kinds of practice,
drilling or repetition, only very superficial intellectual skills, if that, are called on. Not
surprising then that it is difficult to integrate that practice into spontaneous language
use.

Examples of this generalization in the classroom

An individual can practice saying sentences, practice doing grammar exercises, practice
memory skills on vocabulary, however the truth of the matter is that these kinds of
practice will, in most cases, never get the individual where most language learners
want to go – to fluent use of the target language.

5- Knowing a language rule does not mean one will be able to use it in
communicative interaction.

Explanation
Evidence shows that learners’ interlanguage develops and maintains errors when used
in communicative situations despite the explicit knowledge of the rules governing
those errors. This may be due in part to a lack of time in communicative situations to
implement the rules which they have learned thus leaving output unaffected. It may
also be due to not being “developmentally ready” (Lightbown, 2000, p. 445) to fully
acquire features pointed out during instruction.

Caveats or “it depends” statements

 Some students have the ability to quickly internalize language rules in such way
that the can use them naturally in communication.
For example: An elementary adult learner studying the grammatical rules of the past
simple tense in English who can easily identify when conjugating the verb is needed
and when it isn’t.
 Classroom SLA research has shown that learners do benefit from instruction that
focuses their attention explicitly on language form, yet not necessarily in the form
of “rule” learning (N. Ellis, 1995; Spada, 1997). Enough exposure to correct
grammatical forms will help students improve their accuracy.
For example: If the present continuous tense is introduced after the present simple, it
would be a good idea to write two sentences, one for each tense, and ask the students
what differences they can notice. This could be enhanced by using bold type,
underlining, and italics to highlight differences.

Examples of this generalization in the classroom

 Forgetting to add the suffix “-s” for the third person singular in the present simple
tense: She live in New York.
 Wrong word order for embedded questions: I don’t know where is he.
 Incorrect use of the auxiliary verbs in yes/no answers: No, he did/ Yes, she do.
 Conjugating verbs in the past simple tense after auxiliaries: I didn’t understood this
book/ Did you saw Lucy?

6- Isolated explicit error correction is usually ineffective in changing language

behaviour.
Explanation
This is not to say that learners cannot benefit from feedback on errors. However, for
feedback to be effective in form-focused instruction, it is essential that the correction
be focused on linguistic features which students are able to learn and be maintained
over a period of time rather than be isolated in sporadic instances (Lightbown, 2003).
Therefore, only when the correction is focused on a particular form and sustained (as
opposed to occurring in isolation) can it possibly be considered effective in altering the
students’ systems of interlanguage.

Caveats or “it depends” statements

 If the teacher helps the student notice the error, for example, emphasising the
wrong word/s using intonation and, if this succeeds, correction would be necessary
only once.
 Taking affective factors into account, we can consider the case of students who are
harsh critics towards their own mistakes. In this circumstance, the student is likely
to remember the teacher’s correction from the beginning.

Examples of this generalization in the classroom

 A student who keeps saying “there is” to talk about more than one object. The
teacher can repeat the structure saying “there is” and lifting one finger, then saying
“there are” and lifting two fingers. Also, the teacher can use drawings, pictures, or
any other illustrations that will help the student differentiate the meaning.
However, for the learner to understand, he or she needs to know how to use the
verb “to be”.
 When students say “he/she” instead of “hers/his” to talk about possessions, the
teacher could use intonation to emphasize the correct form as well as writing the
possessive pronouns with different colours, pointing at boys and girls with their
possessions (in the classroom), etc. For students to understand this, they should
previously know the possessive suffix “-‘s”.

7- For most adult learners, acquisition stops –“fossilizes”- before the learner has
achieved nativelike mastery of the target language.

Explanation
The Critical Period Hypothesis (Lenneberg, 1967) maintains that children have to be
exposed to a second language before puberty in order to develop near native-like
mastery, and post-puberty learners will always be distinguishable from those who
have experienced substantial early childhood exposure.

Caveats or “it depends” statements

The Critical Period Hypothesis is often confused with the notion that ‘younger is
better’ in second language acquisition. In many places, children who speak minority
languages or languages without political status are placed in second language
instructional settings before they have an opportunity to develop literacy skills in the
first language. Such practices, based on political imperatives, as well as the belief that
young children will easily acquire a second language sometimes result in poor mastery
of either language and in educational difficulties with long-term negative
consequences.
In the context of the foreign language classroom, the relevance of the Critical Period
Hypothesis is questionable. The reality is that perfect mastery of a target language is
rarely attained, even when learners begin at an early age. There are many reasons for
this. One is that learners in foreign language environment usually have only the
teacher as a model of a proficient speaker, and even the teacher may not provide a
native-like language model.

Examples of this generalization in the classroom

Older learners rarely achieve a near-native accent. Many people suggest this is due to
them being beyond the critical period.
A problem arising from the differences between younger learners and adults is that
adults believe that they cannot learn languages well. Teachers can help learners with
this belief in various ways, for example, by talking about the learning process and
learning styles, helping set realistic goals, choosing suitable methodologies, and
addressing the emotional needs of the adult learner.

8- One cannot achieve nativelike (or near-nativelike) command of a second language

in one hour a day.

Explanation
It is said that practice makes perfect, and here, this is the case. Someone who has a
good command of a second language, is someone who speaks the language with
expertise, mastery, and accuracy. This person may also speak the language with an
accent and could still be considered having an excellent command as long as the
person doesn't have an accent that makes the language at times incomprehensible. Be
that as it may, a good command of a language can only be achieved through constant
practice.

It depends on:
 How many hours a person is willing to practice the language;
 Whether or not a person is a risk-taker, and able to make mistakes and learn from
them;
 The quantity and quality of input a person is exposed to.
 Students attending classes from three to four hours per week may achieve a good
command of the English language, in the long run. Nevertheless, people who are
constantly bombed with second language input and forced to speak that language
(and learn from the mistakes they might make)are more likely to achieve an
excellent command of a language in a shorter time.
 Degree of motivation and prior knowledge a person may possess.

Example
People who travel abroad to learn a language stand a better chance of acquiring it as
they are constantly in touch with it than the ones who study it or learn it attending
classes a few hours per week.

9. The learner’s task is enormous because language is enormously complex.

Explanation

Learning the vocabulary, morphology, syntax and pronunciation of a new language is a

very great challenge, and many students never achieve the mastery of these aspects of
a foreign language. Native speakers and learners who are exposed to a second
language in their family or community from early childhood will have thousands of
hours of exposure to the language, while classroom learners usually count their
exposure in terms of hundreds of hours at best. The magnitude of the task of learning
a second language, especially one that belongs to a different language family, can
hardly be overstated. To be sure, there are individual differences in language learning
aptitude, and these differences make the task more manageable for some learners
than for others. Even for “talented” learners, however, language learning is a lifelong
challenge. Furthermore, learning a language means more than learning vocabulary and
morphosyntax. Students in foreign language learning environments face a particular
challenge because their classroom exposure to the language usually leaves them
without adequate opportunities to learn appropriate pragmatic and sociolinguistic
features of the language (Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei, 1998).

It depends on:

 The exposure to the second language in a variety context,

 Individual differences in language learning aptitude,
 Adequate opportunities to learn appropriate pragmatic and sociolinguistic
features of the language.

Examples in the language classroom

Creativity, and efficiency play a huge role in reaching a “superior” level of English.
Personalize the language-learning environment.
Language is what we use to experience the world, plain and simple. Just as no two
people view the world in exactly the same way, there is no one correct way to learn a
language.
Determining the different learning styles can be a good way to figure out just what
resources work best for our class. There are various ways to categorize learning styles,
we’re going to look at the seven learning styles that coincide with the Theory of
Multiple Intelligences:

. Visual (spatial): Students prefer using pictures, images and spatial understanding.
Aural (auditory-musical): Students prefer using sound and music.
Verbal (linguistic): Students prefer using words, both in speech and writing.
Physical (kinesthetic): Students prefer using their body, hands and sense of touch.
Logical (mathematical): Students prefer using logic, reasoning and systems.
Social (interpersonal): Students prefer to learn in groups or with other people.
Solitary (intrapersonal): Students prefer to work alone and use self-study.

10- A learner’s ability to understand language in a meaningful context exceeds his or

her ability to comprehend decontextualized language and to produce language of
comparable complexity and accuracy.

Explanation
There is plenty of evidence that learners are able to get the meaning from the
language they hear, even if they do not understand all of the linguistic features that
contribute to making the meaning. They do this by using contextual cues and world
knowledge.

Caveats or “it depends” statements

 A number of researchers have observed that some features of language either
develop quite slowly, or never seem to develop fully, in learners who are exposed
to the language in contexts where the emphasis is exclusively on getting the
meaning and never (or almost never) on learning specific linguistic features. For
example: A learner can understand the content of a text about fashion, but miss
grammatical structures, word order or some key vocabulary, such as “designer”,
“hairdresser”, “runway”, etc.

Examples of this generalization in the classroom

 Students who are not at an advanced level are more likely to understand the
content of a text related to their previous knowledge (either in their L1 or the
target language): sports, music, TV programmes, rather than more specific topics
such as politics from a certain country, history, medical texts, etc.
 Vocabulary and grammatical structures are better internalized when presented
within a context and with a function: I am Patricia/ You are Carlos/ She is Sofia, etc.
(verb “to be”, function: introducing yourself). Also, teaching the past simple in
connection with historical events or deceased famous people; teaching the present
simple tense in connection with routines, etc.