Adult Acquisition of English as a Second Language Under Different Conditions of Exposure

Abstract

Claims have been made regarding the differing contributions of formal classroom versus naturalistic settings to second language acquisition (D'Anglejan 1978; Krashen 1976; Krashen and Seliger 1975; Sajavaara 1981). A study was designed to test such claims by investigating the production of English grammatical morphology by 18 adult native speakers of Spanish under three different conditions of exposure to English L2: (1) Instruction Only, (2) Naturalistic, and (3) Mixed (a combination of 1 and 2). Effects of the three conditions of second language exposure were revealed in the types of errors produced during individual conversations with a researcher: (1) All subjects made errors of morpheme oversuppliance in inappropriate contexts and morpheme omission in required contexts; however, the former were more prevalent among Instruction Only subjects, and the latter more common among Naturalistic subjects. These differences were statistically significant. (2) The Naturalistic group tended to omit plural ‐s endings on nouns which were premodified by quantifiers. This nonredundant marking of plurality, characteristic of many pidgin speakers, was significantly different from the nontarget plural productions of the other two groups. Despite these differences in production errors, statistically high correlations were found among the three groups of subjects with regard to rank order accuracy for grammatical morphology. Results of the study suggest that different conditions of exposure to English L2 do not significantly alter the accuracy order in which grammatical morphemes are produced. However, as reflected in production errors, different conditions appear to affect learners' hypotheses about the target morphology and their strategies for using it.

Examining the Collocational Knowledge of Libyan Arabic-Speaking Learners of English in Different Learning Environments: Classroom Learning vs. Naturalistic Learning

“…This study is significant because most studies involving the contributions of formal classroom instruction vs. informal naturalistic learning to SLA (Second Language Acquisition) have focused on investigating the grammatical accuracy of adult L2 learners (e.g., Krashen and Seliger 1975;Perkins and Larsen-Freeman 1975;Pica 1983;Turner 1979). As well as this, most studies that have examined L2 collocational knowledge have been carried out on classroom learners (either in EFL, or ESL, English Second Language, contexts).…”

A Longitudinal Study of the Acquisition of Verbal Morphology in the EFL Classroom

“…Unlike the early morpheme studies, these studies analysed the influence of the learning environment (Makino 1980;Pica 1983), the impact of age (Pak 1987), the use of learning strategies (Billings 1999) or, for example, the influence of affective factors (Wang 2000).…”

Foreign Language Teaching and Learning

“…According to this view of SLA, the controlling factor is the innate ability for learning language that all human beings possess. Pica (1983) determined that all language learners progressed through a fixed series of stages, known as developmental sequences, in learning particular linguistic subsystems, such as word order, negation, or relative clauses. In English negation, for example, when communicative samples were examined, it was revealed that both foreign language and second language learners progressed through the same fourstage sequence, defined in terms of placement of negation.…”