Education and Input as Predictors of Second Language Attainment in Naturalistic Contexts

Janko, Eleni; Dąbrowska, Ewa; Street, James A.

doi:10.3390/languages4030070

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Negli ultimi anni, comincia ad ampliarsi la gamma di interlingue indagate, con studi sul suomi (o finlandese) L2 (cfr. Tammelin-Laine, 2015) e sul greco L2 (Janko et al, 2019), nei quali oltre all'assenza o carenza di competenze alfabetiche viene considerato anche il ruolo dell'istruzione formale in L2. Quanto all'italiano L2, solo pochissimi studi hanno finora sistematicamente assunto l'alfabetizzazione come variabile indipendente.…”

Section: Studi Su Acquisizione E Alfabetizzazioneunclassified

Acquisizione Della Lingua Seconda E Alfabetizzazione: Un Caso Di Studio a Palermo

Mocciaro¹

2022

ILD

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Il ruolo dell’alfabetismo nell’acquisizione delle lingue seconde ha finora ricevuto un’attenzione solo periferica nella ricerca acquisizionale. Una lacuna, questa, piuttosto sorprendente se si considera che alfabetizzazione e scolarizzazione limitate sono fattori significativi nell’ambito delle nuove migrazioni verso l’Europa. L’articolo discute alcuni dei risultati di una recente ricerca condotta alla Scuola di Lingua italiana per Stranieri (ItaStra) dell’Università di Palermo, che ha tentato di ricostruire il percorso attraverso cui si sviluppa la morfosintassi verbale nell’italiano lingua non materna di apprendenti adulti con limitate competenze alfabetiche e confrontando questo percorso con quanto emerso da decenni di ricerca sull’acquisizione delle lingue seconde. Second language acquisition and literacy: a case study in Palermo The role of literacy in second language acquisition has so far received only peripheral attention in this field of research. This is a rather surprising gap if one considers that limited literacy and schooling are quite significant factors in the context of new migrations to Europe. The article discusses some of the results of a recent research carried out at the School of Italian Language for Foreigners (ItaStra) of the University of Palermo, which attempted to reconstruct the pathway through which verbal morphosyntax develops in the non-mother tongue Italian of adult learners with limited literacy skills, comparing this pathway with what has emerged from decades of research on second language acquisition.

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Section: Studi Su Acquisizione E Alfabetizzazioneunclassified

Acquisizione Della Lingua Seconda E Alfabetizzazione: Un Caso Di Studio a Palermo

Mocciaro¹

2022

ILD

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“… Dąbrowska (2019) found that age at testing showed a different pattern of correlations in L1 and L2 speakers: in L1 speakers, it was positively correlated with vocabulary and collocations; in L2 speakers, it was negatively correlated with grammar. With regard to education, it is a contributing factor in individual differences among both L1 ( Chipere, 2003 ; Street and Dąbrowska, 2010 ; Llompart and Dąbrowska, 2020 ) and L2 speakers ( Hakuta et al, 2003 ; Tarone and Hansen, 2007 ; Janko et al, 2019 ). Specifically, speakers with higher academic achievement typically perform better than those with low academic achievement, and the latter group also tends to present a much wider distribution of scores.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aptitude and experience as predictors of grammatical proficiency in adult Greek-English bilinguals

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Llompart²,

Dąbrowska³

2022

Front. Psychol.

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It has been shown that individuals exhibit great variability in second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Some speakers reach native-like proficiency, others only achieve a rudimentary command and many lie in the middle. Individual differences research has partly attributed different degrees of L2 attainment to (language) aptitude. Initially considered irrelevant for first language (L1) acquisition, aptitude was viewed as a compensatory ability for adults’ disadvantage in L2 learning. In this line of thought, adults and children are viewed as fundamentally different and rely on different language learning mechanisms. However, aptitude might not be so irrelevant for the L1. Together with input the two factors are found to account for individual differences not only in L2 but also L1 development. Recent research has specifically shown that native grammatical attainment may be modulated by aptitude and input. In this respect, the aim of the current study is to examine the effects of these two predictors (namely input and aptitude) on both L1 and L2 grammatical attainment in the same speakers. Our participants (N = 75) were all native speakers of Greek who learned English as a foreign language in their home country and immigrated to the United Kingdom in adulthood (mean age of arrival = 27.3, SD = 6.4). Grammatical proficiency was measured through a grammaticality judgement task administered in both the L1 and the L2. Aptitude was measured through the Sentence Pairs task (based on the Words In Sentences test from the MLAT battery). Amount of input was measured using the traditional measure, length of residence (LoR) and a new cumulative measure that spanned across the participants’ life. The two measures were pitted against each other in the analysis. We found robust effects of aptitude in both the L1 and the L2, with the effect being even stronger for the L1. As expected, our new cumulative measure of exposure proved to be a better predictor of individual differences in grammatical proficiency. Last but not least, the effects of input were larger for the L2 than the L1.

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“…Earlier research found robust relationships between education and performance on tasks tapping grammatical comprehension in native speakers ( Dąbrowska, 1997 , 2008 , 2018 ; Chipere, 2001 ; Dąbrowska and Street, 2006 ; Street and Dąbrowska, 2010 , 2014 ; Street, 2017 ). There is also a considerable amount of evidence suggesting that adult L2 learners with higher educational attainment tend to be more successful than less educated learners ( Hakuta et al, 2003 ; Tarone et al, 2007 ; Janko et al, 2019 ). In addition, age at testing may affect the performance of native and non-native speakers in different ways ( Dąbrowska, 2019 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Two of these (Thomas et al, 2004;Lukács and Kemény, 2015) found that adults learned better. To the best of our knowledge, only one study (Janacsek et al, 2012) found that younger participants (aged 12 or below) learned more than teenagers and adults. However, the difference showed up only when comparing reaction times on low-and high-probability sequences (and not on accuracy and not on Z-transformed RT measures).…”

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confidence: 95%

Is Adult Second Language Acquisition Defective?

2020

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There is a large literature showing that adult L2 learners, in contrast to children, often fail to acquire native-like competence in the second language. Because of such age effects, adult L2 learning is often viewed as "fundamentally different" from child acquisition and defective in some way. However, adult L2 learners do not always do worse than child learners. Several studies (e.g., Sasaki, 1997; Da˛browska and Street, 2006; Street, 2017; Da˛browska, 2019) found considerable overlap between L1 and L2 speakers' performance on tasks tapping morphosyntactic knowledge. Crucially, these studies used grammatical comprehension tasks (e.g., picture selection) to test mastery of "functional" grammar (i.e., grammatical contrasts which correspond to a clear difference in meaning, such as the assignment of agent and patient roles in sentences with noncanonical word order and quantifier scope). In contrast, most ultimate attainment studies (e.g., Johnson and Newport, 1989; Flege et al., 1999; DeKeyser, 2000; DeKeyser et al., 2010) used a grammaticality judgment task (GST) which assessed mastery of "decorative" grammar, i.e., grammatical morphemes such as tense and agreement markers which make relatively little contribution to the meaning conveyed by a sentence. In this study, we directly compared native speakers, late immersion learners, and classroom foreign language learners on tasks assessing both aspects of grammar. As in earlier studies, we found significant differences between native speakers and both non-native groups in performance on "decorative" grammar, particularly when performance was assessed using spoken rather than written stimuli. However, the differences in performance on the "functional" grammar task were much smaller and statistically non-significant. Furthermore, even in the "decorative" grammar task, there was more overlap between native speakers and late L2 learners than reported in earlier research. We argue that this is because earlier studies underestimated the amount of variation found in native speakers.

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Education and Input as Predictors of Second Language Attainment in Naturalistic Contexts

Cited by 4 publications

References 34 publications

Acquisizione Della Lingua Seconda E Alfabetizzazione: Un Caso Di Studio a Palermo

Acquisizione Della Lingua Seconda E Alfabetizzazione: Un Caso Di Studio a Palermo

Aptitude and experience as predictors of grammatical proficiency in adult Greek-English bilinguals

Is Adult Second Language Acquisition Defective?

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