Second Language Acquisition and Teaching

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is concerned with the cognitive and social factors that lead to success (or failure) in learning a second language. While generally considered its own sub-field, SLA is massively interdisciplinary in its research strategies, drawing on and contributing to work in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, social psychology and the study of human interaction, general linguistics, and developmental and neurological studies of language acquisition. Second Language Teaching (SLT) is concerned with finding ways to improveor enhance acquisition in learners. It develops new strategies and techniques to support learners and provides critical improvements to second language education that, while often prosaic in detail, nonetheless have enduring impact on educational practice.

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Oregon and its faculty colleagues at the American English Institute have had long-standing commitments to research in both SLA and SLT. Current projects in SLA and SLT include:

Research in Second Language Acquisition

Acquisition of Tone (Guion)

In collaboration with Dr. Wayland of the University of Florida, Dr. Guion is investigating the acquisition of Thai tone by speakers of English, a non-tone language, and Mandarin, a tone language. The contribution of perceptual sensitivity to tonal cues and effects of long-term tonal representations on the acquisition of new tone patterns is under study.

Attention and Second Language Acquisition (Tomlin)

There has been considerable interest in recent years in SLA on the role of attention and awareness on SLA. Based on earlier work (Tomlin and Villa 1994), Tomlin is investigating theoretical and empirical issues arising from attempts to incorporate more general work in attention in cognitive psychology into SLA.

Cross-Linguistic Perception and Phonetic Category Acquisition (Guion)

In collaboration with Dr. Flege of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Dr. Akahane-Yamada of ATR in Kyoto, Dr. Guion has investigated the effect of the perceptual assimilation of first and second language phonological categories on second language learning. In investigations focusing on native Japanese learners of English, they have found that English sounds that are more assimilated to Japanese sounds are less likely to be learned than those that were less assimilated. In continuing work on a longitudinal study involving both adults and children the researchers are investigating the effect of age of acquisition on both production and perception in the second language.

FLATLAND: Investigating Early Acquisition (Tomlin)

The Flatland paradigm permits the examination of virtually all of the input and interaction leading to changes in the emerging interlanguage grammar of nil proficiency learners of a second language. Within this paradigm a native speaker and a nil proficiency learner complete a communicative task in which the learner develops comprehension abilities in L2 great enough to manipulate a set of eight objects in a limited environment. The resulting video record permits a close look--turn by turn--at the input and interaction leading to the current state of the IL grammar at each moment over the first hour or so of exposure. The paradigm permits one to look at such diverse matters as vocabulary acquisition, the role of repetition, the differences in the use of simple versus more complex utterances, among other topics.

Rate of Acquisition in Japanese Immersion Programs (Schachter)

Dr. Schachter, Kaori Idemaru, and Joanna Jansen have been measuring acquisition of second language phonology and grammatical systems in early (g.K, 1) and late (g.5,6,7,) Japanese immersion programs in Oregon. We found that older children seem to acquire the sound system (as measured by our test) faster than younger children do, However, age-matched Japanese L1 children, fluent in Japanese, do not reliably report differences in minimal pair words until ages 6-7, raising thorny theoretical issues as to the status of the phoneme in a child's mental sound system. Work continues on grammatical acquisition.

The Role of Attention in the Acquisition of Voice (Tomlin)

Tomlin and former UO students Jongbai Hwang and Lynne Yang have extended the FishFilm paradigm into SLA. This work looks at how the careful manipulation of visual attention to the component elements of a visual during exposure to second language input supports the staged acquisition of voice in English by non-native speakers.

The Role of Attention in Phonetic Category Acquisition (Guion and Pederson)

Drs. Guion and Pederson are currently investigating the effect of attention on learning new phonological categories. They have found that orienting attention to phonetic form facilitates phonetic learning of Hindi categories by naÔe English speakers and that likewise orienting attention to semantic information facilitates the learning of the meaning of Hindi words. Currently, experiments are underway that investigate the effect of orienting attention toward different phonological categories (e.g., vowels vs. consonants) on the acquisition of those categories.

Research in Second Language Teaching