Singular

Nominative—Mein guter Freund, my good friend.Genitive—Meines guten Freundes, of my good friend.Dative—Meinem guten Freund, to my good friend.Accusative—Meinen guten Freund, my good friend.

Plural

Nominative—Meine guten Freunde, my good friends.Genitive—Meiner guten Freunde, of my good friends.Dative—Meinen guten Freunden, to my good friends.Accusative—Meine guten Freunde, my good friends.

Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those variations, and see how soon he will be elected. One might better go without friends in Germany than to take all this trouble about them. I have shown what a bother it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is only a third of the work, for there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object is feminine, and still another when the object is neuter. Now there are more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in Switzerland, and they must all be as elaborately declined as the example above suggested. Difficult? Troublesome? (Mark Twain, ‘The Awful German Language,’ in Twain, 1879, pp. 271–272)

It is now generally accepted that second language (L2) acquisition can take place as a result of learning how to communicate in the L2. It is less clear, however, whether the kind of communication that occurs in a classroom is sufficient to ensure development of full target language competence. This article examines the extent to which the opportunities for communication in an English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom result in the acquisition of one particular illocutionary act—requests. A total of 410 requests produced by two child learners over 15–21 months were examined. The results suggest that although considerable development took place over this period, both learners failed to develop either the full range of request types or a broad linguistic repertoire for performing those types that they did acquire. The learners also failed to develop the sociolinguistic competence needed to vary their choice of request to take account of different addressees. One explanation for these results is that although the classroom context fostered interpersonal and expressive needs in the two learners, it did not provide the conditions for real sociolinguistic needs.

Fluency in a second language is considered important by both learners and teachers but is not well understood. This paper describes what is known about second language fluency and describes a number of psychological learning mechanisms that might explain how fluency develops. These include the mechanisms underlying the contrast between automatic and controlled processing, the learning mechanisms postulated within Anderson's ACT* theory of cognition, Bialystok's conception of the control dimension of language development, the notion of restructuring, recent proposals for the redefinition of automaticity as retrieval from memory (both instance and strength versions), and chunking theories. The paper concludes with some suggestions for research into the development of second language fluency itself that can fill gaps in existing knowledge and reduce our dependence on other fields for explanatory principles, while contributing simultaneously to discussion of the mechanisms responsible for skill development in general.

The study reported in this paper examined the effect of second language (L2) experience on the production of L2 vowels for which acoustic counterparts are either present or absent in the first language (L1). The hypothesis being tested was that amount of L2 experience would not affect L1 German speakers' production of the “similar” English vowels /i, l, ∈/, whereas English language experience would enable L1 Germans to produce an English-like /æ/, which has no counterpart in German. The predictions were tested in two experiments that compared the production of English /i, l, ∈, æ/ by two groups of L1 German speakers differing in English language experience and an L1 English control group. An acoustic experiment compared the three groups for spectral and temporal characteristics of the English vowels produced in /bVt/ words. The same tokens were assessed for intelligibility in a labeling experiment. The results of both experiments were largely consistent with the hypothesis. The experienced L2 speakers did not produce the similar English vowels /i, l, ∈/ more intelligibly than the inexperienced L2 speakers, not did experience have a positive effect on approximating the English acoustic norms for these similar vowels. The intelligibility results for the new vowel /æ/ did not clearly support the model. However, the acoustic comparisons showed that the experienced but not the inexperienced L2 speakers produced the new vowel /æ/ in much the same way as the native English speakers.

Tacit linguistic knowledge derives from experience of the input data or from domain-specific principles without the interaction of experience. Recognition of constraint violations is generally deemed to call upon the second kind of knowledge source. This paper proposes that this epistemological distinction should be reflected in native speaker and nonnative speaker performance. More precisely, performance should be more uniform across the species where it engages knowledge without the interaction of experience. A review of six studies investigating nonnative speaker acceptability judgments supports the predicted asymmetry. The paper concludes that the observed asymmetry supports the modular position on nonnative linguistic knowledge.

Working memory capacity refers to the ability to store and process information simultaneously in real time and has been shown to correlate highly with first language (L1) reading skill. This study examines the sensitivity of second language (L2) working memory capacity to differences in reading skill among advanced L2 learners. The index of working memory capacity used was the reading span test (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980). Subjects with larger working memory capacities scored higher on measures of reading skill, in contrast with the lack of strong correlations between measures of passive short-term storage (memory for strings of random words or digits) and the same reading measures. This result is consistent with an interpretation of the reading span test as an index of working memory capacity, in which capacity is defined functionally in terms of a trade-off between active processing and storage. Issues involved in investigating working memory capacity are discussed and the role of capacity limitations in models of L2 comprehension is considered.

In this paper we follow two beginning learners of English, Andrea and Santo, over a period of 2 years as they develop means to structure the declarative utterances they produce in various production tasks, and then we look at the following problem: In the early stages of acquisition, both learners develop a common learner variety; during these stages, we see a picture of two learner varieties developing similar regularities determined by the minimal requirements of the tasks we examine. Andrea subsequently develops further morphosyntactic means to achieve greater cohesion in his discourse. But Santo does not. Although we can identify contexts where the grammaticalization of Andrea's production allows him to go beyond the initial constraints of his variety, it is much more difficult to ascertain why Santo, faced with the same constraints in the same contexts, does not follow this path. Some lines of investigation into this problem are then suggested.

Recent critical discussion of the Oral Proficiency Interview has questioned the adequacy and validity of the interview guidelines. The present study considers the role of accommodation in interview discourse and suggests that the extent of interviewer accommodation reveals an overlooked criterion for gauging the authenticity of the interview as simulated conversational interaction. The issue of misplaced accommodation as a threat to both the validity of the interview and the subsequent rating process is also raised, and supplementary criteria for training interviewers and evaluating the interview process are considered.

Learnability theory is an investigation of the cognitive principles that determine developmental stages and eventual success in language acquistion. The focus of this study is on the learning principles within learnability theory that account for developmental stages in adult second language acquisition. Three learning principles, cumulative development, continuity, and conservatism, predict a complex sequence of development in the acquisition of relative clauses and wh-questions in English. They predict an early no-prep stage, gradual development through two additional stages of greater embeddedness of the extracted noun, stranded before nonstranded prepositional structures, and the likelihood of resumption at early stages. These predictions are confirmed by data from previous studies and are further investigated in this study by means of elicited production data collected from 35 Japanese learners of English and 17 native speakers of English. The data show the expected stages of development and confirm the relevance of learning principles to a comprehensive theory of learnability in second language acquisition (SLA).

Research suggests that English as a second language (ESL) students take upwards of 5 years to acquire a level of proficiency in academic language that is comparable to their English-speaking peers. They are likely to be denied full access to school knowledge unless teachers help to bring about student content knowledge learning and second language acquisition simultaneously.

In this paper a theoretical model of dyadic native-nonnative speaker (NS-NNS) discourse is proposed in which discourse is described in terms of three features: interactional contingency, the goal orientation of participants, and dominance. The model is then used to study the discourse of 30 dyadic oral interviews of the Cambridge First Certificate in English examination. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the model in abstracting the structure of oral interview discourse. They show that the discourse of oral proficiency interviews is characterized by greater reactiveness by NNS candidates and greater orientation toward goals by NS examiners. Variation in the structure of the discourse is also investigated in this study. This is shown to be related to the examiner, the theme of the interview, the task in which the participants are engaged, and the gender of examiner and candidate.

This paper treats the development of the expression of grammatical categories in German in the early second language acquisition of Turkish and German children attending a bilingual day-care center in a multilingual speech community in Berlin. We examine case and gender marking on noun phrases and pronouns and tense/aspect and agreement marking on verb phrases. These are examined in light of the following general issues: (a) Do grammatical markers develop from independent lexical items in child language as well as in diachronic development? (b) Do the markers initially mark pragmatic categories before being grammaticalized as syntactic functors? (c) Do grammaticalizations of the first language influence the development of the second language?

We find no evidence that pragmatic precede syntactic categories; however, some evidence indicates that grammatical markers develop first as independent words—for example, pronominal use preceding definite article use of der, die, das, and main verb use preceding auxiliary use of sein (‘be’) and haben (‘have’). Some evidence that the categories of the first language (Turkish) play a role in the development of German second language is found in compound verb constructions.

A frequently discussed hypothesis concerning the source of cross-linguistic communication difficulty in written discourse is conflicting organizational patterns (Kaplan, 1966, 1987). Extending the argument to oral discourse, Young (1982) argued that spoken English discourse produced by Chinese speakers evidenced a discourse-level topic-comment structure that native English speakers find difficult to follow. However, Tyler (1988) argued that the perception of incoherence might better be understood as the cumulative result of interacting miscues at the discourse level, that is, miscues in syntactic incorporation, lexical discourse markers, tense/aspect, and lexical The study reported here aims at testing these competing hypotheses. One hundred fifteen subjects rated four versions of the Chinese-produced English discourse presented in Young's study for comprehensibility. Results indicated that the effect of discourse miscues on comprehensibility was highly significant (F = 70, p <.0001). However, there was no significant effect for order of ideas (F = .47, p <.49).

The study examines the effects of both integrative motivation and anxiety on computerized vocabulary acquisition using a laboratory analog procedure as a microcosm of second language learning. An attempt was made to induce anxiety in one group of subjects by videotaping them while learning. Individual differences in integrative motivation were measured by aggregating relevant scales. Subjects higher in integrative motivation showed superior vocabulary acquisition and tended to initiate a translation more quickly than did those lower in integrative motivation. The anxiety manipulation did not appear to influence behavior during the learning trials. A second set of analyses revealed that subjects with more positive attitudes tended to respond more quickly and consistently to the attitude items. The results are discussed in terms of the operational definition of integrative motivation and its relation to anxiety.

This paper reviews work in the philosophy of science pertinent to theory formats and relates it to recent second language acquisition (SLA) theories. Recent developments in philosophy of science and science studies have shown that the theory format advocated by philosophy of science for much of this century is unhelpful; developments in theory format in cognitive science, particularly psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistics, have proceeded on lines independent of the older tradition in theory format. The naturalization of philosophy of science has resulted in improved understandings of what is necessary in a theory if it is to be adequately explanatory. SLA theory development has largely taken place in ignorance of such recent developments, and initial critiques of SLA theory from within the field reflected the earlier conception of theory. However, SLA research has reached the stage where a meta-understanding of theory formats, in terms of the components of a theory and the language in which a theory is couched (its formalism), is badly needed to facilitate theory development.

This study investigates some instances of linguistic development in the acquisition of a second language that might be subsumed under the issue of grammaticalization. First, the notion of grammaticalization is discussed with reference to the current linguistic debate and its applicability to the domain of language acquisition is evaluated. Then, some cases are examined drawing on data on the acquisition of Italian collected during several years at the University of Pavia. With respect to temporality and modality, learners are shown to move from lexical means or context-dependent strategies to a gradual acquisition of the morphological devices required by the target language. The results of the analyses are discussed in terms of their implications for both general linguistic theory and language acquisition research.

It goes without saying that longitudinal second language (L2) data have contributed—and will continue to contribute—much to L2 theory construction, yet one of the more difficult problems involved with this and similarly large-scale corpora is their very manageability. In years past, a common solution to this problem involved creating card catalogs for what appeared to be crucial parts of the data; more recently, researchers have resorted to computational resources, generally electronic databases. Nonetheless, these solutions remained strictly local: Access to such analytical means was generally restricted to the researchers involved. This situation is beginning to change, however, because, as this report will show, more child as well as adult L2 data are finding their way into the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) archive, thereby permitting widespread access to these data.

This contribution will compare the acquisition of German of three adult Poles over a period of 3 years. As background to the acquisition of grammatical features in German (e. g., morphology, auxiliary and modal verbs, constituency structure, temporality), an acquisition profile of the informants will be constructed. With the help of computer-aided corpus descriptions, the sequences in acquisition will be specified.