Phases of interlanguage development from the perspectives of utterance organization, function-to-form mapping, processability, developmental L2 errors, and L1 transference.

1. Function
to form
mapping
Utterance
organization
L1 influence
Corrections
L2
processing
Prof Gregg Brekke - EDU 361

2. Noticing hypothesis
• Nothing is learned unless it is noticed, even
unconsciously.
Importance of awareness and attention in L2 learning
Input processing
• Learners have difficulty focusing on word form and
meaning at the same time. Learners focus on
meaning first and ignore “grammar” information.

3.  Reflect understanding of the English L2 system
1. She looking around.
2. She rans to escape.
3. Yesterday he play soccer.
4. Why you don’t like cheese?
5. The dog run fastly.

4.  She looking around: Developmental.
Simplification of the verb phrase by omitting the auxiliary.
 Yesterday he play: Developmental.
Simplification. No tense or number marker on the verb.
 She rans to escape: Developmental.
Overgeneralization of the 3rd person singular ‘s’ present
marker to the past.

5.  Why you don’t like…: Developmental.
Learner is at Stage 3 of question development
 The dog run fastly. Developmental.
Overgeneralization. Adverbs add –ly to an adjective.

6. Learners in uninstructed settings
• Nothing is learned unless it is noticed, even
unconsciously.
Importance of awareness and attention in L2 learning
Input processing
• Learners have difficulty focusing on word form and
meaning at the same time. Learners focus on
meaning first and ignore “grammar” information.

7. Information Organization of IL structures
01
02
03
Nominal Utterance
Organization
Use of nouns, pronouns,
adjectives
Very few verbs used
Charlie and girl accident
Infinite Utterance Organization- Basic
Variety
Use of uninflected verbs (No #, person, tense)
Use of prepositions
The blonde friend tell other woman about the son
Finite Utterance Organization
Morphological “grammar” endings and words
he has finished the work
Klein & Perdue 1993

8. Function-Form mapping
Reference to the past
01
02
03
Contextual
Describe the
situation
Lexical (vocabulary words)
with time meanings
Morphological “grammar”
endings and words

9.  Phase 1: Contextual
Learners with very limited language may simply
refer to events in the order in which they occurred
or mention a time or place to show that the event
occurred in the past.
My son come and He work in restaurant.
January. It’s very cold.
Viet Nam. We work too hard.

10.  Phase 2: Lexical (vocabulary words)
learners use a rich repertoire of adverbs
Many calendric (Sunday) and anaphoric adverbs
(after, before, then)
Some frequency (always) and durational (two
hours) adverbs.
After his bike fall down, his fruit then fall
down.

11.  Phase 3: Morphological
Learners start to attach a grammatical
morpheme which shows that the verb is marked
for the past.
The people worked in the fields
Even after they begin marking past tense on verbs,
however, learners may still make errors such as
the overgeneralization of the regular -ed ending
She rided her bicycle

12.  Learners are more likely to mark past tense on
some verbs than on others. Why?
 Due to the ‘lexical aspect’ of different verbs
(Bardovi-Harlig (2000).
o Learners learn first to mark past tense when referring
to completed events (I broke the vase or My sister
fixed it with glue) than when referring to states and
activities which may last for extended periods without
a clear end point (She seemed happy last week or My
father belonged to a club).

13. L2 Morpheme Order
1
2
3
4
-ing (progressive): Girl watching picture
Plural –s: Boy give away two pens
Be copula: She is the one
Be Auxiliary: progressive He is going
a/the: Article: He steals a bread
Irregular past: The teacher took us there
Regular past –ed We crashed the car
3rd singular –s He takes a nap
Possessive -- ’s the bread shop’s owner

14. Hierarchy of processing skills
01
02
03
04
apple
walk
apples
walked
three + big + apples
slowly + walked
The three big apples + are ripe.
A big apple + is spoiled.
(N)
(V)
(N)
(V)
(NP)
(VP)
(NP + VP)

15. Cross -Clause boundary movement
05
2
Are / the three big apples / ____ ripe?

16. Hierarchy of Internal Clause reordering
(S1 + S2)
01
02
03
04
That’s the man [who
ran away].
That’s the truck [that I
sold yesterday].
That’s the man [to whom I
gave the letter].
That’s the book [that I told you
about],
or [about which I told you]

17.  Processability Theory- (Pienemann)
1. Developmental features or sequences in syntax
and morphology are affected by how easy they are to
process. L2 learners follow these pathways.
2. Distance among phrase elements, and across phrase
and clause boundaries require increasingly complex
processing
3. Cognitive load in working memory limits depth of
processing. More advanced structures are accessed
only after previous ones are automatized.

18. Interlingual errors: based on cross-
linguistic influence:
 Reflect L1 grammar – due to transfer

19.  French speaker: The boy kiss her mother.
 Spanish speaker: He no speak e-Spanish.
 German speaker: Like you ice cream?
 Arabic speaker: The boy that I saw him was running fast.

20.  French speaker: The boy kiss her mother. (French
possessive determiners agree with object possessed.)
 Spanish speaker: He no speak e-Spanish. (Spanish has
no initial consonant clusters [sp-].)
 German speaker: Like you ice cream? (At Stage 4/5 of
question formation, learner hypothesizes that full verbs
can be inverted in questions.)
 Arabic speaker: The boy that I saw him was running fast.
(In relative clauses, Arabic does not delete the pronoun
from its ‘original’ place.)

21.  Cross-linguistic influence no longer referred to
as‘transfer’or‘interference’. Why?
◦ Cross-linguistic influence can promote L2 development.
◦ Cross-linguistic influence can result in avoidance as well
as errors because learners are sensitive to degrees of
distance between L1 and L2.
◦ L2 can influence L1 (influence goes both ways).
 L1 sometimes makes it difficult for learners to
notice something they’re saying is not a feature
of the L2 (e.g. adverb placement)

22.  Doesn’t take into account learner strategies
such as avoidance
 Has one single focus: errors. Thus does not
track changes in interlanguage that may reflect
progress.

23.  Not like ‘closed doors’
 Emergence of new form, then increasing
frequency of use
 Progress to a higher stage can result in new
(different) errors (e.g. ‘He ran out the door’
followed by ‘He runned out the door.’
 Developmental progress interacts with L1
influence

24.  Teachers’ questions in classrooms (Long and
Sato, 1983)
 Scaffolding and display and referential questions
(McCormick and Donato, 2000)
 Open and closed questions (Dalton-Puffer, 2006)
 Wait time (White and Lightbown, 1984; Long et
al., 1985)

25.  Explicit correction
 Recasts
 Clarification requests
 Metalinguistic feedback
 Elicitation
 Repetition

26.  Pienemann (1988) and his colleagues suggest
that:
Some aspects of language are best taught according to
learners’ internal schedule (i.e. developmental features).
 Other aspects of language can be taught at any
time (i.e. variational features). Vocabulary!
 Instruction cannot change the ‘natural’
developmental course. For some learners, it can
speed up passage.
 Important to assess learners’ development and
teach what would naturally come next.

27.  Advocates of this proposal suggest that:
◦ Not everything has to be taught; lots of language can be
acquired naturally with sufficient exposure.
◦ Some aspects of language must be taught and may
need to be taught explicitly (e.g. when learners share the
same first language).
◦ Other aspects of language can be taught by helping
learners to notice certain features in the input and to
increase their awareness of form.

28.  ‘Get it right in the end’
◦ Strong evidence that form-focused instruction within the
context of communicative and content-based language
teaching is more effective in promoting L2 learning than
instructional approaches that are limited to an exclusive
emphasis on accuracy, comprehension, or interaction.
◦ Decisions about balancing form-focus and meaning-focus
must take into account differences in learners’
characteristics (e.g. age, goals for learning, etc.).

29.  It is not necessary (or desirable) to choose
between form-based and meaning-based
instruction. The challenge is to find the best
balance between these two orientations.
 Many questions about L2 teaching remain to be
answered by classroom-based research on L2
learning.

30. 3
0
t1 t2 t3 t4 t5
S'-procedure
(EmbeddedS)
- - - - +
Sentence-
procedure
- simplified simplified inter-phrasal
information
exchange
inter-phrasal
information
exchange
Phrasal
procedure
(head)
- - phrasal
information
exchange
phrasal
information
exchange
phrasal
information
exchange
category
procedure
(lex. categ.)
- lexical
morphemes
lexical
morphemes
lexical
morphemes
lexical
morphemes
word/ lemma + + + + +
Table 1:Hypothetical hierarchy of processing procedures (Pienemann, 1998)

31.  Subject
That’s the man [who ran away].
 Direct object
That’s the truck [that I sold yesterday].
 Indirect object
That’s the man [to whom I gave the letter].
 Object of preposition
That’s the book [that I told you about].
 Genitive
That’s the man [whose sister I know].
 Object of comparison
He’s the only man [whom I am taller than].
Less
accessible