EUROSLA Yearbook - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2010

Motivation has been a major research topic within SLA for over four decades, yet has endured a marginalized position within the field, remaining somewhat isolated from its more mainstream linguistic traditions. The analysis of motivation and its role in SLA has largely been at the level of global learning outcomes, and research has had little to say about how motivational factors relate to the interim processes of linguistic development. Thus while motivation is recognized as a prerequisite for successful SLA, the relevance of motivation research to understanding the finer detail of how SLA happens has been unclear. This paper discusses some studies that have attempted to integrate the analysis of motivation with more linguistic approaches in SLA. It proposes an agenda for bridging the gap between motivation and mainstream SLA research, and suggests how motivation research may contribute to the development of major lines of thinking within the field

Studies on pragmatic development, especially on the development of pragmatic fluency, are still scarce in the area of Interlanguage Pragmatics. The present study analyses whether EFL learners (N = 144), from Primary to University levels, who have not been instructed in pragmatics nevertheless show development in pragmatic fluency. A wide variety of measures were used to analyse the learners’ production in open role-play. The results in the present study show that pragmatic fluency indeed develops as proficiency increases (the learners develop their use of gambits and routines, they are capable of changing topics by themselves and they produce appropriate time responses) but also that, in contrast, the development in the use of patterns stops at Grade 11 and there is no development in the opening and the closing phases. These results are discussed in the light of cognitive models of second language acquisition.

Nous partons dans cette étude de la polysémie d’un certain nombre d’adverbes temporels récurrents en français L1. Cette polysémie serait le résultat d’un développement diachronique (Dostie 2004, Hansen & Rossari 2005, Pusch 2006). Nous nous intéressons ici au développement des adverbes déjà, encore, toujours, alors, après, et maintenant dans le français parlé L2 chez des apprenants avancés. Nous faisons l’hypothèse que ces adverbes, à mesure que la L2 se développe, sont de plus en plus pragmaticalisés. Par pragmaticalisation, nous entendons ici le développement des fonctions temporelles et discursives et/ou énonciatives des adverbes chez les locuteurs suédophones en français L2.

In order to realize text cohesion, speakers have to select specific information units and mark their informational status within the discourse; this results in specific, language-particular perspective-taking, linked to typological differences (Slobin 1996). A previous study on native speakers’ production in French, Italian, German and Dutch (Dimroth et al., in press) has highlighted a “Romance way” and a “Germanic way” of marking text cohesion in narrative segments involving topic discontinuity. In this paper we analyze how text cohesion is realized in the same contexts by advanced learners of L2 French (Italian and German L1) and L2 Italian (French and German L1). Our aim is to verify the hypothesis of an L2 advanced stage where learners manage the target language utterance grammar whereas their discourse organization still reflects L1 preferences. The results confirm the persistent presence of L1 influence, but they also show learner-specific tendencies (favouring lexical means over morphosyntactic ones), which are independent of their source language.

The present corpus study analyzes 5,016 contextualized DPs drawn from 34 current newspaper and magazine articles to test the so-far unsubstantiated claim that the input provides abundant and clear evidence of the grammatical gender of French nouns. Findings show that 49.76% of noun tokens are not gender-marked; 9.01% of nouns lack a gender-marked determiner, but are modified by a gender-marked adjective; while 41.22% of nouns have a gender-marked determiner. Detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses provide a descriptive and explanatory account of gender-marked contexts and second language learnability implications are discussed. The lack of readily available word-external clues explains why the acquisition of French grammatical gender is notoriously difficult (e.g., Ayoun 2007).

Previous studies of Mandarin speakers’ intuitions about grammatical and ungrammatical wh-movement constructions in L2 English have produced mixed results. Some studies show that such speakers neither fully accept grammatical wh-constructions, nor fully reject constructions that violate locality constraints. The present study examines the possibility that learners may be transferring the Chinese Focused Cleft wh-construction (FCW) into their English grammars, and that transfer is persistently influential. It is argued that the FCW, which produces structures superficially similar to English wh-movement questions, does not involve movement. Two experimental studies are reported. The first tests native Mandarin Chinese speakers’ intuitions about the FCW in order to provide evidence bearing on lack of movement in the FCW. The second tests the intuitions about grammatical and ungrammatical English wh-movement of advanced L2 learners of English whose L1 was Mandarin. The results support the claim that advanced Chinese learners of English interpret English wh-constructions like Chinese FCWs.

This paper offers a number of refinements to Jarvis’s (2000) methodological framework for investigating cross-linguistic effects. According to the original framework, there are three potential consequences of cross-linguistic effects, and any compelling argument for or against the presence of such effects must be based on a consideration of all three consequences. These consequences can be thought of as types of evidence, or premises for transfer, and their investigation requires performance comparisons between individuals, groups, and languages. The present paper has two purposes. The first is to characterize the foundations of a classification scheme that highlights the relationships among these three types of evidence and also indicates that there is yet a fourth type of evidence for cross-linguistic effects that has not yet been taken account of within the framework. The second purpose of this paper is to show that these four types of evidence constitute what can be described as a comparison-based argument for transfer, but that there also exist other valid arguments for transfer, such as what I refer to as the detection-based argument. I describe both the comparison- and detection-based arguments and the types of evidence they entail in relation to number of recent investigations into cross-linguistic influence.

It has been suggested that child L1 learners overuse the definite article in indefinite contexts due to maturational/pragmatic factors such as egocentricity and an inability to differentiate common ground contexts from speaker beliefs-only contexts (Maratsos 1976; Schaeffer & Matthewson 2005). Knowledge of semantic features such as specificity and definiteness is also implicated in L1 learners’ (in)correct article use (Ionin et al. 2004; 2009). In the context of child bilingualism, on the other hand, difficulties in acquisition of articles are expected to be doubled when one of the languages of the child does not have a corresponding article system. To address these issues and to identify parallels between monolingual and bilingual language acquisition, we examine the use of English articles by a Serbo-Croatian-English simultaneous bilingual child and two monolingual English-speaking children. The results reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between monolingual and bilingual children’s use of English articles, possibly due to the influence of Serbo-Croatian (an article-less language). The findings suggest that in simultaneous child bilingualism, cross-linguistic transfer overrides maturational/pragmatic or semantic factors that are tied to incorrect article use (cf. Zdorenko & Paradis 2008).

This paper investigates the knowledge of two unaccusative diagnostics in ­Italian, auxiliary selection and ne cliticisation, in child L2 grammars of L1 Croatian speakers. The two phenomena are not instantiated in Croatian. Following ­Sorace (2000), it is assumed in the paper that the lexical-semantic aspect of these phenomena is characterised by gradience that can be captured by the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy. Findings are reported of an experimental study in which highly proficient child L2 learners and their monolingual peers rated the acceptability of two Italian auxiliaries and ne-cliticisation with different lexical-semantic classes of intransitives by using the Magnitude Estimation technique. The learners’ judgements largely converged on those of the native speakers, suggesting that the two phenomena had been acquired in the L2. Such findings support the hypothesis predicting complete L2 acquisition of properties pertaining to an interface between two domains within the language factory (the so-called internal interfaces), in this case syntax and the lexicon.

L1 attrition is increasingly being studied as a feature of bilingualism, taking into account the parallel process of L2 language acquisition in a migrant situation. Such situations may foster L1 attrition as a result of insufficient L1 input and competition or interaction with the language of the host community. In a study of 27 German late bilinguals resident in Ireland, the question of a possible interaction between the two language systems (German and English) is addressed. This paper reports on the results of two of the elicitation instruments used – a C-test as a measure of global language proficiency, and a verbal fluency task as a measure of lexical retrieval and bilingual dominance. The former is an unspeeded integrative task, while the latter taps lexical access as a function of the relative activation levels of the languages. The analysis focuses on the proficiency profiles of the bilingual participants vis-à-vis a German and an Irish control group to establish the level of L1 attrition and L2 acquisition, and the degree with which L1 and L2 proficiency correlate.