Excerpt 6 June 1988)
3.3 Natural-Order Studies and
Performance Analysis (1960s to 1980s)
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several very important case studies were conducted by child L1 acquisition researchers. Brown’s (1973) case study research on three children named Adam, Eve, and Sarah helped generate a
new research agenda for other language acquisition researchers. Research- ers were also conducting longitudinal studies of children’s acquisition of languages other than English: Finnish, Samoan, Swedish, Spanish, Luo, and German (Brown, 1973). Many of the contributors to Slobin’s (1985) later volume on L1 acquisition of Japanese, German, Hebrew, Kaluli, and six other languages drew heavily on parents’ longitudinal diary/case stud- ies of children’s development in the various languages.
Pioneering research often shifts from case studies to larger, more experimental studies to allow for potentially greater generalization from findings. For this reason, many cross-sectional studies were subsequently conducted on the “remarkably invariant order” Brown (1973, p. 57) had found in the acquisition of 14 English morphemes (e.g., -ing, plural -s, third-person singular -s) in the three children he studied. SLA researchers, in turn, undertook parallel research (see Ellis, 1994; Gass & Selinker, 2001, for reviews). SLA had by then become a legitimate subfield of (applied) linguistics, and the new “focus on the learner” in the 1970s generated both case studies and cross-sectional studies of learners’ errors, classified by types or error source. This analytic approach, in retrospect, was more descriptive than explanatory or theory generating.
Because of the research agenda and methodology inherited from the L1 morpheme-order studies, many interesting developments in learners’
L2 linguistic or communicative systems were ignored (Larsen-Freeman
& Long, 1991). Researchers soon began to examine not only what learn- ers did wrong—their “errors” or performance in relation to a fixed set of morphemes—but also their highly innovative and systematic uses of L2.
This approach came to be known as performance analysis (Long & Sato, 1984), and it was in that context and spirit that many of the case studies in Hatch (1978a) were undertaken. Morphological forms, such as possessive -’s and regular past tense verb endings, were no longer SLA researchers’
sole focus, although Hakuta’s (1976) case study attracted attention because his subject, Uguisu, acquired morphemes in a different order than the established norm.
Research from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s began to take into account more idiosyncratic, creative, functional aspects of SLA than before.
The relationship between the appearance of linguistic forms and the ways in which they were used (their functions or meanings) was reconsidered as case study data suggested that the two did not necessarily correspond and, on the contrary, often had no systematic relationship whatsoever. Wagner- Gough’s (1978) discussion of a young Persian boy’s overextended use of the progressive morpheme -ing in various nonprogressive linguistic con- texts such as imperatives (e.g., Sitting down like that instead of Sit down) helped raise awareness of this mismatch. Therefore, it was a hallmark in the genesis of form-to-function analysis (Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991).
Various functional-linguistic approaches to describing natural language systems were incorporated in these studies (e.g., Givón, 1979), although Hallidayan systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) (e.g., Halliday, 1975) in that period perhaps had less impact on L1 and L2 studies in Canada and the United States than in Australia. However, interestingly, Halliday’s con- ceptualization of the development of language as a semiotic system that unfolds through social interaction was heavily influenced by his case study of the L1 development and meaning making of his own young son, Nigel, in his first three years. (A recently edited collection of Halliday’s influen- tial and prolific writing includes a volume on Nigel’s development and a CD of the “Nigel transcripts” (Webster, 2003).)
Another important study from that era was the functional analysis of certain forms in the evolving language of Ge, Huebner’s (1983) English (L2) case study participant (see Chapter 1). A Hmong immigrant in Hawaii, Ge used the forms da (“the”) and isa (an invented topic marker) in creative ways, and over the initial one-year study the use of these forms changed quantitatively and qualitatively. Whereas da came to be used in more envi- ronments (it “flooded”), such as with definite subjects, isa was used less (it “trickled”) as a topic marker and sometimes-copula, to a copula func- tion mainly. Thus, the scope and semantic features of the two forms under investigation changed. Huebner’s was also one of the first such case studies in SLA to include a quantitative (nonstatistical) analysis of change and a
By functional linguistics or functional analysis, I mean work that considers carefully the semantic and pragmatic properties and uses of morphemes, words, phrases, or other linguistic structures.
For a review of functional approaches used in child L1 studies, see Budwig (1995) and Mitchell and Miles (2004).
microanalysis of the semantics of article use. This study, therefore, reaf- firmed the need to examine learners’ language as a dynamic, ever-chang- ing system and also echoed Wagner-Gough’s (1978) call for more attention to disparities between language forms and functions.
At the same time that fine-tuned, narrowly focused microanalyses of learners’ evolving grammars were under way, the focus in SLA case stud- ies was also broadening. The deficiencies of early performance analysis research (morpheme-order studies), coupled with its lack of explanatory power, led to a growing interest in sociolinguistics and conversation analy- sis and other kinds of discourse analysis in relation to language develop- ment through interactional encounters. The examination of grammar as a natural outcome of conversational interactions became a new trend, and descriptive methods derived from conversation analysis were adopted and are still widely used (see Markee, 2000, 2006). Although syntax continued to be the major focus of attention in SLA, pragmatics (e.g., speech acts such as apologies and requests) and other aspects of linguistic competence and use also grew in popularity.
In Huang’s study of his son Paul (Huang & Hatch, 1978), for example, the relationship between input structures and output structures in his dis- course was analyzed, suggesting that through imitation of what he was hearing at his English nursery school, Paul was producing yet unanalyzed, chunked phrases without knowing quite what they or their component parts meant (e.g., Get out of here! and It’s time to eat and drink! p. 121).
Eventually these would become analyzed. Several years later, Peters (1983) also examined the way children acquire their L1 in a gestalt versus analyti- cal manner, from either the top down (chunks) or the bottom up (words), depending on the child. Her case study of Minh showed how a child comes to analyze previously chunked expressions or units (e.g., Look at that!), again highlighting the observation that language is not simply analyzed and acquired in a word-by-word, structure-by-structure manner. Scollon’s (1976) book, based on his dissertation, was a case study of a young relative named Brenda. He discussed the relationship between the production first of “vertical” constructions, which were strings of related but separate one- word utterances, and then “horizontal” constructions, fluent multiword utterances under one intonation contour. By stringing together the vertical pieces syntactically through conversation, caregivers could help learners internalize complete, grammatical (horizontal) utterances. This scaffold-
ing of discourse by more competent speakers was also thought to play a causal role in language acquisition universally (Peck, 1978; Hatch, 1978c), a viewpoint that was later contested based on new evidence from different cultures in which caregivers did not engage in scaffolding in this manner (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986).
The observation that children do not acquire their L1 or L2 in the same fashion—even if certain morphemes seem to develop in a similar order—and that all children do not use the same strategies emerged in other studies too (e.g., Wong-Fillmore, 1979). Itoh and Hatch (1978) noted, for example, how a young Japanese child in the United States coped with living in her new linguistic environment, with a long rejection phase ini- tially, followed by a repetition stage, and lastly a spontaneous production phase. In this general approach, target forms produced to a predetermined criterion level were not of central importance; rather, the way learners used what (limited) linguistic means or forms they had was of great interest, and so too was silence or resistance to learning. The actual mechanisms of learning and a holistic theory of grammar were not always evident, however.
A new set of function-form studies investigated changes in negation and question formation (Cancino, Rosansky, & Schumann 1978), rep- resenting new “natural orders,” but based on observed ungrammatical interim stages as well as grammatical ones in final stages. Thus, an interest in target-like forms in SLA was complemented by an interest in process or transitional stages encountered by learners before mastering target forms.
Many of these insights were gleaned from seminal case studies such as the one by Cancino et al. (1978). The negation continuum generated by that project was based on the findings of a longitudinal study of six Spanish- speaking learners of English who acquired negation and question forma- tion by traversing essentially similar stages. However, one learner, Alberto, never mastered these structures, and his atypicality became the subject of much subsequent research and discussion. Alberto, a Costa Rican learner in the United States, appeared to have stopped progressing in English at a very low level (Schumann, 1978).
As we saw in Chapter 2, exceptional cases are often very productive for theory construction, as they tend to challenge widely held assumptions about behavior. Schumann posited that the lack of acculturation, a social- psychological variable, was the chief causal factor accounting for Alberto’s
lack of success in English (e.g., in negation, question formation, use of auxiliaries, and provision of subjects). Even when Schumann tried to give Alberto intensive instruction in negation, there was no lasting effect in Alberto’s spontaneous speech. The explanation was that he was simply not integrated sufficiently well into the U.S. English-speaking culture, demon- strating a social-psychological distance from it instead, which is why his English seemed unalterably fossilized.
Based on his case study and supporting research from sociolinguistics, Schumann (1978) proposed that early language development represented a kind of pidginization process, reflecting many of the simplified fea- tures of attested pidgins in various countries. However, his causal claims about acculturation became controversial, and counter-examples appeared as evidence against the strong form of Schumann’s acculturation model or hypothesis. One such study was carried out by Schmidt (1983) on his acquaintance Wes, a Japanese artist in Hawaii. Wes satisfied all the criteria for being well motivated, acculturated, exposed to ample English input and interaction in Hawaii, and so on, but nonetheless did not seem to acquire target-like morphology and syntax. Schmidt’s study revealed that learn- ers may be very competent communicators in their L2 without having acquired many of the fundamental linguistic structures in the language.
Moreover, the interest in conversational ability and pragmatics illustrated in Schmidt’s study was an indication of the broadening scope of SLA at that time.