Second Language Acquisition 2007-08 Lecture Series
Second-Language Acquisition by Low-Literate Learners: An Under-Studied Population
Elaine Tarone
University of Minnesota
3:30 pm, Tuesday, March 25, 2008
254 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive
Abstract:
A great many adolescent and adult second-language learners both in the US and in other countries are either illiterate or low-literate, yet almost all research on oral second-language acquisition has focused on educated, highly-literate learners (Tarone & Bigelow, 2004). As a result, we know little about the impact of literacy level on the processes of oral SLA.
There is good reason to suspect that alphabetic print literacy affects oral language processing in the native language. For example, studies in neurolinguistics and experimental psychology show that illiterate adults perform significantly worse than literate adults on oral phonemic analysis tasks (oral tasks that require the manipulation of phonemes or syllables). These studies suggest that the acquisition of grapheme-phoneme correspondence – the ability to represent a phoneme with a visual symbol -- changes the way in which we process oral language in these sorts of tasks (Olson 1995).
The speaker will review this research and scholarship, and then describe a three-part study on oral second-language processing by low-literate adolescent learners of English as a second language. This collaborative study explored the impact of literacy level on the learners’ 1) noticing of implicit corrective feedback on errors in L2 question formation, 2) accuracy in an elicited imitation task of L2 questions, and 3) use of a set of common morphemes in an oral narrative. Literacy level was significantly related to learners’ performance of each of these tasks.
These findings suggest that the sound-symbol correspondence developed in the process of mastering alphabetic print literacy improves second language-learners’ ability to notice formal differences between L1 and L2 occurring in oral input and in corrective feedback. While the low-literate learners in the study demonstrated many strengths in their pragmatic skill and their ability to leverage their second-language knowledge, they did not focus on oral L2 forms in the same way more-literate learners did.
The speaker will explore with the audience some pedagogical strategies which might suit these learners’ cognitive strengths, learning styles and strategies while helping them build stronger grapheme-phoneme correspondence as a tool for cognitive processing of L2 forms in oral input.
All lectures in the series are free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Language Institute and the Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), with funding from the College of Letters and Science Anonymous Fund.
|
