(SLA) PSYCHOLINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF INTERLANGUAGE

Name    : Safitri Dyah Utami

NIM       : 2201411058

Class      : 103-104

Academic Writing

PSYCHOLINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF INTERLANGUAGE

Ø  L1 TRANSFER

L1 transfer refers to the influence that the learner’s L1 exerts over the acquisition of an L2.

›  The learner’s L1 is one of the sources of error in learner language (negative transfer)

›  The learner’s L1 can facilitate L2 acquisition (positive transfer)

                Behaviourist theories led to two developments:

›  Some theorist, espousing strong mentalist accounts of L2 acquisition, sought to play down the role of the L1.

›  Reconceptualize transfer within a cognitive framework.

According to Eric Kellerman, learners treat some linguistic features as potentially transferable and non-transferable. Kellerman found that advanced Dutch learners of English had clear perceptions about which meanings of ‘breken’ (‘break’) were basic in their L1. Transfer errors do not always occur when they are predicted to occur. Differences between the target and native language do not always result in learning difficulty.

He also found that they were prepared to translate a sentence like:

                                Hij brak zijin been. (He broke his leg.)

directly into English, using ‘broke’ for ‘brak’ but were not prepared to give a direct translation of a

sentence like:

                                Het ondergrondse verset werd gebroken.

                                (the underground resistance was broken.)

Other researchers have found that the transfer of some L1grammatical features is tied to the learners of English.

Transfer errors do not always occur when they are predicted to occur. Differences between the target and native language do not always result in learning difficulty.

When language transfer takes place there is usually no loss of L1 knowledge. This obvious fact has led to the suggestion that a better term for referring to the effects of the L1 might be ‘cross-linguistic influence.’

Ø  The Role of Consciousness in L2 acquisition

Adults seem to have work hard and to study the language consciously in order to succeed when they acquire L2. in contrast, children seem to do so without conscious effort when they acquire their L1. There are two opposing position which can be identified:

1.       Stephen Krashen has argued the need to distinguish ‘acquired’ L2 knowledge (i.e. implicite knowledge of language) and ‘learned’ L2 knowledge (i.e. explicit knowledge about language).

2.       Richard Schmidt has poinyed out that the term ‘consciousness’ is often used very loosely in SLA and argues that there is a need to standardize  the concept that underlie its use.  For example, he distinguihes between consciousness as ‘intentionality’ and consciousness as ‘attantion’.

‘Intentionality’ that refers to whether a learner makes an conscious and deliberate decition to learn some L2 knowledge. He failed to recognize that ‘incidental’ acquisition might in fact still involving some degree of conscious ‘attention’ to input. In the other words, learning incidentally is not the same as learning without conscious attention.

Irrespective of whether learners learn implicitly or explicitly, it is widely accepted that they can acquire different kind of knowledge. Explicit knowledge may help learners to move from intake to acquisition by helping to notice the gap between what they have observed in the input and the current state of their interlanguage as manifested in their own output.

Another way of identifying the processes responsible for interlanguage development is to deduce the operations that learners perform from a close inspection of their output. We shall examine two of them here; operating prinsiples and processing constrains.

Ø  Operating principles

Operating principles is the study of the L1 acquisition of many different language has led to the identification of a number of general strategies which children use to extract and segment linguistic information from the language they hear.

Ø  Processing constrains

Processing constrains sought to account for both why learners acquire the grammar of a language in a definite order and also why some learners only develop very simple interlanguage grammar.

Ø  Communication Strategies

Communicative Strategy – a way of overcoming a gap between communicative intent and a limited ability to express that intent, as part of the strategic competence. For example, : silkworm translated as worm and art gallery translated as picture place.

Ø  Two Types of Computational Model

1.       Serial Processing

Information is processed in a series of sequential step and results in the representation of what has been learned (the mind is processing one thing at a time in a series)

2.       Parallel Distributed Processing

This credits the learner with the ability to perform a number of mental  tasks at  the same thing. (the mind is processing multiple things at one time)