Focus on form

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Re: Focus on form

Postby reineke » Sun Jun 17, 2018 8:44 pm

Vivian Cook
Going beyond the Native Speaker in Language Teaching
Excerpts.

"It is often taken for granted that the only rightful speakers of a language are its native speakers. Linguists look at the intuitions of native speakers or collect quantities of their speech; language teachers encourage students to be like them. This paper argues that the prominence of the native speaker in language teaching has obscured the distinctive nature of the successful second language (L2) user. It puts forward some suggestions for how language teaching can recognise students as L2 users both in the classroom and in the world outside.

Defining the native speaker

First the implications of the term native speaker need to be spelled out. The keynote is struck in what Davies (1991) claims to be its first recorded use: ‘The first language a human being learns to speak is his native language; he is a native speaker of this language’ (Bloomfield, 1933, p.43). In other words you are a native speaker of the first language (L1) that you learnt in childhood, called by Davies (1996, p. 156) the ‘bio-developmental definition’. Being a native speaker in this sense is an unalterable historic fact; you cannot change your native language any more than you can change who brought you up.

This core meaning of native speaker is often supplemented by detailing the characteristics that native speakers share apart from their birth. Stern (1983) lists: (i) subconscious knowledge of rules, (ii) intuitive grasp of meanings, (iii) ability to communicate within social settings, (iv) range of language skills, and (v) creativity of language use. The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics (Johnson & Johnson, 1998) adds (vi) identification with a language community. Davies (1996) adds (vii) ability to produce fluent discourse, (viii) knowledge of differences between their own speech and that of the ‘standard’ form of the language, and (ix) ability ‘to interpret and translate into the L1 of which she or he is a native speaker’.

Some of these characteristics are in a sense obvious: native speakers are not necessarily aware of their knowledge in a formal sense (i and ii), but nor could they explain how they ride a bicycle. Some are debatable: many native speakers are unaware how their speech differs from the status form (viii), shown for example in the growing use of non-standard between you and I for between you and me even in professional speakers such as news-readers. Many native speakers are far from fluent in speech (vii), some having to communicate via alternative means, such as Stephen Hawking and Helen Keller.

Some native speakers function poorly in social settings (iii). In the Chomskyan sense of creativity, any novel sentence uttered or comprehended is creative (v); a computer can create ‘new’ sentences, for instance the speech program that answers telephone directory enquiries with every possible telephone number. In a general literary sense, creativity belongs to a small percentage of native speakers, such as poets, rap singers and so on. The ability to interpret (ix) is only possessed by native speakers with a second language and not necessarily by all of them. Native speakers are free to disassociate themselves completely from their L1 community politically or socially (vi) without giving up their native speaker status, whether Karl Marx in London, James Joyce in Zurich or Albert Einstein in Princeton.

These characteristics are then not only variable but also in a sense accidental; lack of any of them would not disqualify a person from being a native speaker. A monk sworn to silence is still a native speaker. Many are also shared by non-native speakers almost regardless of their level of proficiency in the language: non-native speakers show a rapidly developing awareness of gender-linked pronunciation (Adamson & Regan, 1991) and of the status of regional accents (Dailey-O’Cain, 1998); what level of L2 English did it take for Marcel Duchamps to create ‘surrealistic aphorisms’ such as My niece is cold because my knees are cold (Sanquillet & Peterson, 1978, p.111)?

The indisputable element in the definition of native speaker is that a person is a native speaker of the language they learnt first; the other characteristics are incidental, describing how well they use the language. If you did not learn a language in childhood, you do not speak it as a native speaker. Later-learnt languages can never be native languages, by definition. Children who learn two languages simultaneously from birth have two first languages (Davies, 1991); we see later that this may not be the same as being monolingual native speakers of either language. L2 students cannot be turned into native speakers without altering the core meaning of native speaker in English. A view such as ‘adults usually fail to become native speakers’ (Felix, 1987, p.140) is like saying that ducks fail to become swans: adults could never become native speakers without being reborn. At best L2 learning produces an L2 user who is like a native speaker in possessing some of the nine aspects of proficiency detailed above to a high degree but who cannot meet the ‘bio-developmental definition’. A central aspect of being a native speaker so far as this paper is concerned is that it is someone who speaks their first-acquired language. The variable aspects of ‘proficiency’ (Davies, 1996) or ‘expertise’ (Rampton, 1950) are a separate issue of quality rather than defining characteristics (Ballmer, 1981).

Overt discussion of the native speaker is rare in language teaching. Indirect evidence for the importance of the native speaker in ELT is indeed the perennial issue of which kind of native speaker should be the model for language teaching (Quirk, 1950), which mostly assumes that the choice lies between different types or aspects of native speakers, not whether to use them at all. Stern (1983, p.341) puts it bluntly: ‘The native speaker’s ‘competence’ or ‘proficiency’ or ‘knowledge of the language’ is a necessary point of reference for the second language proficiency concept used in language teaching’. The Practice of English Language Teaching (Harmer, 1991) describes different areas of language in a chapter entitled ‘What a native speaker knows’ and goes on to say ‘students need to get an idea of how the new language is used by native speakers’ (Harmer, 1991, p.57), though the usage shifts into the combined expression ‘native speakers (or competent users of the language)’. Kramsch (1998, p.28) sums it up pithily: ‘Traditional methodologies based on the native speaker usually define language learners in terms of what they are not, or at least not yet’. Or, one might add, probably not ever.

Differences between L2 users and L1 users

Interlanguage refers to the knowledge of the second language in the speaker’s mind. But this L2 interlanguage exists in the same mind as the L1. Since no word describes the knowledge of both L1 and L2, the term multi-competence was coined to refer to the compound state of a mind with two languages (Cook, 1991). Multi-competence covers the total state of language knowledge of a person who knows more than one language, including both the L1 competence and the L2 interlanguage.

Competence is a neutral term in linguistics for the native speaker’s knowledge of language; it does not involve a value judgement about whether such competence is good or bad compared to some outside criterion. In a sense whatever the L1 native speaker does is right—subject of course to the vagaries of performance and the like. Multi-competence is intended to be a similarly neutral term for the knowledge of more than one language, free from evaluation against an outside standard. The difficulty is that, while all the speakers of a first language arguably have similar competences, L2 users notoriously end up with widely differing knowledge. Nevertheless, so far as any individual is concerned, there is a final state of L2 competence just as there is for an individual L1 learner, difficult as this may be to generalise across many L2 learners.

L2 users have to be looked at in their own right as genuine L2 users, not as imitation native speakers. It is no more relevant for language teaching that a few L2 users can pass for native speakers than it is for the study of gender that the woman novelist James Tiptree Jr. wrote as a man or it is for the study of race that the clarinet player Mezz Mezzrow claimed to be a white negro. The study of L2 learning should not base itself on a handful of extraordinary people. There is therefore no special case for making L2 users an exception to the dictum that one group should not be measured against another. Comparing the characteristics of native speakers and of L2 users is like comparing tomatoes and apples, useful only at a gross level. Second language users should be treated as people in their own right, not as deficient native speakers. Halliday (1968, p.165) speaking of dialects said ‘A speaker who is made ashamed of his own language habits suffers a basic injury as a human being: to make anyone, especially a child, feel so ashamed is as indefensible as to make him feel ashamed of the color of his skin’. Clearly up till now many people have had little compunction in treating L2 users in this way.

An illustration can be found in the way that the measure of success in L2 learning is often held to be the amount of foreign accent—the extent to which people’s pronunciation conforms to native standards. Joseph Conrad is taken as a L2 learning failure because Virginia Woolf among others claimed he was ‘a foreigner. Speaking only broken English’, despite the excellence of of his written English or indeed of his second language, French (Page, 1986). Apart from a few die-hard writers of letters to the newspapers, nobody would claim that speakers of Brummy and Glaswegian fail to acquire native speaker language because they were born in Birmingham or Glasgow. Consciously or unconsciously, people proclaim their membership of particular groups through the language they use. However, L2 learners are not supposed to reveal which part of the world they come from; they are failures if they have foreign accents, as much research into age differences in language learning assumes (Cook, 1986). Why should English people who sound as if they come from Houston be accepted as L1 successes when Polish people speaking English are deemed L2 failures for sounding as if they come from Warsaw? A French winegrower once said, perfectly sensibly, ‘My English is not good but my French accent is perfect’. L2 users belong to the general group of L2 users, to smaller groups of L2 users with particular L1s, and to many other language groupings in the languages they know. The one group they can not belong to is native speakers by up-bringing. Only if the native speaker is the sole arbiter of language can L2 learners be seen as failures for revealing the social groups to which they belong.

An objection that is sometime raised to this argument is that it is the L2 users themselves who want to be native speakers. Even bilinguals, according to Grosjean (1989), ‘often assume and amplify the monolingual view and hence criticize their own language competence’. Their attitudes are the product of the many pressures on them to regard L2 users as failed natives...

http://www.viviancook.uk/Writings/Papers/NS1999.htm
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Re: Focus on form

Postby tarvos » Mon Jun 18, 2018 10:06 am

Cainntear wrote:
rdearman wrote:So everyone has their own Native Language and it just happens to overlap on occasion with the Native Language of others? So your basically saying there is no such thing as a language just what each of us carry around individually.

In a real, objective sense, yes.
In reality, a language is simply a set of dialects that are similar enough to be generally mutually intelligible. This idea is often called a "macrolanguage" because you've got cases like that of Moldovan vs Romanian, Czech vs Slovak, Danish vs Norwegian vs Swedish and Serbian vs Bosnian vs Croatian where a relatively arbitrary boundary exists on political grounds.

But start talking about Western Romance, and the whole language vs macrolanguage starts to break down something awful, and you're left with purely political definitions of language.

But if we define "a language" as being only the schoolbook standard, what we actually end up saying is that a language is something that no-one speaks....


Another nice example from Dutch: the standard sentence for having something on your person would be "iets bij zich hebben." In the southern part of the Netherlands (especially in Limburg and Brabant) and in Belgium, that reflexive pronoun 'zich' is often eliminated, leading to the construction "iets bijhebben".

As someone who has hung around Belgians and southerners too much (and as someone whose family speaks a lot of Brabantian dialect), I'm used to this construction and often you'll even hear me say something along those lines "ik had mijn paspoort niet bij" meaning "I didn't have my passport on me" instead of "ik had mijn paspoort niet bij me." I might avoid this in formal speech but in colloquial language use it is extremely common and I wouldn't bat an eyelid (though I will always know you have southern roots if you say something of the sort).

Now the question is: is it Dutch? It's definitely not textbook language, because the standard phrasing is as mentioned above, and it only occurs across a part of the Dutch dialect continuum. But I know a whole range of speakers, including many Belgians and some Dutch people, who would all say this in their colloquial speech. If you live in Flanders, Limburg or North Brabant, you should be prepared to hear things like that.

And so when I teach people Dutch, I tell them, when they see something like this: "that's local speech. You can use it with local people, but it's probably a bit weird to say it in very formal circumstances where super standard language is required. I don't mind if you use it with me, though, I am used to that way of speaking."

Instead of just saying it's wrong. A lot of things in language aren't wrong so much as they are context-dependent. And I don't mind dialectal usage of phrases, even in more standard speech (as I never use full-on dialect in Dutch) but I will occasionally use such phrasings for effect. They work nicely, and in Dutch it gives you the added bonus of identifying a speaker's heritage by their manner of phrasing and word usage.
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Re: Focus on form

Postby Random Review » Mon Jun 18, 2018 3:47 pm

rdearman wrote:I banged out those words using ny English speaking neural network on my English keyboard. So my non elitist English is valid. But you seem to be saying it is wrong and immature. Make iup your minds, are all utterances of a native speaker correct or not?


Sorry, mate; but I really don't think that string of nonsense words was a genuine attempt to communicate. I acknowledge I am biased, because I more or less tend to agree with the point of view currently being championed by Cainntear and additionally I do respect your views and often enjoy your posts and learn from them; but even if I try my best to be as impartial as possible, I really think that specific attempt at a reductio ad absurdum wound up attacking a straw man, mate.
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Re: Focus on form

Postby rdearman » Mon Jun 18, 2018 3:56 pm

Random Review wrote:
rdearman wrote:I banged out those words using ny English speaking neural network on my English keyboard. So my non elitist English is valid. But you seem to be saying it is wrong and immature. Make iup your minds, are all utterances of a native speaker correct or not?


Sorry, mate; but I really don't think that string of nonsense words was a genuine attempt to communicate. I acknowledge I am biased, because I more or less tend to agree with the point of view currently being championed by Cainntear and additionally I do respect your views and often enjoy your posts and learn from them; but even if I try my best to be as impartial as possible, I really think that specific attempt at a reductio ad absurdum wound up attacking a straw man, mate.

I'm no longer bothering with this thread. I feel it is absurd to say everything said in the whole of human history is correct, or even refuse to acknowledge that some people speak better than others. You can of course believe whatever you wish. We will simply have to agree to disagree.
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Re: Focus on form

Postby Random Review » Mon Jun 18, 2018 4:05 pm

rdearman wrote:
Random Review wrote:
rdearman wrote:I banged out those words using ny English speaking neural network on my English keyboard. So my non elitist English is valid. But you seem to be saying it is wrong and immature. Make iup your minds, are all utterances of a native speaker correct or not?


Sorry, mate; but I really don't think that string of nonsense words was a genuine attempt to communicate. I acknowledge I am biased, because I more or less tend to agree with the point of view currently being championed by Cainntear and additionally I do respect your views and often enjoy your posts and learn from them; but even if I try my best to be as impartial as possible, I really think that specific attempt at a reductio ad absurdum wound up attacking a straw man, mate.

I'm no longer bothering with this thread. I feel it is absurd to say everything said in the whole of human history is correct, or even refuse to acknowledge that some people speak better than others. You can of course believe whatever you wish. We will simply have to agree to disagree.


Yes, mate. I also left the argument early (because it was becoming, er, an argument), so I totally get you on that. If anyone is claiming the bit in bold to be true, it is indeed absurd. I honestly haven't seen that claim. Anyway, I agree with your suggestion to amicably disagree. I do respect your opinion. My own opinion is closer to Cainntear's; but you don't get to my age without realising that your opinions are often totally off, so I certainly don't think you are definitely wrong.
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Re: Focus on form

Postby Uncle Roger » Mon Jun 18, 2018 5:45 pm

I liked how the two guys with the obvious expertise in linguistics took pages and pages to even acknowledge that "all native language is correct" would not cover "all that has ever been uttered by a homo sapiens sapiens is correct". Whereas somebody else acknowledged straight away that he wasn't dabbling in theory, but was interested in more empirical and hands-on matters.

Or how somebody else is clearly way too special and precious to even quote a passage of the literature they no doubt know inside out, when extensive quoting of academia and literature is a routine kindness carried out by many in this forum.

Or how a "very good teacher" of English would conveniently make one and the same of "most pervasive" and "universal" to try and gain the upper hand in the discussion.

I might have got angered at some people (and I've never hidden it), but unlike them, I have played fair in the discussion. Haven't tried to cheat anybody or misquote them and I've always bothered to exemplify my points or quote my sources.

To conclude, I understand colloquialism, jargon, register and all those things that cause the bottom-up language phenomenon to deviate from some kind of top-down ideal. I still maintain that, besides all that, there are bona fide mistakes that can't be excused by any of those things. A lie doesn't become the truth just because it's been said a thousand times.

As (if?) this thread comes to an end, I'd recommend some people think about putting some people on their ignore list, to avoid future quarrels. I'm surely going to do that. I think we have done the forum enough of a disservice already.
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Re: Focus on form

Postby kulaputra » Mon Jun 18, 2018 6:00 pm

Uncle Roger wrote:I liked how the two guys with the obvious expertise in linguistics took pages and pages to even acknowledge that "all native language is correct" would not cover "all that has ever been uttered by a homo sapiens sapiens is correct". Whereas somebody else acknowledged straight away that he wasn't dabbling in theory, but was interested in more empirical and hands-on matters.


Why should any reasonable person expect "all native language is correct" to cover "all that has ever been uttered by a homo sapiens sapiens is correct"? Babies are homo sapiens, babies blabber, their blabbering isn't language, much less native language. I am a homo sapiens, I speak Spanish non-natively, everything I say in Spanish isn't native language. This is trivial to understand, and you're letting your barely concealed rage get in the way of understanding this, and/or you are being deliberately obtuse.
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Re: Focus on form

Postby Daniel N. » Tue Jun 19, 2018 11:19 pm

kulaputra wrote:"All native language speakers, barring certain pathologies, are equally competent in their native language" is in fact an analytic claim, the claim that I originally made.

This was shown to be false, and actually depending on education and even social status. More educated speakers are better at parsing complex constructions, maybe because they read more and such constructions are more common in writing.
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Re: Focus on form

Postby kulaputra » Tue Jun 19, 2018 11:42 pm

Daniel N. wrote:
kulaputra wrote:"All native language speakers, barring certain pathologies, are equally competent in their native language" is in fact an analytic claim, the claim that I originally made.

This was shown to be false, and actually depending on education and even social status. More educated speakers are better at parsing complex constructions, maybe because they read more and such constructions are more common in writing.


"Shown to be false" by who?

It has in fact been shown that language competency has nothing to do with "education and... social status." On the contrary, this is a fable invented by rich elites interested in inflating their own egos, a fable which is then disseminated through media and educational institutions until whole communities are gaslit into thinking they speak their own language poorly simply because they were born on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.

Orthography, oration/rhetoric, writing, etc., aren't language, they're sociocultural artifices on top of language. If I know Japanese, but don't know the etiquette involved in a Japanese tea ceremony, do I not know Japanese or do I know it poorly? No. Being unable to jump through various cultural hoops, most of which simply exist for the purpose of virtue signalling that you're "educated" and therefore morally superior to the "unwashed masses," is not an indicator of language competency or the lack thereof.
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Re: Focus on form

Postby Daniel N. » Wed Jun 20, 2018 9:08 am

kulaputra wrote:"Shown to be false" by who?

It has in fact been shown that language competency has nothing to do with "education and... social status." On the contrary, this is a fable invented by rich elites interested in inflating their own egos

I was also skeptical, because I have believed all people have the same 'competence' since I started getting interested in linguistics, some 20 years ago. However, some researchers have shown it's not so:

The grammatical structure here is moderately complicated, but any generative grammarian would unquestionably agree that it is a well-formed example of English. Indeed, the grammar is less tangled than plenty of prose which is in everyday use in written English. But Dąbrowska found that native speakers’ ability to understand examples like this varied fairly dramatically.

When she asked participants in her experiment to answer simple comprehension questions … she found that university lecturers performed better than undergraduates, who, in turn, performed better than cleaners and porters, most of whom completely failed to answer the questions correctly. (Chipere 2003: 2)

source: https://www.grsampson.net/ALac.html

In retrospective, dictionaries, even dictionaries that claim to be dictionaries of my native language contain many words I don't use and many I don't even know the meaning of. Granted, they are mostly dictionaries of the standard language really, but my dialect uses standard language terms in most fields away from the everyday life; e.g. we don't have our words for 'democracy' or 'archeology', but have for 'tomato'. I simply don't know many words a doctor or mechanic will use in their specialized areas. A dancer, athlete or singer really doesn't need to know terms used in neurosurgery, it's better to use the brain for other tasks.

I mean, even when I occasionally read -- or my wife -- some technical manuals, specialized texts, we often struggle to decipher meaning of some long, convoluted sentences which sometimes span whole paragraphs (writing in Croatian in some fields tends to produce very long sentences). I don't doubt someone who reads such texts all the time is much better at parsing them. This is why I always prefer short sentences when writing.

Somehow, if you think of it, not everyone is good at public speech or even telling stories. It takes practice. It seems that some people get more practice at parsing convoluted sentences because of their work.

edit:

Regarding correctness, one purpose of language is communication. If you tell something that the listener will understand as you intended to, it's OK. So you can code-switch and even invent your own words on the fly (like when we convert English technical terms to Croatian by adding suffixes when there's no Croatian word for the term, or we simply cannot recall a suitable word) since you know the other side knows what they mean. Prescriptivists will cringe, but ordinary people want to speak to work and have fun.

But of course, not all people speak the same. I can barely understand people who live 50 km from me, but they can switch to something they know I will understand, which is again not standard. They also likely know some English and German. But they are maybe not very good at parsing complex sentences found in technical works. If anything, their overall communication abilities are better than mine (my German is extremely poor, and I barely understand their dialect).
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