Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby reineke » Mon Apr 17, 2017 5:30 pm

@Random. Of course, teachers may cook down all the theory to an easily digestible definition that's relevant to their field of work:

"Fossilization” means that usage errors have become embedded (i.e., habitual) in L2 learners’ language production. It occurs when learners get no corrective feedback. In some cases, L2 learners with fossilized language patterns are able to communicate successfully enough for their immediate purposes and thus have no immediate motivation to change."

Teacher Talk (worth checking out)

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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby Random Review » Mon Apr 17, 2017 5:41 pm

Just reading my last post back. Uffff, when the ALLF awards are announced, I'm a shoe in for the 'most spectacular overuse of the word "posit" in a single post' award. :oops:
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby tastyonions » Mon Apr 17, 2017 5:45 pm

There's an interesting article examining a number of highly fluent L2 speakers of French (Charlotte Rampling, Jane Birkin, etc.) and the types of errors they make. One remark in particular seems relevant to our discussion:
À l’intérieur de notre corpus nous avons aussi remarqué que, même en cas d’apprentissage relativement tardif, les enseignants de langue française ou encore ceux qui s’intéressent à la langue en tant que telle, ne font que très peu d’erreurs – ce qui est assez logique : ils se sont intéressés aux mécanismes de la langue en les observant et les étudiant.

Basically, people who teach French or otherwise look at the "mechanisms" of the language with an analytic eye tend to make fewer errors than other learners. So maybe if you want to avoid fossilization, try thinking more like a teacher?

https://www.cairn.info/revue-ela-2005-2-page-223.htm
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby Cainntear » Mon Apr 17, 2017 6:17 pm

Random Review wrote:Hi, Cainntear. OK, that's a fair point. I think I can make an argument that these can be looked at fossilised errors though, mate. Firstly I think it is more helpful to look at fossilised errors as being highly resistant to fixing themselves and tending not to under most circumstances, because then we can ask the question about the circumstances under which they do change (of course if these circumstances obtained more widely, they wouldn't be fossilised errors).
...
At any rate, it's a definitional problem. Perhaps (I'm still not sure either way TBH*) you are right about the definition and I have used the word incorrectly; but then I think my point (reworded) remains: why do native children repeat, practice and rehearse the same mistakes over and over again, make no conscious effort to correct them and indeed actively resist adult attempts to correct them and yet the errors don't fossilise?

Children's language development is surprisingly predictable. Certain structures are easy and acquired early, others more complex and later acquired.

Infants can't be corrected because they don't have the linguistic resources to understand process the correction. In particular, if a structure is complex, then there is a lot of prerequisite knowledge the child needs to process the target form. Once the child has that prerequisite knowledge, the target form is very quickly acquired -- and actually, there's evidence that at this point the child is correctable.

Basically, though, because there's an observable pattern that these errors will disappear at a predictable point in the future with no conscious directed effort required, there's no fossilisation.


Of course, this isn't necessarily related to adult second language acquisition, although there are many who claim the adult learning process is very similar to the child's. This view suggests that early errors don't lead to fossilisation, but are just indications that you're attempting to use language that you aren't ready to acquire yet. (N.B. I do not personally agree with this view.)
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby reineke » Mon Apr 17, 2017 6:31 pm

tastyonions wrote:There's an interesting article examining a number of highly fluent L2 speakers of French (Charlotte Rampling, Jane Birkin, etc.) and the types of errors they make. One remark in particular seems relevant to our discussion:
À l’intérieur de notre corpus nous avons aussi remarqué que, même en cas d’apprentissage relativement tardif, les enseignants de langue française ou encore ceux qui s’intéressent à la langue en tant que telle, ne font que très peu d’erreurs – ce qui est assez logique : ils se sont intéressés aux mécanismes de la langue en les observant et les étudiant.

Basically, people who teach French or otherwise look at the "mechanisms" of the language with an analytic eye tend to make fewer errors than other learners. So maybe if you want to avoid fossilization, try thinking more like a teacher?

https://www.cairn.info/revue-ela-2005-2-page-223.htm


Thanks for the link. Teachers need to go through screening mechanisms before they can obtain their diplomas.

I happen to know that Enki Bilal, a famous comic book artist, moved to Paris at the age of 9. I looked up Sylvie Vartan. Her father Georges worked in the French embassy in Bulgaria and she moved to France when she was 8. Karen Ann moved to France when she was 11.
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby s_allard » Mon Apr 17, 2017 7:22 pm

tastyonions wrote:There's an interesting article examining a number of highly fluent L2 speakers of French (Charlotte Rampling, Jane Birkin, etc.) and the types of errors they make. One remark in particular seems relevant to our discussion:
À l’intérieur de notre corpus nous avons aussi remarqué que, même en cas d’apprentissage relativement tardif, les enseignants de langue française ou encore ceux qui s’intéressent à la langue en tant que telle, ne font que très peu d’erreurs – ce qui est assez logique : ils se sont intéressés aux mécanismes de la langue en les observant et les étudiant.

Basically, people who teach French or otherwise look at the "mechanisms" of the language with an analytic eye tend to make fewer errors than other learners. So maybe if you want to avoid fossilization, try thinking more like a teacher?

https://www.cairn.info/revue-ela-2005-2-page-223.htm

Thanks to tastyonions here for a link to a wonderful article that everyone in the subject should read. As tempted as I am, I won't cut and paste the entire article here. I should point out that the authors do not use the term fossilisation but rather "difficultés résitantes" or "erreurs résiduelles. There is passage in the summary that I want to draw attention to:

Par contre les variantes syntaxiques, statistiquement nombreuses, sont significativement groupées autour des formes verbales et du système des prépositions. Nous en déduisons que la didactique du français langue étrangère, parallèlement à un enseignement visant la communication, devrait développer un enseignement qui démonte les mécanismes logiques qui sous-tendent les systèmes syntaxiques.

As the authors say, most of the variation or so-called mistakes in these high-level L2 speakers are in the area of verb forms and the prepositions. The authors later add that the teaching of French should emphasize an understanding of the logical mechanisms that underlie the syntax systems.

This resonates with me because this is exactly what I have been saying in this thread. Despite hearing the correct forms continuously around them, people will make certain mistakes because they have never mastered the target subsystems that lead to correct usage. So correction tends to be useless.

It is no surprise that the French verb system is the most difficult thing to master, especially for English-speakers, as I have alluded to already. It is rich in forms and subtleties. It is also very different from English in its functioning. Prepositions can vary quite a bit with gender and number but the main problem is the very complex usage of the two main prepositions À and DE in their many forms.

All of this can be corrected of course with a lot of effort, but there is a point of diminishing returns where one wonders if there are not better ways to spend one's time. The is particularly true of pronunciation.

Although it's not relevant to our debate here, the authors point out that those speakers who arrived in France at an early age spoke French like natives.
Last edited by s_allard on Mon Apr 17, 2017 8:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby tarvos » Mon Apr 17, 2017 8:00 pm

Cainntear wrote:
tarvos wrote:
{Citation needed} There are uncountable numbers of papers out there showing the limited power of correction at a later stage.


Is this referring to pronunciation errors or grammar, vocabulary, etc. errors? Because I find the latter category can be easily corrected with some practice, but pronunciation is much harder unless you really get deeply into speech therapy territory or learn how to produce phonemes from day one.

My understanding is that it has been replicated over pretty much every area of language. (Although where the errors are correctable, some categories are easier than others -- vocab is easy, pronunciation is difficult.)

I personally think that the problem is exaggerated by the methodology, and that teachers in general focus on explicit correction -- explaining errors rather that giving the minimum indication of errors required to allow the learner to correct themselves. After all, the thing that needs corrected isn't really the output of the process, but the process itself. You cannot fix the process without supporting the student in following the process, and explicit correction doesn't do this.


To follow up on this comment, my Czech teacher had a very interesting methodology for improving my writing skills. (And perhaps also my Czech in general).

One thing that I would do was write articles for my blog, and we'd correct them together. However she would not explicitly correct the mistakes - she would just mark my mistakes in bold, and let me figure out what mistakes were indicated by her marking them. In this way, I started to really internalize the types of systematic mistakes I was making - and after a few months, my writing was much better, much more natural, much more Czech, and way less dependent on my Russian. My vocabulary was better, my grammar made more sense. I still make some mistakes with word order and I forget a word here and there, but my Czech has gone from "pretty bad" to "pretty good" in four months, and most of it was simply concentrating on grammar work.

Another thing we did was concentrate on my pronunciation. Now I have learned Russian before and my accent and phrasing was very Russian-based at the beginning. Czech has a very typical intonation pattern - stress always falls on the first syllable, short and long vowels are clearly enunciated and do not undergo reduction - and it took me two months of reading texts, both single words and in phrases, and eventually I got the melody of the sentences down. However, not all of it was explicit correction, but it was teaching how to hear the melody of the Czech phrase and copying that - because I didn't have much trouble with the individual phonemes, except the short i which turned into a sort of Polish y or Russian ы.

Those were very useful classes, and my Czech is miles better than it was - not just in terms of vocabulary, which I haven't improved that much, but really, by making a concentrated effort on very particular items and targeting the underlying problem. The issue is that very few teachers are capable of teaching you these methods and even fewer are available for languages such as Czech. I have had good experiences with teachers for Spanish and French too, as well as Russian.
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby Cainntear » Mon Apr 17, 2017 8:38 pm

tarvos wrote:To follow up on this comment, my Czech teacher had a very interesting methodology for improving my writing skills. (And perhaps also my Czech in general).

One thing that I would do was write articles for my blog, and we'd correct them together. However she would not explicitly correct the mistakes - she would just mark my mistakes in bold, and let me figure out what mistakes were indicated by her marking them. In this way, I started to really internalize the types of systematic mistakes I was making - and after a few months, my writing was much better, much more natural, much more Czech, and way less dependent on my Russian.

My preferred technique with one-on-ones is to identify students' most common errors and give progressively less and less feedback.

In speaking, I start with an explicit correction with explanation, and then when the error recurs I give a briefer prompt using some key words. I then reduce it to repeating the phrase with a "what's wrong with this?" tone-of-voice, and eventually get it to a "huh?" sound or even a raised eyebrow. With writing, I replace me repeating with a prompt to the student to read the line, and the "huh?" with a finger pointing to the page.

My thinking is that when you make a mistake in the physical world, it has immediate negative consequences, and you learn to identify the precursors to the mistake and associate them with the negative consequences that you want to avoid.

For example, riding a bike.
Falling off a bike hurts. The moment you fall is too late to do anything about it, so you have to learn to identify the feeling of losing your balance that comes just before the fall, and correct then. But of course it's not ideal to have to correct -- it's better not to reach an out-of-balance state. The negative consequence (the fall) is slowly associated back through the chain of events, discouraging us from making the first mistake that triggers the chain.
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby reineke » Mon Apr 17, 2017 8:39 pm

Moving Into the 21st Century With Second-Language Learning

"Although we see many benefits from the French immersion program, we were concerned about the quality of spoken French in our classrooms. Young French immersion learners make errors in their oral language because of the influence of their first language which is most often English. Fossilization in the oral speech of our students occurs. Eliminating these errors is a great challenge that for some students is never corrected...

When you listen to our students speak French, they are generally fluent and able to communicate their thoughts, but not with native-like language structures. The structures our students use are heavily influenced by their first language. Having taught several years in the same grade, we have noticed that different groups have different fossilized errors.

We believe that this is because a specific group develops their own French dialect which becomes accepted by their peers. When left uncorrected, these errors are fossilized and become permanent structures that our students use. The correction of these errors is very difficult and is further complicated by the level of our students’ understanding of language in general.

We were tired of teaching in the past. Through the use of technology, new strategies and current research we wanted to meet our students in the 21st century...

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... p8mAmPVygw

Sorry, I Don't Speak French: Confronting the Canadian Crisis That Won't Go Away
By Graham Fraser

"Immersion needs an overhaul."

"...frustration at the weaknesses in her students' ability to write proper French, largely because of " fossilized errors," the mistakes that were learned young and have become ingrained in the speech and writing patterns of immersion students."

"Things are far from “solved.” There are fewer and fewer institutions where French-­speaking and English-­speaking Canadians work together. French is less and less a requirement in Canadian schools and universities. Four decades after the government declared that the federal public service must be able to function in both languages, millions of dollars are still being spent to teach middle-­aged public servants (who were in high school, for God’s sake, when the policy was declared) to pass language tests. "


Understanding and improving the use of writing portfolios in one French immersion classroom

"I observed that my students, year after year, regularly made errors in the accuracy of their written French in the domains of verb conjugations, spelling, agreements and sentence structure. These errors were numerous and significant enough that the students’ writing could not be characterized as truly the French language. Rather it was an interlanguage, defined as language production which is at an intermediary stage of development. It is characterized by a dependency on structures, semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonics of the dominant language (Lyster, 1987; Selinker, 1972, 1981, 1993), English in this case, because full mastery of the second language structures has not yet occurred (Corder, 1973 de Villiers & de Villiers, 1978, Selinker, 1993). In addition, this student population was not typical of second language learners, such as English as a Second Language (ESL) learners, because they had experienced intense and sustained language instruction in French immersion throughout their entire education. The French language has been both
the medium and the focus of a fundamental portion of their education. From Junior Kindergarten through to the conclusion of secondary school, in logical accordance with their developmental level, these students have had instruction in and exposure to authentic language examples of grammar, spelling, vocabulary enrichment, listening, and reading, and have had continuous opportunities to speak and write with accuracy....

Literature suggests that students of French immersion produce language which shows consistent errors. Lyster (1987) observed that students in French immersion had communicative competency: they could successfully transmit a message in the target language, but students’ language production was consistently characterized by errors, despite efforts to correct these errors. Selinker introduced the term interlanguage, now widely used, to linguistics (1969) to describe the phenomenon of incomplete and therefore inaccurate second language acquisition and production. This interlanguage is also characterized by fossilized errors..."

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... qrzi31vOpg
Last edited by reineke on Mon Apr 17, 2017 8:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby s_allard » Mon Apr 17, 2017 8:42 pm

Let the universe see me actually congratulating tarvos for an excellent post that confirms what I've been saying about error correction. There is no mention of fossilization as such but it is not necessary. The important thing is that improvement comes with detection, correction and better understanding.
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