Crosslinguistic Influence and Distinctive Patterns of Language Learning

Findings and Insights from a Learner Corpus

Anne Golden, Scott Jarvis, Kari Tenfjord, Anne Golden, Scott Jarvis, Kari Tenfjord

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783098781
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Psycholinguistik

This book details patterns of language use that can be found in the writing of adultimmigrantlearners of Norwegian as a second language (L2). Each study draws its data from a single corpus oftexts written for a proficiency test of L2 Norwegian by learnersrepresenting 10 different first language (L1) backgrounds. The participants of the study are immigrants to Norway and the book deals with the varying levels and types of language difficulties faced by such learners from differing backgrounds. The studies examine the learners' use of Norwegian in relation to the morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic and pragmatic patterns they produce in their essays. Nearly all the studies in the book rely on analytical methods specifically designed to isolate the effects of the learners' L1s on their use of L2 Norwegian, and every chapter highlights patterns that distinguish different L1 groups from one another.

1Introduction

Kari Tenfjord

University of Bergen

Scott Jarvis

University of Utah

Anne Golden

University of Oslo

Background and Orientation

As can quickly be seen through a perusal of studies published both historically and even recently in the major journals of applied linguistics, a good deal of what we know about second language acquisition and of the learning of later languages comes from investigations where the target language is English and the learners’ background languages are European. The findings of such studies should of course not be disregarded, but there is a great deal more to be discovered about language acquisition than can be gleaned from patterns produced by European learners of English – or even by English-speaking foreign-language classroom learners of French, German or Spanish, who are also over-represented in the literature. In other words, there is a genuine need for more studies on second language acquisition involving (a) learners of languages other than English and (b) learners who come from non-European backgrounds, especially in cases where (c) the learners are immigrants to the host country and thus experience the language in naturalistic contexts over an extended period of time and with the motivation that comes from a commitment to making the host country their new home. A particularly useful type of study would involve comparisons of a large number of adult immigrant learners from each of several L1 backgrounds – both European and non-European – having comparable levels of proficiency in the language of the host country.

The present book offers a number of studies that meet these criteria. The studies included in this book all draw from the ASK1 corpus – a corpus of texts written by adult immigrant learners of Norwegian at controlled levels of language proficiency. As we will describe in the paragraphs that follow, the ASK corpus includes texts written by L2 learners of Norwegian from 10 different L1 backgrounds, two of which are non-Indo-European (i.e. Somali and Vietnamese), five of which are Indo-European but non-­Germanic (i.e. Albanian, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Polish, Russian and Spanish) and the remaining three of which, like Norwegian, are both Indo-European and Germanic (i.e. Dutch, English and German). The composition of these learner groups offers the possibility of a number of intriguing comparisons. Most of the studies in this book examine only a subset of these groups, but the patterns produced by the non-Indo-European groups are given special attention, and inter-L1-group comparisons are a core feature of every study.

The studies in this book deal with the acquisition and assessment of a number of disparate features of Norwegian involving vocabulary, grammatical morphology, syntactic constructions and broad categories of errors, but all of the studies in this book are linked to each other through the theme of crosslinguistic influence. Following the common convention of using the term crosslinguistic influence interchangeably with transfer (e.g. Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008; Odlin, 1989), we characterize the present volume as a book on L1 transfer in the acquisition of Norwegian as a second or additional language. However, in this book we adopt a perspective on transfer that is broader than the goals pursued in most other contemporary research on crosslinguistic influence. Whereas other studies tend to take cases of inter-L1-group heterogeneity (i.e., differences in the use of the target language by learners who speak different L1s) as merely the starting point for a larger analysis whose goal is to determine whether differences in the learners’ L1s themselves are the direct cause of the inter-group differences in target-language performance (cf. Jarvis, 2000), the studies in the present volume seek first and foremost to identify cases of inter-L1-group heterogeneity and to explore their nature and distribution. Some of the studies in the present book go a step further and adopt Jarvis’ (2000, 2010) methodological framework in order to confirm L1 effects beyond inter-L1-group heterogeneity. However, what characterizes the approach to transfer taken in this book is the recognition that (a) transfer effects are not always immediately traceable to the source language and (b) the unique challenges experienced by learners from different L1 backgrounds are sometimes of tremendous theoretical and practical import regardless of whether those challenges can be shown to be a direct consequence of the learners’ specific L1 knowledge.

The ASK corpus is a collection of texts written in an authentic assessment situation by more than 1700 adult learners, resulting in a corpus of about 620,000 words. The texts were written as part of two separate standardized tests of Norwegian as a second language: The Language Test for Adult Immigrants (Språkprøven i norsk for voksne innvandrere) and the Test of Norwegian – Advanced Level (Test i norsk – høyere nivå). The former test was designed for learners at an intermediate level of Norwegian proficiency, whereas the latter test is used as a university entrance examination for learners at a higher, pre-academic level. Both tests contain multiple components, only one of which is the essay part that constitutes the content of the ASK corpus.

The texts written as part of the intermediate test are mainly expository essays, but they also include narratives and argumentative essays. The texts written as part of the higher-level test, on the other hand, are all argumentative essays. Comparable texts were also collected from a control group of 200 L1 Norwegians, 100 of whom were given some of the same prompts that were used on the intermediate-level test, and the other 100 of whom were given some of the same prompts as were found on the higher-level test. The texts written by L1 Norwegian speakers were produced under the same conditions as the learner texts. There was, nevertheless, one important difference between the two: For the learners, this was a high-stakes test that had consequences for their ability to get a job or to be admitted into a university, whereas for the L1 Norwegian speakers, this was simply an ungraded writing assignment.

Although the data in the ASK represent the written language use of different L1 groups in two separate assessment situations – 10 L1 groups at the intermediate level and seven2 at the higher level – the texts in the corpus are fairly homogenous in several respects. First, the texts were all written in similar testing situations and were produced under similar conditions with respect to time constraints, learners’ access to reference tools, task type and so forth. Furthermore, the texts in the ASK were produced by learners who shared the same type of learning context in that they were all learning Norwegian as immigrants to Norway. The available data also provide important information that makes it possible to perform useful comparisons between learners and groups. For example, all of the learners passed their respective test and must therefore be assumed to be at or above the proficiency level associated with a passing score for that test. Although the data were collected before these tests were linked to rating scales of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), passing scores on the two tests correspond roughly to the B1 and B2 CEFR levels, respectively (Council of Europe, 2001). Also, in 2010 the texts written by the English, German, Polish, Russian, Somali, Spanish and Vietnamese groups were given individual ratings using the CEFR writing scale (Carlsen, 2012), and this information is now included in the metadata for these texts. The ASK also contains additional metadata consisting of self-reported personal information that makes it possible to control for several variables that may affect language learning. In addition to indicating their L1 background and which of the two Norwegian tests they took, the metadata also include information about the participants’ age, sex, years of residence in Norway, which Norwegian courses if any they have taken, how often they use Norwegian and in which contexts and what their self-reported level of English proficiency is.

Another important feature of the ASK is that all of its texts have been manually coded for errors (Tenfjord et al., 2006) and automatically annotated for parts of speech (POS) and grammatical functions. The ASK is set up with a query engine called Corpuscle (Meurer, 2012), which offers rich search possibilities. Searches can be performed through either a menu-based search, a Corpuscle query-syntax search, or a combination of the two.

Because the texts in the ASK were produced in an authentic, high-stakes testing situation, we may assume that they reflect the writers’ best attempts at producing well-written texts. The ASK corpus is therefore highly suitable to the investigation of a range of questions, dealing not only with crosslinguistic influence, but also with how students present themselves in a testing situation and which strategies they use when answering questions about topics ranging from friendship to the advantages and disadvantages of using a mobile phone. The fact that the texts were written on multiple topics does nevertheless present certain challenges to the researcher. Among these challenges is the difficulty of comparing texts that make use of different (though overlapping) sets of vocabulary. Despite these challenges, the ASK is a valuable, rich and well-structured corpus that makes it possible to explore certain questions about language learning that have not yet been addressed at all, and to address other questions that have not yet been fully answered. These are questions whose answers are of great interest to researchers and practitioners of L2 Norwegian, transfer researchers and scholars in the field of learner corpus research.

Organization of the Book

This book consists of nine chapters. The present chapter constitutes Chapter 1. The second chapter, written by Scott Jarvis, provides an overview of relevant areas of current transfer research in order to contextualize the chapters that follow it. Chapters 3–9 are all empirical studies that use the ASK as their source of data, and the first six of these (Chapters 3–8) specifically rely on Jarvis’ (2000, 2010) methodological framework for verifying cases of transfer. The final chapter (Chapter 9) does not rely on Jarvis’ methodological framework but rather represents the expanded scope of transfer referred to in Chapter 2; it deals with patterns of language use that are characteristic of learners from specific L1 backgrounds without delving into whether the sources of these patterns can necessarily be identified in learners’ L1s per se. Additional information on each chapter is given in the following paragraphs.

In Chapter 2, Scott Jarvis discusses the terminological conventions, theoretical tenets and methodological considerations regarding crosslinguistic influence that inform the research designs and analyses of several of the book’s chapters. The core of the chapter is the methodological framework originally proposed by Jarvis (2000) as a way to achieve higher levels of methodological rigor in the investigation of crosslinguistic influence and as a way to ensure that researchers’ claims about the presence or absence of crosslinguistic influence in a sample of learner data are sufficiently supported by relevant types of evidence. The chapter also includes two other key components. One is a discussion of the levels of knowledge and performance at which crosslinguistic influence can occur. This discussion addresses, among other things, the distinction between linguistic and conceptual transfer, how conceptual transfer can be identified and verified, and whether or how conceptual transfer can be investigated in a written learner corpus such as the ASK. A final key component of Chapter 2 is a discussion of the value of expanding the scope of transfer research to include an exploration of the various ways in which learners from different language backgrounds differ in the acquisition and use of the same target language. The author relates this to the methodological framework discussed earlier, and argues that even when there is insufficient evidence to claim that the source of a particular pattern in the learners’ use of the target language is one or more of their specific background languages, there might nevertheless be sufficient evidence to show that the pattern is indeed characteristic of learners with a specific language background. Such a finding may hold great value in and of itself, not least in the practical implications it offers to language learners and teachers.

Chapter 3, written by Ann-Kristin Helland Gujord, deals with crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of temporal morphology. The chapter analyses the use of preterite and perfect morphology in L2 Norwegian texts written by speakers of two non-Indo-European languages: Somali and Vietnamese. Importantly, the learners’ L1s are dissimilar as to how temporal and aspectual distinctions are encoded. The Norwegian perfect construction has no counterpart at all in Somali, but its prototypical function largely corresponds with the way that temporal/aspectual markers are used in Vietnamese. The results of the study show that Somali learners of Norwegian tend to erroneously substitute the preterite and perfect for each other significantly more often than Vietnamese-speaking learners, whereas the Vietnamese learners’ errors in the use of tense and aspect are largely limited to the overuse of the present perfect in preterite contexts. The author argues that the main differences between the Somali and Vietnamese learners are not so much in their levels of accuracy, but instead in the distribution of their errors when referring to past time. This finding aligns with the findings of previous studies that have examined learners of L2 Norwegian, L2 English and L2 Swedish from a variety of L1 backgrounds. Collectively, these studies show that the present perfect is especially challenging for learners whose L1s altogether lack this grammatical category, and is also difficult for learners whose L1s have tense/aspect morphology that superficially resembles the L2 perfect construction but is functionally different.

In Chapter 4, Oliwia Szymańska examines the use of spatial prepositions in L2 Norwegian by learners whose L1s include Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, English, Polish and Russian. Szymańska focuses on learners’ use of the Norwegian prepositions i and på (in and on), examines which factors – including crosslinguistic influence – lead students to choose a certain preposition in a given ...