Justyna Leśniewska

Songs vs. stories: impact of input sources on ESL vocabulary acquisition by preliterate children

Research in second language acquisition has paid little attention to preliterate children learning a language which is absent from their environment outside the language class. This study examines the acquisition of English words by 24 French-speaking children aged 35–59 months, who were introduced to 57 words, embedded in stories and songs. Four stories and four songs were randomly spread across four consecutive weekly workshops consisting of play-based pedagogical activities. The impact of the input source, number of encounters with each lexical item, animacy as a feature of the lexical items, and first language (L1) lexicon size was examined. Recall of target words was assessed through the selection between four images after hearing the word, and L1 lexicon was assessed through the Peabody test. Results show significantly higher recall for animate concepts, while no difference in recall was found in relation to input source (words in songs vs. stories) or L1 lexicon size. Results also stress the need for a possibly higher number of encounters than that normally found for adults in order to achieve significant recall.

Native vs. non-native English: data-driven lexical analysis

This article presents a preliminary, data-driven study of a corpus of texts written by advanced Polish learners of English, which were analysed with reference to a baseline corpus of native-speaker texts. The texts included in both corpora were produced in similar circumstances (classroom setting), with the same time and word limit, and in response to the same task. We conducted a comparative lexical analysis of the two corpora, using corpus methodology (word lists, cluster analysis, concordances, keyness) to identify the most significant differences. The most important conclusion from this study is that advanced foreign language use may differ from native-speaker language use in ways which only become visible in larger samples of language, and the differences, if analysed individually, would not be regarded as errors and would go unnoticed. There is some evidence in the study that some of these differences may be attributed to cross-linguistic influence.

Crosslinguistic influence in English as the weaker language of French-English and Polish-English bilingual children

This study aims to assess the extent of crosslinguistic influence in English as the weaker language of unbalanced bilingual children, and to compare the extent of such influence to that reported in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. Additionally, by comparing children from different L1 backgrounds, we aim to see if typological distance impacts crosslinguistic influence. We collected elicited speech samples from 16 Polish-English and 44 French-English children who have had dual language input from birth, but whose English is weaker mostly because it is absent outside the home environment. The crosslinguistic error rates (an average of 6%) are lower for our participants than averages found in SLA literature, but still considerably high. Although French- and Polish-dominant children present comparable error profiles, the extent of crosslinguistic influence tends to be greater in the case of French-English bilinguals than for Polish-English bilinguals, which may reflect the perceived distance between the languages.

Crosslinguistic Influence and Bilingual Children’s Weaker Language

Various kinds of asymmetry in bilingual development have been investigated, with a distinction often being made between the ‘dominant’ and the ‘weaker’ language. One interesting question is to what extent the acquisition of the two languages resembles monolingual acquisition patterns of the languages involved. Some findings point to the independent development of two language systems, indicating that the weaker language, despite developing in a delayed manner, actually follows the same developmental pattern as when it is acquired as the only language. However, other results suggest that the weaker language differs fundamentally from monolingual L1 (or balanced bilingual L1) and resembles an L2, or provide evidence for the separation of both languages and cross-linguistic influences. This Chapter analyses the weaker language output of two unbalanced simultaneous Polish-English bilingual children with the aim of gauging the extent and nature of crosslinguistic influence. While the influence of the weaker language (English) on the stronger one (Polish) was found to be very limited, numerous non-target elements were observed in the weaker language, about half of which can clearly be attributed to crosslinguistic influence.

Age and SLA: Research Highways and Bye-Ways

This article addresses the issue of the role of age factors in second language acquisition. Specifically, it takes a critical look at the notion that the second language acquisition process is maturationally constrained—the proposition commonly labelled the Critical Period Hypothesis—and the practical implications of this proposition. The article begins by reviewing some of the oft-cited evidence concerning the critical period hypothesis (CPH), coming to the conclusion that the evidence in question falls short of establishing its veracity. In its second part, the article turns to some less well-trodden approaches in the critical period area, summarizing some recent qualitative research which does not particularly favor the CPH, and going on to survey the kinds of inferences researchers have drawn from the critical period discussion for the stage at which second languages should be introduced into the school curriculum. On this last point, the article concludes that even if the existence or non-existence of a critical period for language acquisition were clearly demonstrated, this would not necessarily answer the question of what age should constitute the starting-point for formal second language instruction.