Preview of Chapter 3 with discussion questions: Crosslinguistic influences

As Samantha said, I developed some discussion questions which are believed to help you to think more deeply on some issues in this chapter. The questions are seemingly general and are relatively affected by my own curiosity, so your understanding and cooperation would be necessary to make the discussion to be viable if you would like to use those questions. Also, your own questions or ideas regarding the same issues or any other issues would be so welcomed.

This chapter introduces us to the term transfer or crosslinguistic influence, replacing the older term interference, which implies that crosslinguistic influence is two-dimensional: both positive and negative. A number of empirical studies have reported that this influence happens due to similarities or differences in the features of two languages, such as grammar structure or their social aspects (e.g., attitudes about accepting the boundary of politeness). The important thing to note further is that the interlingual identifications of two languages is affected not only by the characteristics of specific language phenomenon and universal language development, it is also due to the learner's conscious or subconscious judgment on the distance of L1 and L2. In addition, the identifications are affected by the learner's proficiency level.

The manifestation of interlingual identifications can be largely perceived through learners’ production, which might drive researchers to pay attention to the many aspects of learners’ language, further to learners’ performance analysis or error analysis. Selinker (1972) coined the term interlanguage for learners’ developing L2 knowledge. He also introduced fossilization to describe the fact that some features of a learner’s language might not change. This may be true, for example, for learners who are only exposed to positive evidences with absence of negative evidences showing inadequacy of their performance.

(a) We may discuss more profoundly in class on systematic, universal features of interlanguage (including factors on shaping interlanguage patterns) in terms of syntax, vocabulary, pragmatics, and so on. For example, frequency and the presence of cognates (words that look similar and have the same meaning in two languages) might influence development of vocabulary acquisition. (b) What kinds of approaches have been used to extract some features of interlanguage to date may be treated in class as well. Recently, corpus studies have drawn the attention of researchers in SLA. What others? (c) Pedagogically, you may think of the ways of efficiently handling the phenomena of interlanguage and fossilization in class. (d) The chapter later deals with the direction of crosslinguistic influence (the recent attention to bidirectional transfer). It would be more interesting to discuss this issue with more empirical studies.