2. Children vs. adults in second-language learning
Basic psychological factors affecting second-language learning
Intellectual processing: explication and induction
Essentially, there are only two processes by which one can learn the syntax of a second language: someone can explain rules to you, explication, or you can figure them out for yourself, induction.
The nature of explication
Explication is the process whereby the rules and structures of a second language are explained to a learner. This explanation is given in the first language of the learner. The learner is then expected to understand, learn, and apply the rule in the second language.
Why a language cannot be learned completely by explication
While parts of a second language can be learned by explication, it is impossible for it to be learned entirely by explication. This is because not all of the rules of any one language have been discovered and written down. Even for a language such as English, the most researched of all languages, one still finds linguistic journals discussing the concepts involved in such commonplace features of English as tense and the article.
Explication is rarely applicable to young children
Explaining is rarely done by parents or others when children acquire a native language, yet children by the age of 4 or 5 can understand and speak most of their native language quite well. They have learned language by self- analysis, induction. You do not hear a parent saying: ‘Now, Mary, to make the plural of “dog” you add a “z” sound to the end of the word, while with “duck” you add an “s” sound. You do this, Mary, because the last sound of “dog” has a voiced consonant and the last sound of “duck” has an unvoiced one.’ Similarly, parents do not tell their children that, in order to negate a sentence like ‘John wanted some chocolate ice cream’, the negative marker, ‘not’, must occur before the verb, ‘do’ must appear before the NEG, the tense on the verb must be shifted on to the ‘do’, so that do + PAST becomes ‘did’, and ‘some’ must change to ‘any’ for agreement, so that the sentence ‘John did not want any chocolate ice cream’ will be the result. Even college students taking linguistics courses can find such explanations daunting!
Teaching simple and complex rules
However, rules that are simple can be learned by explication without much difficulty. An example of teaching a simple rule would be a case in which
a mature Korean speaker studying English would be told that there is a Subject + Verb + Object order of constituents (Korean has S–O–V). On the basis of such a description, a learner can learn relevant usable rules, though they may need practice before the rules can be applied with any speed or reliability. In such cases, explication may even be a faster means of learning than induction, since induction requires that a learner be repeatedly exposed to words, phrases, and sentences along with relevant situations that give some indication as to their meaning. Robinson (1996), for example, found that explication improved the learning of simple Subject–Verb rules.
6.2.1.2 Induction
Learning rules by self-discovery is the essence of the process of induction. The child who is exposed to second-language speech and remembers what he or she has heard will be able to analyze and discover the generalization or rule that underlies that speech. Actually, not only must the learner devise the rule based on the speech that has been heard, but he or she must also figure out how those rules are to be applied in other cases. For example, given the sentences ‘John danced then John sang’ and ‘John danced and then he sang’, spoken in relevant situations, the learner can determine that the two sentences are related, with ‘he’ being a replacement for ‘John’. The learner must also figure out that while ‘he’ can replace ‘John’ in the second of the conjoined sentences, it cannot do so in the first sentence (as in ‘He danced then John sang’) since in that case the pronoun ‘he’ must refer to someone other than John. With such a rule, the learner is on the way to being able to use and understand increasingly complicated structures involving pronominalization. Such phenomena as pronominalization, negation, and the plural are learned by induction and become part of a young native speaker’s language knowledge quite early, long before the child enters school.
The second-language learner is always trying to figure out language by
induction. This is simply the natural thing to do. So long as the structures involved are not far beyond the learner’s level of syntactic understanding, there is a good chance that the learner can discover the rules by self-analysis.