Constructing a second language inventory–the accumulation of linguistic resources in L2 English.

356 Pages·2008·1.67 MB·English

Constructing a second language inventory –
the accumulation of linguistic resources in L2 English.

Ph.D. dissertation
Institute of Language and Communication
University of Southern Denmark

Supervisor: Johannes Wagner, University of Southern Denmark
Co-supervisor: Carl Bache, University of Southern Denmark

Søren Wind Eskildsen
Institute of Language and Communications
University of Southern Denmark
DK-5230 Odense M
Denmark

2008

Constructing a second language inventory –
the accumulation of linguistic resources in L2 English.

Contents.
People and Places: Acknowledgments i

Introduction 1
Preliminaries 1
The research interest 2
The data 4
About the anthology 5

Chapter 1: 10

EC: Søren W. Eskildsen and Teresa Cadierno: Are recurring multi-word expressions really
syntactic freezes? Second Language Acquisition from the perspective of Usage-Based Linguistics.

Chapter 2: 23

ESK1: Constructing Another Language – Usage-Based Linguistics in Second Language
Acquisition.

Chapter 3: 50

ESK2: What’s New? - Routines and Creativity along a Usage-Based Path of Second Language
Learning

Chapter 4: 87

ESK3: Second Language Learning as Participation and Acquisition: Towards a new SLA
Eclecticism.

Chapter 5: 127

ESK4: You no oich – User-Based L2 Learning: The Case of Negation

Chapter 6: Portable language experience – a brief outline of UBL 169

6.1 Introduction 165
6.2 UBL: Maximalism and other basic tenets 165
6.3 UBL vs. UG: logical problems of language learning? 170
6.4 UBL for SLA: setting the stage 175

Chapter 7: Linguistic resources and routines – MWEs and other units in L2
learning 181

7.1 Introduction 181
7.2 Setting the stage 181
7.3 On starting points: Linguistic Units and L2 Vocabulary
Research. 183
7.4 Idioms, Open Choices, and Collocations 188
7.5 On the right terms 193
7.6 Formulaic language – findings in SLA 204
7.7 Perspectives – formulaic language, UBL, and SLA 209

Chapter 8: E Pluribus Unum? – tracing the roots of SLA 212

8.1 Introduction 212
8.2 There's competence and then there's competence – a brief
Introduction to SLA's adolescence 212
8.2.1 Interlanguage and psycholinguistics 213
8.2.2 Developmental sequences 217
8.2.3 Communicative Competence 224
8.3 Individual competence or social performance? 228
8.3.1. Is there a super-theory of SLA? 229
8.3.2 Tracing the social-cognitive split 239
8.3.3 Second language acquisition or second language
participation? 249
8.4 Overcoming the dualisms 261

Chapter 9: Conclusions and perspectives 265

Complete References 272

Appendices: Inventory counts and traced utterances, initial and final
recording periods (ESK2) 296
Appendix 1: Valerio, recording period 1 296
Appendix 2: Valerio, recording period 6 303
Appendix 3: Carlos, recording period 1 315
Appendix 4: Carlos, recording period 4 321

English Summary 339
Dansk Resumé 345
People and Places: Acknowledgments

A confession: This dissertation is a piece of work which I have not carried out entirely by myself. I
certainly did the writing; I know I did all the transcribing. But I did not do all the thinking on my
own. Thus, I am greatly indebted to people who took part in the thinking process. They are, in a
form of chronological order, Rineke Brouwer who first assisted me in the process of putting
together my dissertation proposal. She is the first person without whom I could not have done this.
The second person must be Teresa Cadierno; her name as co-author on my first published work says
it all. The third person – and the one who was with me all the way – was my supervisor, Johs
Wagner. Thank you, Johs, for inspiring me to keep doing what I do. Without Rineke, Teresa, and
Johs there certainly would have been no dissertation from my hand.

Other people from other places have been helpful, too. I am especially indebted to Steve Reder,
Kathy Harris, and John Hellermann from the Applied Linguistics Department at Portland State
University for inviting me to Portland and for granting me access to their unique database – and for
teaching me how to use the software needed to access the data. I also want to thank the 'tech team'
at the Lab School in Portland, Vid and Glen, who would always provide technological first aid
when it was needed. I also owe a great deal of thanks to both teachers and research assistants at the
Lab School for letting me share their office space when in Portland.

Of course, I must also thank my own local spot in Odense, Institut for Sprog og Kommunikation,
for approving my dissertation proposal and giving me a work space. I am especially indebted to my
colleagues in the Language and Cognition Research Group for inspirational discussions. Also
thanks to my co-supervisor, Carl Bache, who was always available when needed.

I dedicate this work to those people mentioned here; they are the ones without whom I could not
have done this. To you, Lise, I can only say I'm sorry – times will change now as I get out of my
hole. You're not the reason why I did this work. You're the reason why I look forward to getting out
of the hole where, it must have appeared to the outside world, I've been stuck for three years. This
work is not for you; everything else is.

i
Constructing a second language inventory –
the accumulation of linguistic resources in L2 English.

Introduction.

Preliminaries.
When people learn languages they do so in many different ways and by many different means. They
are cognitively active; they figure out the target language as they engage in it. They are
interactionally active; they establish conversational routines as they take part in it. They are socially
competent people; they are people doing something real in the real world. The real world of the
present research is a second language (L2) classroom in Portland, Oregon. The real people, the focal
students of the research, are Mexican-Spanish speakers. They go to class, they sit at their desks,
they perform the classroom activities they are asked to perform, they interact with their teachers and
their classmates. Therefore they are many different identities; Mexican immigrants, appliance repair
men, married, single – but they are also bona fide L2 learners of English. The question is, what, in
this real world, do they learn as they engage in the L2 classroom interaction?

The present research reflects a general increased interest, within Second Language Acquisition
(SLA) research, in what might be broadly referred to as 'the mental lexicon'. I do not, from the
onset, wish to imply that I take a special interest in 'words' over other aspects of language and
language acquisition, but I do wish to imply that 'grammar' does not really do it for me – as I
believe it does not do it for my focal students. Grammar, as traditionally conceived, is not
something L2 learners learn, neither in the real world, nor to deploy in the real world. The basic
concern of the present research is to investigate the recurring building blocks of language as they
are made relevant in the context of learning a L2, the primary interest focusing on empirical
investigations of what might be said to be the kernel of L2 linguistic knowledge; the units of
language learning.

Such an undertaking requires a well-thought-out linguistic theory, an elaborate view of learning, as
well as an idea of what it means to take part in social interaction. Contrary to much traditional SLA,
where the underlying linguistic theory is usually left unmentioned but where the object to be
learned is usually defined in terms of 'words and rules', where learning is never discussed but
1
unfailingly accepted a priori to be about the structured acquisition of 'input', operationalised as
'intake' to denote the idea that not everything L2 learners hear around them is internalised, the
present research aims to study the learning of recurring bits and pieces of language as they are used
in interaction. To this end, I invoke Usage-Based Linguistics (UBL) and its notion that all linguistic
units are form-meaning pairings implying that semantically empty combinatorial rules of language
are not relevant in terms of L2 learning. I discuss metaphors of learning, as participation and
acquisition, to denote the idea that something as complex as L2 ontogenesis cannot be captured by
recourse to one such metaphor only – and to imply that, in terms of participation, learning happens,
not in an interactional vacuum, but in a real world where interaction matters as more than a site for
information exchange and negotiation for meaning.

The research interest.
The present research can therefore be said to bring together two strands of SLA – or perhaps more
precisely, aspects of these strands, these being 1) the focus on 'lexical units' (though not 'words', as
traditionally thought of); and 2) the recent increased tendency to combine cognitively and socially
oriented approaches to the study of language learning (Larsen-Freeman 2007). I perform this
operation by calling upon UBL which insists on defining the linguistic unit in specific terms and
always with recourse to meaning and function, and by attempting to contextualize L2 development
in terms of local language emergence. In other words, I view the object of research in L2 learning as
the accumulation of interactional resources and routines; i.e., I investigate linguistic patterns and
how they develop over time. This makes for a strictly empirical operationalization of linguistic
knowledge which demands an abolition of the strict dichotomy between competence and
performance. The only a priori decision to be made is the decision to take UBL as my point of
departure.

This lack of predetermined linguistic structures to look for stems from an insight generated by the
interest in looking for recurrent 'formulaic sequences' (Wray 2002) in the data. Initially, the present
research was framed around an attempt to investigate the role of such formulaic sequences in L2
learning, an area of SLA research still not blessed with unequivocal results (Schmitt and Carter
2004). However, it quickly transpired that such formulaic sequences, partly because of their largely
elusive nature in linguistic theory and research, seemed to a large degree to be absent from the data.
The question of whether L2 learners start out from formulas and gradually start analysing them to
2
use the individual constituents in other linguistic structures, or if they start from the learning of
combinatorial rules with practice ensuring the entrenchment of certain formulas over time, seems
fundamentally misguided and flawed. Formulas and more general patterns seem to co-exist at all
points in development, at least as far as the data investigated here are concerned. One does not
happen before the other in ontogenesis; there is no formulaic language ahead of current
interlanguage competence – and there is no current interlanguage competence ahead of formulaic
language. Such convictions, it will be argued, stem from what Langacker termed 'the rule-list
fallacy'.

Instead, the research focus became one of investigating the extent to which the learning of all such
'formulas' and general patterns could be said to be item-based along a usage-based path of learning
from fixed patterns via partially flexible patterns to completely schematic constructions, as
suggested in UBL. As such the investigations revolve around the notion of L2 learning as the
gradual accumulation of an assortment of interactional routines and resources. Combined with this
linguistic descriptive and analytical tool-box from UBL, the concept of emergentism, at whose heart
is the notion that language knowledge is fundamentally in flux, will be invoked to throw light on
the seemingly essentially constant and never-ending nature of L2 learning

Hence, the research as presented in the five research papers is informed by the idea that the field of
SLA lacks a framework within which to study an empirically based, performance-driven, emergent
linguistic inventory of a L2 learner. The strictly field-related epistemological interest lies in charting
such emergent inventories for the first time. The studies presented in the five research papers in this
collection are therefore exploratory in nature, seeking out the fabric of those linguistic inventories.
Only linguistic units actually found in the data are discussed; no units, either of a lexically specific
or a syntactically generic nature, are invoked to explain linguistic development. Rather, what I see
in my data is always and everywhere described, analysed, and explained with recourse to the
linguistic and interactional reality of the learners. This is done on the basis of the UBL framework
and its insistence on using actual language use in actual usage events (Langacker 2000) as its point
of departure for doing research.

3
The data.
The data source for all the research papers is the Multimedia Adult English Learner Corpus
(MAELC) which consists of audio-visual recordings of classroom interaction in an English as a
Second Language (ESL) classroom in Portland, Oregon. MAELC was compiled and is maintained
at The National Labsite for Adult ESOL (known locally as the Lab School1). The Lab School was a
partnership between Portland State University and Portland Community College. The ESL
classrooms, in which the recordings were made, were equipped with six ceiling-mounted video
cameras. Four of those were fixed, and two were moveable by remote control. The two latter
cameras each followed a student wearing a wireless microphone; students were given these
microphones to wear on a rotational basis. The teacher wore a microphone at all times in the class
(Reder et al. 2003; Reder 2005).

The final database of the inquiries in the five research papers consists of transcripts from approx. 70
classroom sessions each consisting of three hours of recordings in which my focal students are
either wearing a microphone or sitting next to someone wearing a microphone. Carlos, the focal
student in EC, ESK1, ESK2, and ESK4, attended ESL class from September 2001 through February
2005, and Valerio, the focal student in ESK2, ESK3, and ESK4, attended class from July 2003
through July 2005. During their time in class, both Valerio and Carlos were considered to be
successful learners as they gradually progressed, by the standards of this language program, from
Level A to Level D (beginning to intermediate; for more information on the proficiency levels, see
Brillanceau 2005; Reder 2005).

Taking as its point of departure those two Mexican-Spanish speaking classroom learners of English,
the present research investigates L2 learning as a constant movement of linguistic advancement –
but a movement which has no visible endpoint (Firth and Wagner 1998), a movement where
completion is always deferred (Hopper, quoted in Lantolf and Thorne 2006: 14). The emergent
linguistic inventories of the two focal students are described and analysed in terms of an
interactionally situated grammar consisting of recurring flexibly abstract units of actual language
use. Language learning in this sense is dealt with in terms of linguistic and interactional progression

1 The Lab School was supported, in part, by grant R309B6002 from the Institute for Education Science, U.S. Dept. of
Education, to the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL). I am deeply indebted to
Steve Reder and all the staff at the Lab School for granting me access to their data, providing me with office space
while in Portland to work on the data, and generally being extremely hospitable and helpful.
4
and discussed in the light of the two aforementioned learning metaphors. The investigation of
linguistic inventories along these lines is done in the form of the five research papers; their
methodological and theoretical underpinnings and perspectives are further unpacked and discussed
in the subsequent chapters. The rest of this introduction serves as a guide to this collection of
research papers and theoretical-methodological chapters.

About the anthology:
Starting with the five research papers, these investigate various aspects of emergent linguistic
inventories along a usage-based path of learning, going from formulas through low-scope patterns
to fully schematised abstract constructional language knowledge (e.g., Tomasello 2000, 2003; N.
Ellis 2002). In this anthology they are presented in the first five separate chapters. Chapter 1,
Eskildsen and Cadierno (EC)2, studied negation development in one of the focal students,
suggesting that the usage-based path of learning was indeed a valid default for investigating the
acquisition of L2 structure. Seen retrospectively, it formed the preamble for the subsequent research
as presented in the four remaining papers, ESK1, ESK2, ESK3, and ESK4 respectively. In terms of
the chronology of those four papers, it is also evident that there is a movement towards an increased
awareness of the importance of studying interactional development in the classroom alongside the
more traditional linguistic inquiries. Chapter 2, ESK13, thus showed the fundamentally locally
situated nature of the initially occurring 'formulas' in learning, the items from which the linguistic
inventories are seen to spring, operationalised as recurring multi-word expressions (MWEs). They
were operationalised as such to denote the usage-based vantage point both in terms of the non-
distinction between lexis and syntax as separate compartments of language, and in terms of
underlining the methodological principle that no a priori structures were defined as formulas; these
were allowed to rise from the data.

Chapters 4 and 5, ESK34 and ESK45, expand on these insights. Thus, echoing findings from
language socialization studies in L2 learning (e.g., Kanagy 1999; Hellermann 2006), showing how

2 Published in 2007. Collocations and Idioms 1: Papers from the First Nordic Conference on Syntactic Freezes,
Joensuu, May 19-20, 2007. Editors M. Nenonen and S. Niemi. Studies in Languages, University of Joensuu, Vol. 41.
Joensuu: Joensuu University Press
3 Under review for publication in Applied Linguistics.
4 Under review for publication in International Review of Applied Linguistics.
5 Under review for publication in L2 Learning as Social Practice: Conversation-analytic Perspectives (Working title).
Editors G. Pallotti and J. Wagner.

5