Ecology of Language Acquisition

227 Pages·2003·7.19 MB·English

by  Jonathan Leather

ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Educational Linguistics
Volume 1
General Editor:
Leo van Lier
Monterey Institute of International Studies, U.S.A.
Editorial Board:
Marilda C. Cavalcanti
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil
Hilary Ja nks
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Claire Kramsch
University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.
Alastair Pennycook
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Educational Linguistics is a new book series that focuses on work that is:
• innovative
• transdisciplinary
• contextualized
• critical.
In our compartmentalized world of diverse academic fields and disciplines there is a
constant tendency to specialize more and more. In academic institutions, at conferences,
in journals, and in publications the crossing of disciplinary boundaries is often
discouraged.
This series is based on the idea that there is a need for studies that break barriers. It is
dedicated to innovative studies of language use and language learning in educational
settings worldwide. It provides a forum for work that crosses traditional boundaries
between theory and practice, between micro and macro, and between native, second and
foreign language education. The series also promotes critical work that aims to challenge
current practices and offers practical, substantive improvements.
Ecology of Language
Acquisition
Edited by
Jonathan Leather
Faculty of Humanities,
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
and
Jet van Dam
Faculty of Humanities,
University ofA msterdam, The Netherlands
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-6170-6 ISBN 978-94-017-0341-3 (eBook)
DOl 10.1007/978-94-017-0341-3
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2003 .
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 2003
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording
or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception
of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered
and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
CONTENTS
Notes on the authors ............................................................................v ii
Acknowledgements ..............................................................................x i
Towards an ecology of language acquisition
Jonathan Leather and Jet van Dam ....................................................... .1
2 Critical realism, ecological psychology, and imagined communities:
Foundations for a naturalist theory of language acquisition
Mark Fettes ................................................................................. 31
3 A tale of two computer classrooms:
The ecology of project-based language learning
Leo van Lier ............................................................................... .49
4 From joint attention to language acquisition:
How infants learn to control others' behavior
Hideki Kozima and Akira Ho ............................................................ 65
5 Beyond cognitive determination:
Interactionism in the acquisition of spatial semantics
Jordan Zlatev ............................................................................... 83
6 Language socialization in children's religious education:The discursive and
affective construction of identity
A. Patricia Baquedano-Lopez ............................................................ .1 07
7 An integrationallinguistic view of coming into language:
Reflexivity and metonymy
Michael Toolan ............................................................................. 123
8 The ecology of an SLA community in a computer-mediated environment
Wan Shun Eva Lam and Claire Kramsch ............................................... .141
9 Robot babies: What can they teach us about language acquisition?
David Powers ....................................................................... 159
10 Borrowing words: Appropriations in child second language discourse
Gabriele Pallotti ............................................................................ 183
11 Language acquisition behind the scenes:
Collusion and play in educational settings
Jet van Dam ................................................................................. 203
Index ..................................... , ......................................................... 223
NOTES ON THE AUTHORS
Patricia Baquedauo-Lopez is Assistant Professor of Language, Literacy, and
Culture at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. Her research orientation
and training encompass linguistic anthropology, first and second language
acquisition, and education. Her special interests include the study of language
socialization; discourse analysis; and literacy practices both in and out of school.
Her work is aimed at investigating how participation in particular discourses and
social practices has cognitive and social consequences, especially for ethnic and
linguistically diverse learners. She has completed two major ethnographic studies of
the language socialization practices of Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrant
children-at a parish in Los Angeles, and more recently at a parish in the East Bay
of the San Francisco metropolitan area .. Resulting publications include 'Narrating
community in doctrina classes' (2000), and (co-authored) 'The politics of language
and parish storytelling: Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe takes on 'English Only'
(2002).
Email: [email protected]
Mark Fettes is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser
University, Canada. He has pursued a fascination with complex living systems
through biology, linguistics and social theory. Some of the interconnections
between these areas of inquiry are sketched in his brief programmatic essay
'(Un)Writing the Margins: Steps toward an Ecology of Language' (in R. Phillipson,
(Ed.) Rights to Language, 20(0). Among his long-term research interests are the role
of the imagination in human learning (of languages and other things); the
problematic relationship of schools with community-based indigenous languages
and cultures; the relationship of linguistic and cultural diversity to ecological
education; and the cultural dynamics of the worldwide Esperanto community. He
welcomes correspondence on theoretical issues. Address: Faculty of Education,
Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, B.c., Canada V5A IS6.
Email: [email protected]
Akira Ito is Professor of Information Science at Gifu University, Japan. He took
his degrees in Physics from Kyoto University, and from 1979 to 1998 worked with
the Communications Research Laboratory. He has worked extensively on satellite
communication systems, human communication systems and multi-agent systems.
He was Chief of the Knowledge Systems Section, Kansai Advanced Research
Center (Kobe) from 1990 to 1998, and from 1998 to 2000 Professor of Electrical
and Information Engineering at Yamagata University. His current interests include
the role of the mind in human communication, and human social interaction.
Email: [email protected]
Hideki Kozima is Senior Research Scientist in the Keihanna Human Info
Communications Research Center (Kyoto) of the Communications Research
Laboratory (Tokyo). He took degrees in Information Mathematics and Computer
Science at The University of Electro-Communications (Tokyo), concentrating on
semantic and contextual processing of natural language. Since 1994 his work at the
VID
Communications Research Laboratory has focused on the cognitive science of
human communication. In 1998-1999 he was a visiting researcher at MIT Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (Cambridge, MA). His current research interests encompass
cognitive development; language acquisition; autism and related developmental
disorders; humanoid robotics; and human-robot interaction.
Email: [email protected]
Claire Kramsch is Professor of German and Foreign Language Acquisition and
Director of the Berkeley Language Center at the University of California at
Berkeley. She is the past president of the American Association for Applied
Linguistics and the current co-editor of the journal Applied Linguistics. Her
research interests include discourse and culture; the teaching and learning of foreign
languages; language and identity; and subjectivity in language learning. Her
publications include Discourse Analysis and Second Language Teaching (1981),
Context and Culture in Language Teaching (1993), and Language and Culture
(1998). She is the co-editor of Text and Context. Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on
Language Study (1992), Redefining the Boundaries of Language Study (1995), and
Language Acquisition and Language Socialization: Ecological Perspectives (in
press).
Email: [email protected]
Wan ShUD Eva Lam is a Ph.D. candidate in the language, literacy, and culture
division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California,
Berkeley. Her research interests include the sociocultural study of literacy;
discourse and identity; second language development; and the role of technology in
language learning. She is currently completing her dissertation entitled "Second
Language Literacy and Identity Formation on the Internet: The Case of Chinese
Immigrant Youth in the US."
Email: [email protected]
Jonathan Leather wrote his dissertation in experimental phonetics at University
College London. He has held teaching and research positions in Britain, France,
Tunisia, and Ethiopia, and is currently Associate Professor of English Linguistics at
the University of Amsterdam. His main research areas are phonological acquisition
and the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, with special interests in Thai tone,
Caribbean K weyol, and syncretic approaches to theoretical modelling. He edited
Phonological Issues in Language Learning (1999), and co-edited Sound Patterns in
Second Language Acquisition (1987), and Second Language Speech: Structure and
Process (1997). He is the co-organizer of the triennial New Sounds symposium on
the acquisition of second-language speech.
Email: [email protected]
Gabriele Pallotti is Associate Professor of Second Language Teaching at the
University of Sassari, Italy. He studied semiotics with Umberto Eco at the
University of Bologna, devoting his dissertation to the naturalistic acquisition of
Italian by a Moroccan girl. His research focusses on the interplay between second
language acquisition and socialization in children, and specifically on how second
IX
language learners develop the linguistic and social means necessary to participate
in everyday interactions. He has published a handbook on second language
acquisition (La Seconda lingua, 1998) and various articles and chapters on L2
language socialization, teaching languages to young immigrants, and cross-cultural
conversation analysis.
Email: [email protected];[email protected]
David Powers completed his PhD in 1989 at the School of Electrical
Engineering, University of New South Wales (Australia) with a dissertation on
psycho linguistic approaches to computational language learning. He has held
teaching and research positions in Australia and Europe, and since 1994 has been
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory in the School of Informatics and Engineering at the Flinders University
of South Australia, Adelaide. His research interests include cognitive and
computational models of language and learning; speech and thought control of
electrical equipment; speech reading; spelling and grammar checking and
correction; web search and information retrieval.
Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
Michael Toolan has since 1996 been Professor of Applied English Linguistics in
the English Department of the University of Birmingham (England), where he
coordinates the M.A. programme in Literary Linguistics. He had previously taught
at the National University of Singapore and the University of Washington, Seattle.
He recently assumed the editorship of the Journal of Literary Semantics (Mouton de
Gruyter). His research interests include stylistics and narratology; integrational
linguistics; the language of the law; and discourse processing and coherence. His
main work in progress is a monograph on the last of these topics.
Email: [email protected]
Jet van Dam is Associate Professor in the English Department of the University
of Amsterdam. Her main research areas are discourse structure and the modelling of
mUlti-party discourse data in educational settings. Her publications in English and
Dutch include studies on classroom ethnography using a computational 'stack
automaton' metaphor; codeswitching phenomena; correction and face; and teacher
education. She taught in the Dutch Department of the University of London and
was a visiting scholar at the Stanford School of Education.
Email: [email protected]
Leo van Lier has taught at the University of Northern Iowa and in Britain, Peru,
Mexico, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands. He is Professor of Educational
Linguistics at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and Director of the
Max Kade Language and Technology Center, where he coordinates a program in
Computer-Assisted Language Learning. In addition to articles and book chapters,
he is the author of The Classroom and the Language Learner (1988), Introducing
Language Awareness (1995), and Interaction in the Language Curriculum (1996).
He is co-editor of Volume 6, Knowledge about language, of the Encyclopedia of
Language and Education (1997), and General Editor of the Educational Linguistics
x
series of Kluwer Academic Publishers. His current interests include ecological
linguistics; semiotics; and equitable uses of technology in education.
Email: [email protected];[email protected]
Jordan Zlatev is a Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics, Lund
University (Sweden). He took his Ph.D in General Linguistics at Stockholm
University in 1997 with a dissertation entitled Situated embodiment: Studies in the
emergence of spatial meaning (Stockholm: Gotab) , in which he presented a
synthetic, biocultural conceptual framework for the study of language and
cognition, and its application to spatial meaning. He has been guest lecturer in
Linguistics at Thammasat University, Thailand, and Arhus University, Denmark.
As a post-doctoral researcher in Cognitive Science at Lund University he initiated
the research program 'Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling cognitive development in
robotic systems'. His current research interests include the typological and
developmental study of spatial semantics (with particular focus on serial verb
languages such as Thai) and the interrelationship between language, gesture and
imagery in ontogenesis and evolution.
Email: [email protected]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We should like to thank the many colleagues whose ideas and suggestions have
contributed to the genesis of this volume. We are particularly grateful to Olga
Fischer for detailed comments on an earlier draft of our introductory chapter, and to
Ben Tinholt for copy editing and formatting. All shortcomings remain, of course,
our own responsibility.