Developing Grammars

Klein, Wolfgang; Dittmar, Norbert

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-67385-6

Cited by 97 publications

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“…The view which I have in mind -THE LEARNER VARIETY PERSPECTIVE -is somewhat more radical. It goes back to early attempts to analyse the language of adult foreign workers in Germany (Klein and Dittmar 1979); much the same idea is found in Bley-Vroman (1983). The learner variety perspective can be characterised by three key assumptions (Klein and Perdue 1997: 307s): A.…”

Section: Two Views On Sla Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Contribution of Second Language Acquisition Research

Klein

1998

Language Learning

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During the last 25 years, second language acquisition (SLA) research hasmade considerable progress, but is still far from proving a solid basis for foreign language teaching, or from a general theory of SLA. In addition, its status within the linguistic disciplines is still very low. I argue this has not much to do with low empirical or theoretical standards in the field—in this regard, SLA research is fully competitive—but with a particular perspective on the acquisition process: SLA researches learners' utterances as deviations from a certain target, instead of genuine manifestations of underlying language capacity; it analyses them in terms of what they are not rather than what they are. For some purposes such a “target deviation perspective” makes sense, but it will not help SLA researchers to substantially and independently contribute to a deeper understanding of the structure and function of the human language faculty. Therefore, these findings will remain of limited interest to other scientists until SLA researchers consider learner varieties a normal, in fact typical, manifestation of this unique human capacity.

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Section: Two Views On Sla Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Contribution of Second Language Acquisition Research

Klein

1998

Language Learning

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“…Three major studies investigate the development of word order: i) the 'Heidelberger Projekt Pidgin-Deutsch' (cf. HPD, 1975;Klein and Dittmar, 1979) ii) the 'ZISA cross-sectional study' (cf. Clahsen et al, 1983) iii) the 'ZISA longitudinal study' (cf.…”

Section: ) Guck Was Ich In Mein Tasche Habmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the discovery of the speaker's word order was not one of the major objectives, a certain amount of attention was paid to the placement of the verb as &dquo;the rules for the position of the verb makes possible a rather precise differentiation of all the varieties of learning&dquo; (Klein/Dittmar, 1979: 150). The word-order analysis is restricted to complete sentences only, which contain at least a subject, in addition to a verb.…”

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confidence: 99%

The availability of universal grammar to adult and child learners - a study of the acquisition of German word order

Clahsen

Muysken

1986

Interlanguage studies bulletin (Utrecht)

256

189

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Children learning German as their first language grasp its verb-final character from the very beginning. Adults learning German as a second language tend to assume in the beginning that it has a subject-verb-object order, and modify this hypothesis only gradually. We argue that this difference is due to the fact that children have access to the 'move alpha' matrix when learning the language, allowing them to make more abstract hypotheses, while adults can only rely on general learning strategies.

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“…The impact of transfer, complexification/simplification, and universal grammatical principles on the learning process have been studiedmainly as (series of) static descriptions of IL forms (e.g. Dulay and Burt, 1974;Hyltenstam, 1978;Klein & Dittmar, 1979;Schumann, 1978). However, in order to understand the dynamic nature of IL change, we need to know not only what syntactic structures are acquired, but also how and why this is so.…”

Section: Syntactic Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntax and information structure in learner language

Holmen

1988

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

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The paper reports on the first part of a longitudinal study of young immigrants' spoken Danish during the first 3-17 months of their stay in Denmark. The subjects include Albanian, Vietnamese, and English speaking adolescents who at the time of recording attended schools in the Copenhagen area. The data was collected by means of audio-taped interviews consisting of unguided conversation and elicited production (based on pictorial stimuli).The study aims at comparing the developmental patterns of individual learners in order to investigate the role of their linguistic and sociocultural background and present conditions and to gain insight into language learning processes. The study focusses on syntactic development approached from a functional perspective, and in the part reported here, changes in early second-language syntax are regarded as a result of changes in the ways in which information is organised in learner utterances and thus rooted in cognitive as well as interactional dimensions of language use. IntroductionWithin interlanguage (IL) research one is concerned with second-language acquisition, i.e. with the conscious and subconscious processes involved in learning a language other than the mother tongue whether through language instruction or in a natural setting. Samples of learner data are studied in order to gain insight into the learning process and, if possible, to map out routes taken by learners from their first acquaintance with a target language to a more advanced proficiency level. It is a common aim of this line of research to be able to identify general and variable features of language learning by focussing on linguistic, psychological and/or sociocultural aspects chosen according to the researcher's theoretical stand. Thus learners who differ, for example, in age or mother tongue, in cultural and educational background, in attitude to the target language culture, or in motivation for learning the target language are compared and the general validity of the differentiating factors discussed (Ellis (1985) for an overview of current theories of second language acquisition).

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Developing Grammars

Cited by 97 publications

References 0 publications

The Contribution of Second Language Acquisition Research

The Contribution of Second Language Acquisition Research

The availability of universal grammar to adult and child learners - a study of the acquisition of German word order

Syntax and information structure in learner language

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