 Master
paper
|
Completed in Fall 2001 at Georgia State University
Field: Second Language Acquisition
Research Topic:Formulaic
Speech in Second Language
Acquisition: The importance of language
chunks in L2 learning.
The research was a two-month longitudinal study conducted
on 21 young adult students (10 males and 11 females) learning French in
the Department of foreign languages at Georgia State University. The sttudents
were actually false beginners because most of them had already had French
in high school.
The purpose of this research was to determine whether
or not the learning of language chunks can favor creativity and enhance
communication, especially for beginners.
Unlike many other
second language acquisition research topics, formulaic speech or formulaic
language has attracted the attention of only a few researchers, and it
has been a concern of less importance in the acquisition and learning of
a second language. For many researchers, there is not any relationship
between the learning of chunks (or prefabricated patterns) and language
creativity. Among others, Krashen and Scarcella (1978), two prominent researchers
in the field of SLA, have simply argued that the learning of language chunks
and language creativity are completely independent. The learning of chunk
is then relegated to rote learning as described and used in methods like
Audiolingual, where learning is so mechanical that it does not allow the
students to meaningfully generate new ideas, new thoughts, and even new
patterns. On the other hand, Wong-Fillmore (1976) argued that the acquisition
of formulaic speech plays a central role in second language learning. She
claimed that the learned language chunks become part of the learners' developing
linguistic system.
Today, more and more researchers (Hickey, 1993; Mitchell and
Martin, 1997; Myles, Hooper, and Mitchell, 1998; Towel and Hawkins, 1994;
Weinert, 1995) are studying this type of learning under a variety of labels:
prefabricated routines and patterns, imitated utterances, formulas, and
formulaic units (Myles, Mitchell, &Hooper, 1999; Raupach, 1984; Weinert,
1995; Wong-Fillmore, 1976). Formulaic speech can be defined as a “multi-morphemic
unit memorized and recalled as a whole, rather than generated from individual
items based on linguistic rules” (Myles et al, 1998, p. 325). These sorts
of utterances are often produced during human interactions, playing an
important role in communication. They bear contextual and cultural meaning
as well as linguistic meaning. From those researchers' studies comes the
idea that the role of formulaic language may have been underestimated.
Among others, Towel and Hawkins (1994) have suggested that this learning
strategy be reconsidered and possibly better understood.
The main purpose of this paper is to present some findings on whether or
not the learning of language chunks can favor creativity and enhance communication.
It is important to keep in mind, as argued by Pine and Lieven (1993, p.551,
cited in Myles et al, 1999, p. 52) that for some children, entry into structured
language involves their “gaining productive control over ‘slots’ in previously
unanalyzed phrases.” Children learn and internalize the language chunks
that they hear around them (from parents, friends, etc.) and use these
chunks to utter things that they had never heard before. A longitudinal
study by Mitchell and Martin (1997) reveals that children from age 11 to
16 make great use of the language chunks in learning French. They found
that some pupils used those chunks in structured situation while a number
of them were quite able to adapt what they learned by replacing things
and by putting bits together to express their own ideas in French. My purpose
here then is to contribute to the study on the role of formulas by analyzing
them in young adults’ L2 learning process and see their effects on learning
as well as language teaching.
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Formulaic speech, creativity, and communication
Many researchers have recognized
the importance of formulaic language at early stages but they have disputed
its role in the learning process itself (Ellis, 1984, cited in Mitchell
& Martin, 1997). On the other hand, Wong-Fillmore (1976, cited in Schmidt,
1983) reported that routines and patterns evolved into creative language
in the case of the children she studied. We know that children’s learning
differs from adults’ learning in that the former is mostly unconscious
and the second is mostly conscious (Bley-Vroman, 1989). Therefore, I was
concerned with investigating how conscious language learners, who have
the ability to analyze the language in terms of its structure and meaning,
use the language chunks they are provided with. According to Gibson and
Cornwell (1979), awareness plays an important role in language creativity.
How then the memorization of language chunks can help young adults acquire
a second language is my main concern in this paper.
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The project was a two-month longitudinal study
conducted on a college-level class that I taught on French as a foreign
language in southern United States. The class met three times a week for
a session of 50 minutes with substantial additional work in the laboratory.
The 21 students (10 males and 14 females) involved in the study were false
beginners in that most of them had taken a French course either in high
school or in undergraduate college. Yet, the truth is that they remembered
very little of what they had learned. They were from a variety of cultures
but mostly from U.S. cultures; their age ranged from 18 to 32.
My task consisted of
providing students with language chunks in French with their translation
in English, on Mondays, taking 5-10 minutes of the class period. They would
then have to prepare, during the week, a conversation or a dialogue that
they would perform on Fridays, using those chunks. I decided not to chose
the pairs of students who would perform in advance so that all of them
would have to prepare, as no one knew in advance who was going to perform
and who was not. Not only did I provide the chunks, but also I often provided
the dialogue situations. My purpose in so doing was to give students some
kind of orientation in order to prevent any confusion on what they should
do with the chunks. It is worth mentioning that the utterances were not
taken randomly or meaninglessly; students actually made a list of formulaic
speech in English that they thought they could use in everyday communication
in French, among themselves. From that list, I selected 7 utterances that
I deemed useful to them. I would write them on the board and had students
write them in a special notebook that they used for that particular purpose.
After they had written down the utterances, I would help them with the
pronunciation of some of the words and the different intonations. Before
we left the class on Mondays, we took care of forming pairs of students
(10 in total including a group of 3 students), who had to prepare the dialogues
or conversations.
Just as on Mondays, I reserved ten minutes of the Friday class for
the performance of the conversations or dialogues that I asked the students
to prepare. All pairs were required to prepare those dialogues or conversations,
but because of the time constraint, only 3 or 4 were chosen randomly on
Fridays to perform their dialogues. The performers would stand in front
of the whole class and perform the dialogue. The other pairs would simply
watch and have their turn the following Friday. All the dialogues were
tape-recorded to keep record of how previously learned chunks were used
by the students. No correction was made during the dialogues, nor was any
special feedback given from me except some encouragement and the cheers
of the class. Students were promised a reward at the end of the study:
one of their lowest quiz grades would be cancelled.
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The study was
conducted in two rounds with two different sets of chunks. Each round lasted
3 weeks with 3 or 4 pairs performing each week. The first set of chunks,
which was used in the first round of conversation, was already designed
as a dialogue with 7 utterances for each of the two speakers involved.
In fact, with the 7 utterances that I selected from the students’ list,
I made a dialogue myself in which each student would have to use 7 chunks.
One would ask the questions while the other would answer. Students were
supposed to pretend to have already met but without having introduced themselves
to each other. At times, the student who answered the questions also asked
some questions such as “Et toi, comment t’ appelles-tu?” (And you, what’s
your name?). When an utterance was completely new, I would not really pay
attention to it particularly, except for the context that it might create.
I was mainly concerned in looking at how the students would use the utterances
that I gave them myself. Below are the chunks for the first round.
Set of utterances for Round 1:
Q1: Bonjour, comment t’appelles-tu? (Good morning, what’s
your name?)
R1: Je m’appelle … (Students say their name). (My
name is …)
Q2: Quel âge as-tu? (How old are you?)
R2: J’ai (20) ans. (I’m (20) year
old.)
Q3: D’où viens-tu? (Where do you come
from?)
R3: Je viens de (France). (Each says the country he/she is from)
(I come from (France)).
Q4: Où habites-tu? (Where do you live?)
R4: J’habite à (Marietta). (I live in
(Marietta).)
Q5: Avec qui habites-tu? (With whom do you live?)
R5: J’habite avec ma famille. (I live with
my family.)
Q6: Quels cours prends-tu? (What classes are
you taking?)
R6: Je prends un cours de Français.
(I’m taking a French class.)
Q7: Comment vas-tu à l’université?
(How do you go to the university?)
R7: Je vais en voiture. (I go by car).
The above utterances are some of the ones that students usually use
in their daily conversations. This constitutes the rationale for my focusing
on informal language, which seemed more authentic and in which students
could be better involved.
The second set of chunks, used in the second round was randomly given
to the students, who had to build a conversation or a dialogue around them.
The reason for that change was to see the level of involvement of students
at a higher degree. I was interested in seeing the degree of creativity
in both provided contexts and contexts that students would create themselves,
still using the provided chunks as shown below.
Set of utterances for round 2:
1- J’ai faim (I’m hungry).
2- Je veux aller au restaurant. (I want to go to
the restaurant).
3- Veux-tu venir avec moi? (Do you want to
come with me?)
4- J’ai envie de prendre du thé chaud.
(I would like to drink some hot tea).
5- J’ai soif. (I’m thirsty).
6- J’ai envie de boire de l’eau glacée.
(I would like to drink some ice water).
The conversations that were done by the students in this second part
had many new utterances. This was somehow predictable because some of the
utterances actually required some questions while others required some
answers.
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The findings of this study were interesting and, actually, not far from my expectations. Some of the dialogues sounded just like some kind of recitation. A number of students stuck to the chunks without adding or changing anything. There were some hesitations as students tried to remember the words. Fillers like “umh” were frequently used. In spite of this, some very interesting findings were made. For example, in response 1 (R1), most of the respondents added two new words (et toi?) (and you?) and raised their intonation at the end. This was a way of returning question 1 (Q1), Comment t’appelles-tu?, to the sender, without having to re-state the whole sentence again. In one of the conversations during the first round, the respondent replaced a word by a new one, without changing the meaning of the utterance. She said, in answering Q1, Je suis Amanda (I’m Amanda). That showed her understanding that we can express the same idea differently. In response 4 (R4), I noticed more word addition and chunk combinations. A student put an emphasis on himself while answering Q4: Moi (me), j’habite à College Park. This “Moi” was inserted in the right position, keeping then the syntactical rule correct. Another student, while answering the same question provided an additional information about the place she lives at: J’habite à l’appartement à Marietta (I live in an apartment in Marietta). Although the inserted phrase was grammatically incorrect, the student demonstrated how she could modify the chunk by inserting new words and convey additional messages. The same information was also provided by another student who succeeded in making a syntactically correct sentence. The new phrase was added at the end of the given chunk: J’habite Dunwoody umh… dans un appartment (I live in Dunwoody umh… in an apartment). The utterance shows that there was some hesitation before the new phrase was added. The most logical reason for this is that the respondent was trying to recall the phrase and put it in the right order in order to convey her message successfully. Two other students combined both the chunk in R4 and the chunk in R5 while they were answering Q4. They successfully made the necessary deletions so that the sentence would be syntactically correct and keeping also its function. These two utterances are written below:
A1: J’habite à Rosewell avec ma famille, loin de l’université.
(I live in Rosewell with my family, far from the university.)
A2: J’habite à Decatur avec ma mère, et toi? (I live
in Decatur with my mother. And you?)
In answer 1 (A1), the respondent provided extra information by adding one more phrase (loin de l’université). This is the kind of complex sentence that are used in highly advanced French classes. Answering the same question, a student, who had previously listened to the two students mentioned above, obviously tried to imitate their utterances but remembered that these utterances would not be true statements about himself. The reader will notice that there was some hesitation before he provided the information that was true about himself:
A3: J’habite à Stone Mountain avec umh… moi seul. (I live in Stone Mountain with umh… alone).
The
combination of these two last words (moi seul) is not accepted in standard
French, but here it does serve its purpose. Functionally, it is acceptable
in that it is often commonly used by French speakers. Three students, who
waited for the question before answering, skipped the phrase avec ma famille
(with my family) by saying something true about themselves. One said
that she was living avec mon copain Frederic (with my boyfriend Frederic);
another one said that she was living avec ma mère (with my mother).
The third one used a phrase -avec mes parents (with my parents)- that worked
as a synonym to the replaced phrase in R5 (avec ma famille). For response
6 (R6), one student replaced the phrase Je prends (I take) by J’étudie
(I study). Interestingly enough, she deleted two words (cours de), which
worked only with the phrase that she replaced. So, instead of saying J’étudie
le cours de Français, (I’m studying the French class) which would
make no sense, she said J’étudie le Francais (I’m studying French).
Moreover, almost all the participants provided additional information about
the other classes that they were taking while answering Q6. One of them
added even a description of the French class -et mon cours préféré
le Français (and French, my favorite class). The conjunction et
was successfully used by a couple of students to connect the phrases in
the provided chunks to the new phrases that they were adding. Noteworthy
is the fact that while using that conjunction, they understood that they
did not need to re-state the subject and the verb again. A similar case
consisted of a complete deletion with no replacement. In answering Q7,
one student simply deleted the subject and the verb but kept the complement
en voiture (by car). She thereby demonstrated her ability to delete words
that would sound repetitious and that are not necessary for the expression
of an idea. The subject and the verb were simply implied in this answer.
The second
round showed almost the same results. In the first dialogue,
the speakers created a context in order to use chunk 2, Je veux aller au
restaurant. Before one of the students used the above chunk, the other
student asked her what she was going to do that night. The use of the future
in the question pushed the respondent to modify the chunk by saying Je
vais aller au restaurant (I will go to the restaurant) instead of Je veux
aller au restaurant (I want to go to the restaurant) just as in the original
chunk. In another dialogue, one student combined a chunk from the first
round with three of the second round. Answering the following question
Comment allez-vous?, she answered Ça va, mais j'ai très faim.
On va au restaurant? (I'm fine, but I'm very hungry. How about going to
the restaurant?) Not only did she succeed in combining all these four chunks,
but also she strengthened the meaning of one of them by using an intensifier
(très): J'ai très faim (I'm very hungry). In addition to
that, she combined chunk 2 and 3 and modified them by replacing the subjects
and turning the two phrases into a single question, On va au restaurant?
(how about going to the restaurant?). Finally, she made a great use of
the connector mais (but), showing the contrast between her feeling good
and her being hungry. Another student succeeded in making almost the same
combination, but with two chunks. She asked her friend if she wanted to
come to the restaurant without saying first that she wanted to go herself,
and also deleting avec moi (with me). This is what she said: Veux-tu venir
au restaurant? (Do you want to come to the restaurant?). The word venir
(to come) here implied that the one who invited was already going to the
restaurant. Based on that context then, she did not need to add avec moi,
which would have been redundant.
Besides these interesting findings, I also noticed that some of the
chunks were either not used or used in the exact form in which they were
provided. This was the case with Comment t'appelles-tu, quel âge
as-tu, où habites-tu, d'où viens-tu, which had all been used
without any change. Actually, these chunks hardly accept any modification,
even in native French speakers’ interactions. J'ai envie de boire de l'eau
glacée was used only once and with a lot of hesitation. The following
is an attemptive reproduction of how it was used: J'ai ... envie de ...
boire ... de ... l'eau glacée. It should be noted that this utterance
was one of the longest chunks provided. The longest one -J'ai envie de
prendre du thé chaud- was not used at all. There are all reasons
to assume that the shorter a chunk, the most often it is likely to be used
and modified by learners, especially beginners.
Now, what do all these results tell us in terms of communication and
creativity?
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The purpose
of this research study was to see the impact of language chunks on L2 learning.
The question I was trying to address was whether formulaic speech can be
used creatively and serve the purpose of communication and learning. Based
on the above results, the first observation I can make is that language
chunks have a very important role in L2 learning. It seems obvious that
language chunks play an important role in communication. As Charles Fillmore
(1976, cited in Vihman, 1982) has pointed out, there is a great deal of
formulaic expressions in natural language. This shows how vital those expressions
are for L2 learners in order to be able to meet basic communicative needs.
In the study, students demonstrated that they could converse with the chunks
that I provided them even when they were given randomly. I could see that
students turned those chunks into their own, creating at times some contexts
in which they could fit. This study certainly supports the idea that chunks
have a useful communicative function, refuting at the same time the belief
that it is only during the early stages that they are useful (Weinert,
1995, cited in Mitchell and Martin, 1997). Some of the chunks that did
not deal with the actual lives of students were simply ignored. The hesitations
that occurred sometimes were not just a matter of recitation; instead,
students tried to simulate the actual communicative settings in which people
do not always say things in one trait. Hesitations were also the proof
of students’ reflection in order to put their ideas or words together and
create the sentences. This, of course triggers the process of L2 learning
in that the students successfully incorporate the chunks in contextual
conversations instead of just reciting them mechanically. They alternate
the positions of the chunks according to the context that they create by
themselves.
The results
also show that language chunks are not always used exactly the way they
are provided. This departs from the idea that formulaic speech only serves
for rote learning. On the contrary, there is evidence that students did
not repeat the chunks mechanically but tried instead to make them meaningful
by not only providing contexts in which they could fit, but also, and especially,
by either recombining or modifying them. It is important to mention that
the degree of recombination and modification varied according to the levels
of students. Most of the students who made the most complex recombinations
and modifications were the most successful in class. Two of them had recently
taken a French class, contrary to the others, who had not studied French
for many years. In addition, some students seemed more enthusiastic about
the study; therefore, they had a better preparation and performed better,
using more complex utterances. They succeeded in adapting the chunks by
either adding new ones or replacing some while adjusting them to their
real lives. The students who recombined the least were less proficient.
They were the ones who mostly used the chunks without any change. A couple
of them also did not seem very enthusiastic about the study. Their performances
were often very fast and cold, contrary to the most enthusiastic students
who had a very warm performance, which, consequently, aroused more cheers
from the class.
Overall, as can
be seen in the results, chunks were often put together in the same response
to anticipate questions that were likely to be asked. Being creative in
language does not necessarily mean that you create a completely new utterance,
both in its form and its meaning. As Stemmer (1973) clearly mentioned in
his research about children creativity, creativity also occurs when previously
heard chunks are associated to generate a new idea or a new thought. Knowing
the meaning of each of those chunks, students understood that they could
either delete one word or phrase, or replace them by other words or phrase
in order to communicate their ideas. By providing some contexts, students
transfer their creative thought into their speech, influencing then the
chunks they were supposed to use. Thus, the chunks, as Mitchell and Martin
(1997) remarked, break down with new elements being substituted within
them. The findings of this research support the idea that students usually
unpack the chunks and use parts of them, sometimes by combining them with
other parts, and use them to produce new utterances. It seems obvious,
based on the study, that not all learners will have the same degree of
creativity in recombining and modifying chunks, but at least it shows that
creativity is well engaged in the unpacking of chunks. Students did not
just give back the chunks as they had received them but tried instead,
to use them meaningfully in a context.
As a whole, the results from this study suggest that formulaic speech
does play an important role in language learning. Contrary to what Krashen
and Scarcella (1978) have contended, the findings have indicated that creativity
is not independent from the breaking down of chunks. Students do modify
the chunks they are provided with so that they can fit in contexts; they
do generate new ideas and new thoughts through a process of deletion, addition
or replacement instead of just reciting the chunks. I will not deny the
fact that some chunks will be reproduced in their original forms. However,
this does not make their use less creative or less communicative in that
students build some personal contexts around them, turning them into meaningful
utterances instead of just detached and meaningless utterances.
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