FORMAL APPROACHES TO SLA

By : Kristiani (1800888203015)
In this chapter, we focus on linguistic in which
the SLA relationship with other academic
disciplines has been most heavily felt.
This chapter deals with nativist approaches to
language, which claim that at least some aspects
of language learning involve innateness :
1. General nativism
there is no specific mechanism designed for
language learning.
2. special nativism
Includes theories of language (learning) that
posit special principles for language learning,
principles that are unique to language (learning)
and that are not used in other cognitive
endeavors.
Universal Grammar
Universal Grammar (UG) is theory of languages
and the expressions they generate.
The theory underlying UG assumes that
language consists of a set of abstract principles
that characterize core grammars of all natural
languages.
(6-1) I want to go.
(6-2) I wanna go.
(6-3) John wants to go but we don’t want to.
(6-4) John wants to go but we don’t wanna.
(6-5) Do you want to look at the chickens?
(6-6) Do you wanna look at the chickens?
(6-7) Who do you want to see?
(6-8) Who do you wanna see?
Examples 6-1 to 6-8 show the range of
possibilities for changing want to to wanna.
However, there are many times in English where
the sequence want to cannot be replaced by the
informal wanna, as in 6-9 to 6-12 :
(6-9) Who do you want to feed the dog?
(6-10) *Who do you wanna feed the dog?
(6-11) Who do you want to win the race?
(6-12) *Who do you wanna win the race?
Transfer: the UG perspective
White (1992) provided detail on this issue. She
notes four areas that make current views of the
phenomenon of transfer truly different from
earlier conceptualizations, particularly those
embodied in the frame work of contrastive
analysis.We deal with three of these areas here:
levels of representation, clustering, and learn
ability.
Phonology
Table 6.1 Hierarchy of phonological difficulty
NL TL
0 Obligatory difficult
0 Optional Optional
Obligatory Obligatory Optional
Obligatory 0 Optional
0 Optional Optional
Obligatory Obligatory easy
The hierarchy (ordered from most difficult to least
difficult) attempts to make pre-dictions of difficulty
based on whether or not phonological categories are
absent or present and, if present, whether they are
obligatory or optional . Thus, if a learner comes from a
language that has no phonemic contrast between two
sounds (e.g., /l/ and /r/) and is learning a language
where that contrast is obligatory, she or he will have
difficulty. However, if the first language and the target
language both have the same contrast, there will be
little difficulty in learning.
Thank u