II. DISCUSSION
1. COMPETENCE AND USE
We have known what is the communicative competence that introduced in Chapter 5 is broadly inclusive in scope: “everything that a speaker needs to know in order to communicate appropriately within a particular community.” (Saville-Troike2003).
This construct combines the knowledge of language which defines linguistic competence, knowledge of the specific components and levels of a language, and knowledge that is required for their appropriate use in communicative activities. Accounting for competence in this broader sense also requires considering “encyclopedic” cultural knowledge concerning the content of what is written or talked about, and recognizing the social significance of the context within which language use takes place.
The ability to use language appropriately includes pragmatic competence. This can be defined as what people must know in order to interpret and convey meaning within communicative situations: knowledge that accounts for “the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication” (Crystal 1997a:301)
The knowledge that an L2 learner begins with includes everything that he or she has previously acquired as part of his or her general cognitive development and prior social experience, as well as in his or her acquisition of L1.
2. ACADEMIC vs. INTERPERSONAL COMPETENCE
L1 competence ideally involves the broad repertoire of knowledge which people need to communicate appropriately for many purposes within their native language community. L2 competence is typically, perhaps unavoidably, much more restricted, especially when SLA takes place in a foreign language setting. For most people, their second language often serves a much more limited range of needs than their first language, depending on the situation they are in. For example, native speakers of English in the USA might learn Spanish L2 because their jobs require engaging in cross-national sales and services, or because they are in social service roles which involve daily communication with native Spanish speakers, or because they have academic interests in New World history and need access to archival records and scholarly publications that are available in Spanish.
§ Priorities for L2 use
In considering the purposes for which people learn second languages, we must make a distinction between at least two fundamental types of communicative competence: academic competence and interpersonal competence.
o Academic competence : would Academic competence would include the knowledge needed by learners who want to use the L2 primarily to learn about other subjects
o Interpersonal competence : encompasses knowledge required of learners who plan to use the L2 primarily in face-to-face contact with other speakers.
As with academic competence, vocabulary is the most important level of language knowledge for these learners to acquire, although the domains of vocabulary involved are likely to be very different. Knowledge which enables them to participate in listening and speaking activities merit the highest priority for interpersonal contexts; they must be able to process language rapidly “online” (without the opportunity to review or revise text that is possible in reading and writing), as well as possess strategies for achieving clarification and negotiation of meaning during the course of face-to-face interaction. Depending on the situation, the level of language to be used may be formal or informal. Writing and reading activities are required in some interpersonal situations, but speaking and listening are much more likely to play dominant roles in interpersonal production and interpretation.
The activities that have highest priority in academic competence are receptive (reading and listening), which function primarily in processing input; the activities with highest priority for interpersonal competence are oral (listening and speaking), which function in processing both input and expression. While all four areas of communicative activity draw on an overlapping pool of L2 knowledge at different language levels, they are independent to some extent.
Learners’ academic and interpersonal competences which underlie their ability to engage in these activities usually develop to different degrees, and there is no necessary reason for one type to precede or outpace the other. It is known, however, that literacy (and schooling) in the L1 facilitates acquisition of competence in an L2 under conditions of formal instruction.
3. COMPONENT OF LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE
Linguists have traditionally divided language into the following five components for purposes of description and analysis (as listed in Chapter 3):
§ vocabulary (lexicon)
§ morphology (word structure)
§ phonology (sound system)
§ syntax (grammar)
§ discourse (ways to connect sentences and organize information)
Determining the specific L2 needs of any group of learners involves identifying what subset of linguistic elements is associated with the varieties (or registers) of a language that are used in particular situations. In recent years, much of this task has been carried out using computerized analyses of “corpora,” or large collections of written and spoken texts (e.g. Biber, Conrad, and Reppen 1998).
a. Vocabulary
As we have already noted, vocabulary (or lexicon) is the most important level of L2 knowledge for all learners to develop – whether they are aiming primarily for academic or interpersonal competence, or for a broader scope of communicative competence that spans the two. There is a core of high-frequency words in a language that everyone needs to learn, but beyond that, which specific vocabulary elements learners are most likely to need depends on whether the L2 is going to be used primarily for academic or interpersonal functions.
The core vocabulary in every language includes function words, a limited set of terms that carry primarily grammatical information. For example, in English the most frequently used words include: determiners the, that, this; prepositions to, of, for; conjunctions and, but; pronouns I, it, he, she, you; and auxiliary verbs is/was/be, have/has/had. The most frequently used words in spoken (but not written) English also include interjections yeah, oh; contractions it’s, that’s, don’t; and verbs expressing personal opinion or feeling know, like, think.
English words that occur with high frequency in a wide range of academic (but not interpersonal) contexts include modifiers such as analytical, explanatory, and implicit, as well as names for scientific concepts such as data, hypotheses, and correlation. Other general academic vocabulary items from written texts have been compiled in the University Word List (Xue and Nation 1984).
Vocabulary knowledge is acquired to different degrees, with learners first recognizing words they see or hear, then producing them in limited contexts, and ultimately (perhaps) fully controlling their accurate and appropriate use. L2 speakers may never acquire complete knowledge of some words that nevertheless become part of their productive repertoire. Among the last types of word knowledge to be mastered are collocation behavior (what words go together), metaphorical uses (a thing regarded as symbolic of something else), connotations associated with synonyms, and stylistic register constraints (see Nation 1990).
The following types of knowledge contribute to effective use of context for vocabulary learning (Nagy 1997):
o Linguistic knowledge: syntactic information; constraints on possible word meanings; patterns in word structure; meanings of surrounding words.
o World knowledge: understanding of the concepts which the words represent; familiarity with related conceptual frameworks; awareness of social associations.
o Strategic knowledge: control over cognitive (acquiring knowledge through thought, experience and the sense) resources.
b. Morphology
L2 learning at the level of morphology (or word structure) can be very important for vocabulary development as well as for achieving grammatical accuracy. This level is highly significant for learning English, for instance, where thousands of words are formed by compounding smaller words (e.g. wind _ shield _ windshield [British windscreen]) or by adding prefixes and suffixes (called derivational morphology) that can create new meanings (e.g. un- _ kind _ unkind) or change part of speech (e.g. friend [noun] _ -ly _ friendly [adjective])
c. Phonology
Mastery of the L2 sound system was considered the first priority for teaching and learning during the middle of the twentieth century (as expressed in the writing of Fries 1945; quoted in Chapter 3).
As a component of academic competence, proficiency in phonological perception is required for listening if learners are studying other subjects through the medium of L2, and at least intelligible pronunciation is needed for speaking in most educational settings
As a component of interpersonal competence, proficiency in phonological perception and intelligible production are essential for successful spoken communication, but a significant degree of “foreign accent” is acceptable in most situations as long as it is within the bounds of intelligibility.
The following aspects of the sound systems are likely to differ for L1 and L2 (see Chapter 3):
· Which speech sounds are meaningful components of the phonological system (phonemes)
· Possible sequences of consonants and vowels (phonotactics)
· Which speech sounds can and cannot occur in combination with one another, in which syllable and word positions
· Intonation patterns (stress, pitch, and duration)
· Rhythmic patterns (pauses and stops)
d. Syntac
Depending on the theoretical linguistic perspective one takes (Chapter 3), acquiring the syntax of another language may be seen as an issue of internalizing new construction patterns, generative rules, different parameters for innate principles, or collocational probabilities and constraints.
For example:
S V O English, Chinese, French, Russian
S O V Japanese, Turkish, Persian, Finnish
V S O Irish, Welsh, Samoan, Zapotec
(German is unusual in having a mixed system, since the word order is SVO in main clauses and SOV in subordinate clauses.)
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