The theory of affordances

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 521 82347 1 hardback ISBN 0 521 53032 6 paperback Contents List of tables page vii Preface to the second edition ix Preface to the first edition xii 1 Why a global language? 1 What is a global language? 3 What makes a global language? 7 Why do we need a global language? 11 What are the dangers of a global language? 14 Could anything stop a global language? 25 A critical era 27 2 Why English? The historical context 29 Origins 30 America 31 Canada 36 The Caribbean 39 Australia and New Zealand 40 South Africa 43 South Asia 46 Former colonial Africa 49 Southeast Asia and the South Pacific 54 A world view 59 v Contents

English as a global language

Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

PART ONE: CLEARING THE GROUND PART TWO: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES PART THREE: CONCEPTS OF LANGUAGE PART FOUR: CONCEPTS OF SOCIETY PART FIVE: CONCEPTS OF LANGUAGE LEARNING PART SIX: CONCEPTS OF LANGUAGE TEACHING

语言教学的基本概念 = Fundamental concepts of language teaching

The study reported here examines the English language knowledge and performance of bilingual school children of Middle School age in Britain, in particular their acquisition and use of vocabulary. One of the chief premises of the research is that pupils from bilingual minority ethnic backgrounds suffer a major disadvantage while learning from the National Curriculum because they lack the necessary richness of word knowledge, accompanied by the conceptual frameworks expected in learning subjects such as science and geography. Furthermore, it is believed that by raising awareness among teachers and by the adoption of appropriate methods of vocabulary teaching founded on research, the vocabulary learning of bilingual pupils can be greatly increased. The aim of the study is to identify, describe and evaluate methods of vocabulary instruction currently used and to provide recommendations for suitable methods to be introduced. By means of an action research methodology implemented in a middle school, and with the joint participation of some members of staff and some pupils, classroom data was collected over a two and a half year period from teachers of science, geography and English and their pupils, supplemented with semi-structured interviews with teachers and support staff and conversations with children. These data provided material for a detailed analysis of exactly how individual words develop from first introduction into the pupils’ active vocabulary.

Teaching and Learning Vocabulary

Part 1 Evidence of speech milestones: the early stages later stages speech processing milestones evidence from abnormal language development and language disorders. Part 2 The critical period hypothesis - first language-related evidence: the onset of the critical period the end of the critical period first language development after puberty a decline into the vale of years? Part 3 The critical period hypothesis - second language evidence: the younger=better position the older=better position the younger=better at acquiring accent BICS position the younger=better in the long run position age and the second language learning process. Part 4 Theoretical perspectives: the ageing of the senses age and competition between languages neurolinguistics and the critical period cognitive developmental views affect and motivation age and input the de-coupling hypothesis the age factor and nativism. Part 5 The educational dimension: second languages in the early school years second languages for the young-old.

Language Acquisition: The Age Factor

Unlike many recent books on L2 vocabulary and processing, this volume does not set out to offer a complex perspective of the L2 lexicon, but rather represents a sustained attempt to come to grips with some very basic questions clustered around the relationship between the L2 mental lexicon and the L1 mental lexicon It provides a substantial review of L1 and L2 lexical research issues such as similarities and differences between the conditions of L1 and L2 acquisition, the respective roles of form and meaning in L1 and L2 processing, and the degree of separation/integration between L1 and the L2 lexical operations New research into the L2 lexicon from the Trinity College Dublin Modern Languages Project is considered in the latter part of the volume

Exploring the second language mental lexicon

This article addresses age-related attainment effects in second language acquisition, posing the question of whether such effects are to be explained in terms of a Critical Period with a predictable and abrupt offset point or in terms of the impact of a wider range of factors. It attempts to explore this question by focusing on four discussion points in the current debate: (i) the wide use of native-speaker behaviour as the key L2 attainment yardstick; (ii) the degree of compatibility of prevailing views regarding the notion of a critical period for L2 acquisition; (iii) the relative narrowness of much research in this area, where age of L2 onset is often regarded as the crucial if not the only critical variable; and (iv) insights relative to maturational constraints on language acquisition offered by recent brain research. The article concludes that a loosening of the association between ultimate L2 attainment research and Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) issues would shed more light on L2 attainment in terms both of the comprehensiveness and of the acuity of the insights which would result.

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A critical review of age-related research on L2 ultimate attainment

Research on age-related effects in L2 development often invokes the idea of a critical period - the postulation of which is customarily referred to as the Critical Period Hypothesis. This paper argues that to speak in terms of the Critical Period Hypothesis is misleading, since there is a vast amount of variation in the way in which the critical period for language acquisition is understood -affecting all the parameters deemed to be theoretically significant and indeed also relating to the ways in which the purported critical period is interpreted in terms of its implications for L2 instruction. The paper concludes that the very fact that there are such diverse and competing versions of the Critical Period Hypothesis of itself undermines its plausibility.

The Critical Period Hypothesis: A coat of many colours

This paper aims to show that the development of multilingualism in the world has reached a point where, in terms of scale and significance, it is comparable with and assimilable to politico-economic aspects of globalisation, global mobility and ‘postmodern’ modes of thinking. The paper situates multilingualism in its relationship with the most dramatic social changes currently occurring in the world, notably the transformation of the experience of time and space, as well as global mobility, which has resulted in unprecedented diversity and heterogeneity in the populations of individual countries and regions. It argues that multilingualism is the ineluctable concomitant of all dimensions of globalisation and that the application in the relevant literature of the notion of a new linguistic dispensation to recent shifts in the language/society interface is entirely justified by the facts. Finally, taking an historical perspective, it seeks to make a case for the claim that, although multilingual ind...

David Singleton

Papers

Language Acquisition: The Age Factor

Exploring the second language mental lexicon

A critical review of age-related research on L2 ultimate attainment

The Critical Period Hypothesis: A coat of many colours

Multilingualism as a New Linguistic Dispensation