English Language Teaching in its Social Context

20 ROSAMOND MITCHELL AND FLORENCE MYLEScommunity of target language ‘native speakers’; most remain noticeably deviant in theirpronunciation, and many continue to make grammar mistakes and to search for words, evenwhen well motivated to learn, after years of study, residencc and/or work in contact withthe target language.Second language learning, then, is typified by incomplete success; the claimed systematicevolution of our underlying interlanguage rules towards the target language system seemsdoomcd, most often, never to integrate completely with its goal. Indeed, while some learnersgo on learning, others seem to cease to make any visible progress, no matter how manylanguage classes they attend, or how activcly they continue to use their second language forcommunicative purposes.The termfossilization is commonly used to describe this phenomenon,when a learner’s L2 system seems to ‘freeze’, or become stuck, at somc more or lessdeviant stage.These phenomena of incomplete success and fossilization are also significant ‘facts’ aboutthe process of L2 learning, which any serious theory must eventually explain. As we willsee, explanations of two basic types have in fact been offered.The first group of explanationsare psycholinguistic: the language-specific learning mechanisms available to the young childsimply cease to work for older learners, at least partly, and no amount of study and effortcan recreate them.Thc second group of explanations are sociolinguistic: oldcr L2 learners donot have the social opportunities, or the motivation, to identify completely with the nativespeaker community, but may instead valuc their distinctive identity as learners or asforeigners.Cross-linguistic injluences in L2 learningEveryday observation tells us that learncrs’ performance in a second language is influencedby the language, or languages, that they already know.This is routinely obvious from learners’‘foreign accent’, i.c. pronunciation which bcars traces of the phonology of their firstlanguage. It is also obvious when learners make certain characteristic mistakes, e.g. when anativc speaker of English says something in French likc je suis dome, an utterance parallel tothc English ‘1 am twelve’. (The correct French expression would of course bej’ai doure ansI have twelve years.)This kind of phenomenon in learner productions is often called by the term languagetransfer. But how important is the phcnomenon, and what exactly is being transferred? Secondlanguage researchers have been through several ‘swings of the pendulum’ on this question,as Gass puts it (1996). Behaviourist thcorists viewed language transfer as an important sourceof error and interference in L2 learning, because L1 ‘habits’ were so tenacious and deeplyrootcd.The interlanguage theorists who followcd downplayed the influence of the L1 in L2learning, however, because of their preoccupation with identifying creative processes at workin L2 development; they pointed out that many L2 errors could not lie traced to L1 influence,and were primarily concerned with discovcring pattcrns and dcvclopmental sequences onthis creative front.Thcorists today, as we shall see, would gcncrally accept once more that cross-linguisticinfluences play an important role in L2 learning. Howevcr, we will still find widcly differingviews on the extent and nature of these influences. Some researchers have in fact claimedthat learners with different Lls progress at somewhat different rates, and even followdiffcrent acquisitional routes, at least in somc areas of the target grammar (c.g. Keller-Cohcn1979, Zobl 1982, quoted in Gass 1996, pp. 322-3).