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2.1 The Research on Second Language Acquisition

Over the years and beyond bilingualism, linguistic research in the context of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has yielded quite different if not controversial results. It seems to meander between the opposites of the Unitary System (USH) and the Dual System Hypothesis (DSH) and even goes back as far as the assumptions of learning psychologists (Lernpsychologen) like Carel van Parreren (1960). Van Parreren assumed a mental dual track system, where interferences occasioned distracting connections between the L1 and L2 “track” (like in the old-fashioned stereo tape recorders), and he considered the unitarian view as being harmful to the learning process. Over time, language teaching strategies went through a number of turns from behaviorism and the direct (Berlitz) method through to paradigmatic changes like immersion and generative SLA (see above: Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar and the Language Making Capacity—LMC), and the communicative, competence-oriented and intercultural approaches. All these changes have strongly influenced teaching strategies and more recently were complemented by social-constructivist ideas, relating to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD; cf. Klewitz 2017a: 15) and to research results from cognitive neuro-science and experimental neurolinguistics. A comprehensive and integrative approach towards learning processes in general is presently gaining considerable influence as the concept of Visible Learning based on the meta-analyses conducted by New Zealand’s educational researcher John Hattie.

One of the central issues remains, however, whether there are basic differences between acquiring your mother tongue (L1) and learning your second and/or foreign language (L2) and if so, how decisive these are. Apparently, L1 acquisition entails the parallel development of cultural and world knowledge and always happens successfully and effortlessly, if not automatically. Learning a foreign language, on the other hand, is perceived as being more difficult, can only be completed to a certain level, e.g. as described in the global scales of the CEF (see 4.2 and 7.2), and a nativelike competence is rarely, if at all, achieved. The language level arrived at depends, moreover, on vast individual differences, such as motivation, attitudes and types of learners and the respective contexts of societal expectations, school provisions and cultural environments. At the same type, there are certain parallels between L1 and L2 acquisition: similar mistakes occur in child- and adult-learning, for instance to-do-negations in English, syntax errors in German, fossilization in the development of the so-called interlanguage as a phase in the acquisition process that curbs learning progress or standstill as in the third-person-singular-“s” and other grammatical phenomena that deviate from the target language and seem difficult to “repair”. The answer to the question if learning L2 follows conscious (“learning”) or unconscious (“acquisition”) patterns5 depends on the learning theories operating in the background (cf. for details: Riemer 2010: 278 ff).

2.2 Behaviorism and a Black Box

Prevalent between the 1940s and 1970s in Anglophone as well as European countries, one of the early learning theories was dominated by behaviorism claiming that learning as part of behavior occurred through interaction with the environment in a process called conditioning. New behavior/learning was simply a response to environmental stimuli. Stimuli-response behaviors were to be studied in a systematic and observable manner as opposed to internal events like thinking or emotions, expectations and motivation. In this theory the nature-versus-nurture dilemma (chapter 3) was resolved in favor of nurture with the near exclusion of innate or inherited factors. Extended to language learning, the stimulus-response system plus positive and/or negative feedback was realized by so-called pattern-drills that allowed repetition and correction but very few situational or conscious operations, never mind language awareness. Since the learner’s brain was thought of as a black box operating between stimulus and response, results of learning activities were in the focus of instruction, they were measurable and comparable. This is probably why audiolingual and audiovisual methods, the direct application of the behavioral learning theory, are still being used to gain insights into learning and language development although the theory itself has since been refuted in many details, albeit keeping some relevance—in textbooks, exercise sequences and audiolingual practice.

The behaviorist approach maintained that all complex behavior, including language learning, was acquired from the environment, apart from a few innate reflexes and the capacity for learning, an assumption that was questioned by early Gestalt psychologists as well as later theories of cognitive development. It was the idea of machine-like human behavior that attracted much criticism and consequently a new psychology of learning and language acquisition came to the fore, including the Dutch psychologist Carel van Parreren with his theory of a dual track system (van Parreren 1960). The related Gestalt theory had already supported a concept of insight learning, meaning that people would learn most effectively by problem solving and recognizing a gestalt or organizing principle. Van Parreren, in turn, focused on the importance of perceptions and affect for the understanding of human learning. In their cognitive development learning would always be based on actions accomplished by students with the help of teachers or more knowledgeable peers. In this, van Parreren followed Vygotsky’s ideas of an educational concept, summarized in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD; cf. chapter 6 in detail). Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist active in the 1960s, had proposed his theory about the relationship between speech and thinking (Vygotsky: 1962—Thought and Language), but the study of cultural historical psychology by that time—during the Cold War—was suspect for political reasons and only later taken on by mainstream scientists like Jerome Bruner and his concept of Scaffolding (see chapter 6.9).

2.3 The Universal Grammar and Noam Chomsky

As part of cognitive psychology, van Parreren focused on the problem of interference in learning processes, especially the relationship between two languages (L1 and L2) in language acquisition. Contrary to recent research results, where more complex distinctions are discussed, such as positive and negative interferences as well as inferences, his assumption of the mental dual track system posited that the linkage of two systems, in this case of two languages, would cause detrimental effects. Especially if languages were characterized by similarities in structure and lexis, there would be negative effects: one linguistic element (from L1) would influence another one (from L 2), because students would tend to create a cognitive linkage between related elements. Foreign language teaching, as a follow-through, needed to aim at preventing connections between mother tongue and foreign language(s), which would support convergence processes rather than facilitating correct and sustainable learning results. Mental tracks of the foreign language system would assimilate with the mother tongue elements and the “clumping factor” of similar elements would connect otherwise disjoined tracks of L1 and L2. Van Parreren explains this process of homogenizing when originally separated mental tracks are merged into one system (clumping factor). This is why the explicit separation of L1 and L2 should be encouraged and even safeguarded by avoiding tangency between the two linguistic systems to limit the interlingual transfer, predominantly seen as negative by the Dutch researcher and his school of cultural historical psychology.

Despite the differences in learning and language theories, language acquisition as a mere act of imitation appeared less and less convincing and the abandonment of behaviorism in the teaching community—or the greater majority—was encouraged by competing explanations of the role of innate or native dispositions in L2 learning. The paradigm of generative SLA, based on the concept of a Universal Grammar (UG) was already developed by Noam Chomsky and his school in the 1950s to 1960s. Following the Poverty of Stimulus (POS) the existence of a UG was deemed to explain why children—despite a limited input of language models—were able to develop linguistic structures that they could not have experienced in their own surroundings. This is what Chomsky analyzed as the logic L1 problem with the conclusion that there was every reason to argue in favor of an innate UG—meaning a cognitively language-specific endowment (“endowment” as a figure of speech will reappear in dealing with the LMC and its meaning for childhood bilingualism).

UG, believed to be an innate or native mechanism, would be described as the product of a specialized language organ in the human brains, a faculty dedicated to the mastering of language. The plausibility of linguistic nativism was not only supported by the above-mentioned POS but also by the everyday observation that infants and children develop their language almost effortlessly and successfully even in the absence of a caretaker’s formal instruction and active attempts to correct their children’s grammar. According to Chomsky, UG as a mental module would thus solve the problem of how children—and language learners in general for that matter—could acquire and/or learn the complex syntactic and semantic rules necessary to put together sentences and communicate just by sole exposure to the language(s) spoken around them. This faculty or mental module would also constitute your linguistic competence, but a lot more additional knowledge would be needed to enable language performance, in other words actual language use with all its limitations like the previously mentioned TOT as a case in point. As a nativist mechanism, it would be triggered off at contact with the mother tongue and develop its own dynamics; whether the same or a similar process is working or at least influential in L2 acquisition has been argued controversially ever since.

In the 1950s to 1960s Chomsky’s linguistic research and ensuing theories revolutionized and reoriented academic approaches to language worldwide. By aiming at delineating and explaining the tools and means through which infants and children acquire language(s) he developed a system of principles and building blocks that were to demonstrate an infant’s innate understanding of syntax and semantics. Criticism appeared quickly with the bottom line that Chomsky’s propositions remained a truism:

only humans have language, so sth. about our genome is “special” insofar as it enables us to develop a language faculty whereas other animals do not.

In other words, humans have UG, a genetic propensity for language that is quite rich, but it need not be and, given our understanding of the evolution of the language faculty as of now as well as our general understanding of how genetics works, quite likely cannot be 100 % specific to language alone (https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1269. Last viewed 03/05/2021).

Chomsky and colleagues—after 2002—have rejected certain assumptions of a “rich” UG and argued that the domain-specific faculty of language comprised only the property of recursion, as a linguistic property whereby phrases may be continuously embedded into other phrases:

Chomsky explains linguistic recursion as something that occurs when a grammatical sentence, which includes a noun or noun phrase and a verb, might or might not contain another sentence. In Chomsky's understanding, there is no upper bound, or outer limit, on how many sentences can be maintained within each other. In this understanding, recursion in language develops as we build increasingly long and complex sentences. … Chomsky has understood recursion in language to be indicative of the tremendous creativity of language. Since the number of embedded sentences is unbounded, there are multiple possibilities for human expression as occurring within recursion (Sterns: 2018 n.p.).

2.4 The Minimalist Position of Recursion

No longer arguing in favor of a rich UG, linguists from the Chomsky school now support a minimalist position purporting a lean version of the innate faculty of language, basically characterized by recursion. But particularly in the light of neuro-biological research findings even this reduced version of the UG is increasingly being questioned to a point that UG might not exist at all but would be part of the general cognitive human properties. Two misjudgments appear to be tenacious: that older people need more time to learn a foreign language and that they are best learned on the basis of grammar. Both are long-lived because, like Chomsky’s UG, they keep being repeated every so often. Developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, for instance, claims that specific grammatical principles and constructions have not evolved biologically and cognitive scientist David Everett goes as far as maintaining that UG does not exist at all. To Everett the question is not whether humans can think recursively:

The question is whether this ability is linked specifically to language or instead to human cognitive accomplishments more generally (it could be connected to both, but that is less likely given what we know about the organization of the brain) … Recursion is not fundamental to human language but is rather a component of human cognition more generally… Language does not seem to be innate. There seems to be no narrow faculty of language nor any universal grammar. Language is ancient and emerges from general human intelligence, the need to build communities and cultures (Everett 2017: n.p.).

There is, however, still sympathy in the research community for the Chomsky school of thought. In his book The Language Instinct (1994), psychologist Steven Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. But instead of proposing a Universal Grammar he calls this faculty an “instinct” developed in biological evolution unique to humans. According to the Canadian scientist, this instinct was instrumental for communication among social hunter-gatherers and is comparable to other animal adaptations like those of spiders (web-weaving) or beavers (dam-building). As a mental module, this instinct represents specific structures in the human brain recognizing the general rules of other humans’ speech and in this confirms that “Chomsky’s theory (at any time) has attracted a plurality of linguists, but never a majority, since there have always been rival theories …” (Horgan 2016: n.p.):

The misconception that Chomsky represents the dominant view comes from the fact that the opposition is divided into many approaches and factions, so there’s no single figure that can be identified with an alternative. … Another problem with the claim that Chomsky’s theory of language “is being overturned” (as if it had ever been accepted, which is not true), is that it’s not clear what “Chomsky’s theory of language” refers to. He has proposed a succession of technical theories in syntax, and at the same time has made decades of informal remarks about language being innate, which have changed over the decades, and have never been precise enough to confirm or disconfirm. And it’s not so easy to say what “Universal Grammar” or an innate “language faculty” consists of; it’s necessarily abstract, since the details of any particular language, like Japanese or English, are uncontroversially learned (ibid.).

Further insights into the properties of L1 development, taken up by Pinker and related to in the Guide for Bilingual Parents (Meisel 2019), allegedly confirmed three relevant findings: (1) that L1 acquisition is always successful, (2) that it happens at first rate, (3) that in L1 grammatical development is uniform and children proceed through identical developmental phases (cf. Meisel: 33). The explanation seems like a resurgence of Chomskyan thought and maintains that children are equipped with—what Meisel calls—a Language Making Capacity (LMC; see above) guiding linguistic development. This innate LMC

does not relate to specific languages but contains principles and mechanisms enabling children to whatever language they are exposed to. The LMC is genetically encoded and species-specific, i.e. only humans possess a faculty for language. It is innate, meaning that children are endowed with it at birth, although initially they cannot make full use of it, either because they are cognitively not yet ready or because parts of the LMC only become accessible in the course of development (ibid.: 34).

Similar to the older UG version but also in accordance with Pinker’s theories, the LMC is supposed to be genetically encoded and innate, and as part of nativist positions it means that children inherit this capacity at birth—or in the words of the Guide for Bilingual Parents “LMC is an endowment for bilingual children” (ibid.: 44, 47). The assumption that all children share a common language acquisition mechanism also describes the milestones of L1 development as language perception, comprehension and production (cf. ibid.: 37, 40). Whether this can also be applied to L2 learning is a different discussion and needs to be considered separately, mainly in the context research about L1-L2 divergence and the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (FDH, see chapter 3). The focus here is on the acquisition of mental grammars, because grammar is considered the core component of linguistic competence (cf. Meisel: 30). Following this position, the consequences for language instruction are fairly obvious: no (formal) teaching would be required, neither any corrective feedback from parents:

… many parents try to foster children’s linguistic development by correcting their grammatical errors. It seems, however, that this has little effect on acquisition processes—these children do not fare better than those whose parents do not correct them. … they should know that language acquisition succeeds equally well without this kind of support (ibid.: 31).

In sum, the LMC position insinuates that for learning a language (and at that also foreign languages) no particular instruction is needed and best results are to be expected from immersion situations and programs. The further development of teaching strategies, however, has meanwhile acknowledged the differences between the acquisition of a mother tongue and foreign language learning, epitomized in the revision of the UG as a minimalist program—still as a rejection of behaviorist beliefs. In this context the FDH was established as a means to overcome fundamental criticism of the UG proposition and allow for different language development of children, adolescents and adults—with a growing need for effective instruction and more conscious learning. Details of the FDH will be discussed in the following juxtaposition of nature-versus-nurture in the next chapter (chapter 3).

2.5 The Input and Output Hypotheses

In conclusion, nativists—as exemplified by Chomsky and Meisel—tend to overestimate the challenges language learners have to face and underestimate the resources available to them. A child or adolescent does not represent a tabula rasa but they are able to lean on their own language development and can use their previous knowledge to perceive meaningful structures and extract helpful rules from further input. As a consequence for changes in teaching strategies and in the transition from young infants to older children, language learning appeared to be more convincing as a cognitive operation and replaced the assumption of a UG—even in its minimalist version or sole reliance on recursion—by a stronger focus on cognitive and mental solving capacities. In their theory of practice (cf. Coyle: 45) language instructors and linguistic researchers became convinced that, with growing age, conscious learning and language awareness would be more effective for developing grammar competence and lexical knowledge—always with a view to bridging the gap between competence and performance, as epitomized in the above-mentioned TOT and the Zone of Proximal Development.

This conviction and trend initiated a number of turns in (foreign) language learning and teaching encapsulating shifts from a previous focus on grammar to Task-Based Teaching and Learning (TBLT) and the growing importance of content. The ensuing transitions started with tendencies of learner-centered approaches and cooperative (group) working phases, a change in the instructor’s role from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side” and once again back to Direct Instruction in the version of explicit teacher influence and control and as opposed to exploratory models of inquiry-based learning. The two main sources for the “revival” of Direct Instruction—apart from much earlier versions in the 1960s—turned out to be DISTAR and John Hattie’s meta-analyses recommending this teaching strategy. The “Direct Instruction System for Teaching Arithmetic and Writing” (DISTAR) and the “Project Follow Through” (1968-1977) was a “cooperation between policy makers and educational practitioners” (De Florio 2016: 99) and proved most effective for teaching academic skills and providing positive outcomes for children like empowerment, self-esteem and a feeling of achievement. It was, however, criticized for limiting creativity due to its strict and scripted procedures. Hattie’s encouragement of Direct Instruction (as interactive whole-class teaching), not to be confused with traditional teacher-centered instruction (the chalk-and-talk version of “Frontalunterricht”6), was based on synthesized research of 304 studies with over 42,000 students showing a major effect size (d=0.59) and significantly larger than any other curriculum Hattie studied.

The UG theory had suggested that the nativist/innate language capacity (aka Meisel’s LMC; see above) of a child would be—more or less automatically—awakened by L1 contact and that L2 acquisition would follow the same mechanism. The fact, however, that under “normal” conditions L2 learning does not result in native-like competence and performance indicates that a direct and effortless access to the respective UG properties cannot be substantiated. Thus, and in another renunciation of behaviorism, the nativist position, namely Chomsky’s innate language theory, seems to have been superseded by cognitive approaches and even more recently by learning theories based on constructivism and findings of neuro-science. Common to these shifts in the theory of practice is that they do not take a language-specific mental module for granted (like in the UG and its minimalist version). They rather assume that language acquisition and learning7 are creative processes and occur in processing information in multiple ways.

In a succession of consecutive steps to explain the relationship between language acquisition and learning, Krashen’s monitor hypothesis (1977) can be regarded as an important starting point and building block in assigning the learning system the role of monitoring or controlling utterances, whereas the acquisition system would act as the initiator of language production. His further theoretical assumptions, namely acquisition-learning, natural order, input, affective filter and reading hypotheses, were instrumental in discovering stages of language development referring, for instance, to basic grammar domains like English negations or German syntax as partly conscious and partly unconscious processes. One paradigm evolved concerning knowledge learned which cannot be transferred into knowledge acquired directly, but more recently it is suggested that previously acquired implicit knowledge can be turned into explicit knowledge of rules by reflection and analytical access through learners. Accordingly, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe: 2001) distinguishes four different kinds of general competences:

Declarative knowledge—savoir Practical skills and know-how—savoir-faire Attitudes, motivation, cognitive styles …—savoir-être Ability to learn—savoir-apprendre (ibid.: 101-106).

These areas of knowledge were complemented by Byram’s components of Intercultural Competence (1997), especially critical cultural awareness (savoir s’engagé) and will be further explored as pertinent parameters of an integrated bilingual teaching strategy in chapter 6.

Constructivist learning theories are a further development of the cognitive approach because they perceive the learner as an active agent, learning as an autonomous process of construction and gaining knowledge as a variable process in every individual. The most important conclusion would be that every learner gained something different from the same input (cf. Riemer: 279). But only linguistic input enables the learner to build on and restructure their language knowledge and performance:

For this to work, the input must be comprehensible. Interactionist approaches highlight the importance in this context of the conscious perception of linguistic forms. With respect to the linguistic interaction between target language speakers and target language learners (as well as among target language learners), they assume that input is made comprehensible for the learners through processes of negotiated meaning, for example via feedback, corrections or requests for clarification, and can then be processed by them in the optimal manner (Ohm: 2015 n.p.).

Interaction and cooperative activities in groups were considered to be the most supportive conditions for effective leaning. Yet, following the output hypothesis (Swain 2008), language input is not sufficient for successful L 2 acquisition, rather the language to be mastered needs to be actively practiced and used.

The output hypothesis completes this model of the cognitive and interactionist approaches by adding the idea that the learner’s production of the target language plays a central role in the learning process. The starting point for this is the observation that learners can frequently infer the meaning of target language input from the linguistic and situational context and thus focus their attention only to a limited extent on linguistic forms. On the other hand, when producing their own target language output, they are required for example, to engage to a much greater extent with the rules of word formation and inflection, as well as with word and sentence order (ibid.).