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3.2 Linking Nature and Nurture
In effect, Vroman’s FDH was able to create a link between the nativist (UG-) position in primary language acquisition and the idea that L2 learning was predominantly influenced by external factors and “nurtured” by educational and societal settings rather than by an innate language “endowment”. This, however, does not completely answer the question how children and adolescents learn to develop their language(s), which boils down to the controversy whether language acquisition is enabled by this “endowment”, the language acquisition faculty, or a result of environmental influences—in other words facilitated by nature or nurture.
According to Chomsky, language acquisition has a biological foundation which would be backed up by the following considerations: sounds are acquired in a certain sequence and are common to all world languages. The Guidebook for Bilingual Parents documents identical developmental phases for all children from the discrimination of sounds, a focus on language properties, different reactions to function and property words and—after two years—a rapid increase in the number of lexical items acquired (Meisel: 37 ff). These processes would occur in all world languages and confirm the existence of an innate mental structure, the domain-specific mechanism of UG.
In contrast to that, behaviorist theory had proposed that a child’s environment was the most important factor in language learning and would include, even be based on imitation, a clear-cut nurture position. Whereas imitation certainly plays a limited role even in second language acquisition, learners do not imitate everything they hear and are selective in what they produce; this could be taken as a hint at an “internal language-monitoring process” (Lanir 2019: n.p.) rather than the nurture aspect of environmental conditioning. Further aspects that cannot be explained by the process of imitation are overgeneralizations like goed, putted, mouses and sheeps (in inflection) and non-existent language structures that children never heard. Language chunks acquired through imitation become locked in a child’s memory and are not assimilated in their language production and thus dysfunctional. At the same time, children produce many more sounds and combinations than they hear and understand much more than they can produce—this phenomenon is also known as Poverty of Stimulus (POS—cf. Riemer: 277). Overall, they are exposed to language performance instead of competence and can even extract linguistic rules from incomplete or faulty language they listen to (cf. ibid.).
These aspects come across as a critical view of behaviorist language theory and an appreciation of the innate position of a UG and domain-specific mental modules. And indeed, despite all recent rejection of Chomsky’s propositions—including his own revocation of UG and resort to paradigms like recursion (cf. Everett 2017)—a study of psychologists claims to have found new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” theory:
One of the foundational elements of Chomsky’s work is that we have a grammar in our head, which underlies our processing of language,” explains David Poeppel, the study’s senior researcher and a professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology. “Our neurophysiological findings support this theory: we make sense of strings of words because our brains combine words into constituents in a hierarchical manner—a process that reflects an ‘internal grammar’ mechanism (NYU: 2015 n.p.).
On the other hand, and conceding that a universal grammar is not impossible in principle, linguists like Daniel Everett do not see much evidence for it and maintain that it would not work in any case. In his view, a complex interplay of factors structures the way humans talk and what they talk about. In that he is supported by developmental psychologists, and Michael Tomasello (2008), for instance, agrees that grammatical principles and constructions have no neural foundation but stem from more general cognitive processes and are part of communication in particular linguistic communities, although aspects of language competence might have evolved biologically. Everett, in his book Language: The Cultural Tool (2012), argues that the rules of language are “not innate but spring from necessity and circumstance”:
Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community. Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to solve the communication problem. Language is the tool that was invented to solve that problem. … The lesson is that language is not something mysterious that is outside the bounds of natural selection, or just popped into being through some mutated gene. But that language is a human invention to solve a human problem. Other creatures can't use it for the same reason they can't use a shovel: it was invented by humans, for humans and its success is judged by humans (Everett: 2012 n.p.).
3.3 Anthropology Sheds a New Light
Beyond the linguistic nativist-versus-learning debate, related fields in psychology (Pinker) and literature (Caliban/Ortega) have quite intensely mirrored the nature-versus-nurture controversy, which has a long history reaching even back to the beginnings of anthropology (Boas) in the late 19th century. Building blocks of this controversy will be helpful to consider in some detail because an integrative CLIL methodology not only needs to connect language and content, but also has to specify the various aspect of subject matters to establish content, which in addition to natural and social sciences also encompasses literature and cultural studies as key components. Therefore, it is essential to draw on some examples of how the nature/nurture debate has been documented in these CLIL related domains and which conclusions can be drawn for effective learning and successful teaching strategies in either focusing on the nature of (language) acquisition processes or tenets of Visible Learning trying to nurture content learning based on the three foundations of competence development, i.e. knowledge, skills and volition.2
A German expatriate like Franz Boas (1858-1942) is not commonly associated with developing linguistic theories or participating in discussing issues of whether acquired traits of character can be inherited. But he was one of the first scientists to refute the view that intelligence was innate and the assumption of “primitive races” justified, prevailing at his time. Boas emigrated to the United States and later earned the attribution of a Father of American Anthropology. A professor at the Columbia University in New York since 1899, Boas spent a lifetime, both in the US and Europe, to fight against the racist side of biological determinism. As a proponent of “cultural relativism” he argued that cultures cannot be ranked as higher or lower and that all humans see the world through the lens of their own cultural perspective. At the turn of the century (19 to 20) it was a difficult stance to take in the light of Darwin’s theory of evolution and Mendelson’s laws of dominant and recessive genes which spread the news that “acquired traits cannot under any circumstances be inherited; that is, our genetic material is sealed off from everything we learn” (Roth Pierpont: 2004 n.p.).
Together with his students, among them Margaret Mead, whose bestseller Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) “turned the American culture upside down” (ibid.), his research and academic work clearly went against mainstream psychology; Boas did not believe in turning heredity against culture but he believed that each person should only be judged as an individual and was malleable by cultural influences:
The challenge that remained was to demonstrate the power of culture in shaping lives. It was nature versus nurture with the scales reset: against our sealed-off genes, there was our accumulation of collective knowledge; in place of inherited learning, there was the social transmission of that knowledge from generation to generation. "Culture" was experience raised to scientific status. And it combined with biology to create mankind. Boas sent his students off to learn how the delicate balance worked (ibid.).
When Margaret Mead came back from Samoa, her research and ensuing publications established a new view of the concept of culture and a utopian perspective with the recognition of unknown freedom.
The extremes of nature versus nurture are spanned by literature and philosophy as well. In The Tempest (1610/11) Shakespeare has his Prospero, the Duke of Milan, say about Caliban: “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick” (IV, 1), who as the son of a witch is denied any possibility to escape slavery. About three hundred years later, Ortega y Gasset, spent part of his studies of Philosophy in Marburg/Lahn and came up with quite the opposite opinion: “Man has no nature, what he has is—history” (History as a System, 1935). But in America, during the 1920s and 30s, the racist dimension of biological determinism—as so determinately fought by Boas—had peaked, not only in the revival of the Ku Klux Klan with four hundred new members but also with books on race and immigration such as The Passing of the Great Race (1916) by amateur anthropologist Madison Grant or The Rising Tide of Color (1920) by Lothrop Stoddard. Warning against the coming nonwhite population explosion after World War I, Stoddard’s racist book reappeared in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) when Daisy’s bullish husband Tom Buchanan provokes his wife and her cousin Nick with quotations from a book he calls “The Rise of the Coloured Empires, by this man Goddard? …The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved” (The Great Gatsby: 19).
The dire consequences of biological and racist determinism have culminated in the 20th century holocaust and would hopefully have been overcome by now. But have researchers in the meantime settled the nature-versus-nurture debate finally? Natural scientist Steven Pinker seems to say “no”—at least when he summarizes the situation in his book The Blank Slate—The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002). It was John Locke in 1690 who envisaged the human mind as a blank slate, explaining everything people are and all their knowledge as malleable, easily influenced, trained and controlled, by their environment and experience. In his essay “Why nature & nurture won’t go away” (Pinker: 2004), Pinker argues, in a shift away from behaviorism, that the blank slate, the former cornerstone of behaviorism used to be “the ultimate safeguard against racism, sexism, and class prejudice” but was longer defendable:
Though human nature has been debated for as long as people have pondered their condition, it was inevitable that the debate would be transformed by the recent efflorescence of the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution. One outcome has been to make the doctrine of the blank slate untenable. No one, of course, can deny the importance of learning and culture in all aspects of human life. But cognitive science has shown that there must be complex innate mechanisms for learning and culture to be possible in the first place (ibid.: 6).
Turning to language as a “paradigm case”, he maintains that acquiring languages is a human talent (also called “instinct” by him). Pinker summarizes “a common position on nature and nurture among contemporary scientists” as follows:
By now most scientists reject both the nineteenth-century doctrine that biology is destiny and the twentieth-century (sic!) doctrine that the mind is a blank slate. … modern biology has made the very distinction between nature and nurture obsolete. … Indeed, genes are expressed in response to environmental signals, so it is meaningless to try to distinguish genes and environments; doing so only gets in the way of productive research (ibid.: 7).
In a nutshell: a common realization in recent years has pointed at the fact that the question how much behavior—and language as a part of human behavior—is due to heredity or environment might be wrong in the first place. It would probably have to be replaced by investigating how much nature and nurture interact instead of defending extreme nativist or nurturist opinions. Similarly, the debate whether linguistic skills are innate (nature) or acquired (nurture) might be resolved by a combination of the two attitudes. Especially, a cognitive approach deals with processes in the brain that underpin language acquisition, socio-cultural approaches—preferred here!—reject the notion that SLA is a purely psychological phenomenon and attempt to explain language development in a social context. This will prove an encouraging idea for language teachers (and researchers). The assumption that all children are born with an instinctive mental capacity (mindful of Pinker’s dictum of language as an “instinct”) allows them to learn and effectively use language. The challenge for instructors here is to foster and enhance this mental capacity or instinct and create favorable methodological and didactic conditions, particularly when dealing with the double objective to teach language and content at the same time, as in CLIL programs.
3.4 The Neuro-biological View
In this context, the linguistic side of CLIL can draw on results from neuro-biological research (cf. Müller 2003, Videsott 2009, Ellis 1994) describing mental processes of language representation and functions. One of the findings has observed minor neural networking in processing abstract concepts, necessitating to anchor abstract contents in multi-modal ways and to include affective situations in language teaching such as role plays, cooperative learning and active participation in teacher-student dialogues. As tangible content effects greater neural networking the assumption of a definite language center in the brain seems to be evident—the question only is whether this capacity is innate or a result of active learning and whether there is a sensitive phase of this learning process/language acquisition in terms of student-age. A related finding concerns the neural transmission of L1 and L2 acquisition and if different parts of the cortex are involved; in this process neural substrate was found in different parts of the brain after seven years of age, on the other hand changes in the physiology of the brain during L2 acquisition were only established between the ages of 13 and 16 (Müller: 173). Neurophysiological examinations have, additionally, not been able to show coherent results of the existence of a sensitive or critical age of language acquisition in the long run (cf. ibid.: 174, Meisel: 200 f).
Most neurobiological studies refer to the question if a joint neural network is used for the acquisition of L1 and L2. It appears that late L2 learners’ language can be located in the left part of the cortex, the so-called Broca area, the part of the brain connected to speech production (Videsott: 162). Overall, a comprehensive neural network is observed in the classic language environment, including Wernicke’s area which is the part of the cerebral cortex linked to the comprehension of written and spoken language (ibid.: 160). But many issues in the neural context of language acquisition remain unresolved; a common denominator, however, regards the L2 learning process as being influenced by languages that the learner already knows and confirms language transfer, especially as a bidirectional cross-linguistic influence.
Activating different cerebral areas for language comprehension and production remains a very complex process, depending—apart from its neural location—on additional factors like exposure, age, fluency, motivation, proficiency and learning strategies. The latter are, at least in school settings of foreign language instruction, often based on pseudo-communicative situations: a teacher too often keeps asking questions the answers to which s/he already knows. Much more effective would be the negotiation of meaning as a real process of communication by which the students have the occasion to produce more spontaneous output and gain more insight in their own learning processes and thus the aforementioned language awareness:
Language Awareness can be defined as explicit knowledge about language, and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning, language teaching and language use.
It covers a wide spectrum of fields. For example, Language Awareness issues include exploring the benefits that can be derived from developing a good knowledge about language, a conscious understanding of how languages work, of how people learn them and use them.
Can we become better language users or learners or teachers if we develop a better understanding? And can we gain other advantages: e.g. in our relations with other people and/or cultures, and in our ability to see through language that manipulates or discriminates? Language Awareness interests also include learning more about what sorts of ideas about language people normally operate with, and what effects these have on how they conduct their everyday affairs: e.g. their professional dealings. (https://lexically.net/ala/la_defined.htm. Last viewed 03/05/2021.).
Overall, many standards of language learning have been confirmed by neuro-cognitive research, especially the fact that learning engages the entire person in terms of cognitive, affective and psycho-motoric domains. The research, however, has also indicated that many traditional language-teaching strategies are quite inefficient (Ellis 1994) and that the focus on teaching grammar and vocabulary does not lead to accurate and fluent L2 usage. Students need to be given opportunities to practice and use their language skills in communicative situations:
For language development to occur, interaction has to take place; language cannot be acquired passively. Although imitation and habit forming do have a role in language acquisition, children seem predisposed to acquire speech and competency in language by being able to map language, possibly onto what Noam Chomsky calls a ‘language acquisition device.’ (Lanir 2019: n.p.).
3.5 The Task-based Approach
Sometimes the focus on grammatical forms may be an advantage provided that L2 learners have reached a stage where explanations and the comprehension of rules and their implementation are possible (cf. Videsott: 11). But “the role of formal instruction itself has been a perennial area of debate, and more than 20 years of research have failed to yield firm guidelines for grammar teaching methodology” (Borg 1999: 157, cit. in Timmis 2012:119). This is why the use of tasks in language teaching has developed as a distinct concept of Task Based Teaching and Learning (TBLT; cf. chapter 6.3), connecting grammar pedagogy and task-based methodology. A task in this sense is embedded in a language project, “an activity in which a person engages in order to attain an objective, and which necessitates the use of language” (Ellis 2003: 1f). With a primary focus on meaning, task-based verbs are used to close particular gaps in information, reasoning and opinion—allowing for students to choose the necessary language skills and attaining a clearly defined non-linguistic outcome (cf. De Florio 2018: 80).
What kind of language is needed to close these gaps depends as much on the needs of the students involved as the selection of grammar skills and lexis. But “how much grammar is needed?” is an oft-asked question, in this context answered by post-modern language methodology with the proposal “not as much as commonly believed”. And the theory of practice is reflected in the guidelines of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL): “Meaning needs to precede form as the basis for comprehension: before looking at letters or characters, before looking for clues in grammatical forms or word order, before trying to figure out details, learners should search for overall meaning.” (ACTFL 2020: n.p.) Implications for teaching strategies in CLIL programs will be discussed in detail in chapter 8 (CLIL Tools and Skills, 8.2: Task-based Language Teaching—TBLT).
Review—reflect—research
Franz Boas would not have reneged on his strong believe that “America was politically an ideal country”. But would he, in the light of four years of Trumpism?
In the light of different theories about Second Language Acquisition (SlA), what can be inferred from these about how foreign languages can best be taught?
There are different opinions about “nature versus nurture” in the neuro-biological domain. Why does this controversy not go away according to Steven Pinker?
1 This part of my narrative is based on general literature, and individual contributions served as a blueprint, such as NYU 2015, Everett 2017, Lanir 2019, Meisel 2019.
2 Different and culture dependent aspects of standard-based learning and competence levels are referred to in “American Standards”, “Australian VCE” and “CEF”.
