Bilingual Service Brasil

  View 796 comments In this article, Roumyana Slabakova asks ‘what is easy in second language learning?’ She gives an example from her own research which shows that due to our human capacity for language, some aspects of language learning may be easier than others. What is easy in second language learning? I shall give an example of second language acquisition (of universal grammatical meanings) from a recent Mandarin Chinese experiment of mine. At the heart of this experiment lies the separation between grammatical meanings and their linguistic expressions, or realizations: one and the same meaning can be expressed in many different ways. Look at these ways to express the past in English and in Mandarin Chinese:   Meaning Expression English Past work ed Mandarin Chinese Past work yesterday It is well known that Mandarin Chinese does not have a special morpheme to mark the past tense, as the English  -ed . The use of adverbs such as  ye...

In this article, Roumyana Slabakova presents a research study which shows that some aspects of grammar may be problematic for everyone to learn (native speakers too!). The article she refers to is: Dabrowska, E. and Street, J. (2006) ‘Individual differences in language attainment: Comprehension of passive sentences by native and non-native English speakers’ in  Language Sciences,  vol. 28, pp 604-615 In this section, we will consider what is hard in learning language. By looking at what is difficult for native speakers, we can understand what might be difficult for non-native speakers. We know from research that some aspects of language can be harder than others to learn or to use. I will share with you the results of an experimental study which set out to discover how speakers of English use grammatical morphemes to get sentence meaning. For example, one such morpheme, the ending ‘–ed’, is very versatile. It can mark past tense but it can also make ...