What is easy in second language learning?
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 | worked |
| 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 yesterday tells you when the action happened, even if there is no past tense morpheme on the verb.
But not all Chinese sentences have adverbs. Sometimes, speakers mention the adverb (e.g. yesterday) once, and then hearers keep it in mind. This is known as knowledge coming from the discourse. Linguists have proposed, however, that this traditional explanation of how Chinese speakers know when the action takes place is not sufficient to explain correct language use.
There is more to consider. Knowledge about the aspect of the event also locates the action in time. What is aspect? This is information on whether the action is complete, or ongoing, or habitual. For example:
| I eat a sandwich for lunch. | HABITUAL |
| I am eating a sandwich. | ONGOING |
These two sentences are both in the present tense, but one is habitual, while the other describes an ongoing event.
Aspect and tense are connected. In Mandarin Chinese, complete situations such as ‘eat the sandwich (in full)’ are normally located in the past. Incomplete and ongoing situations (‘eating a sandwich’) are typically interpreted as present, when no adverbs are used. Thus English and Mandarin Chinese differ in the ways that they express past and present, and this is something that learners of Mandarin have to acquire.
In my experiment, I investigated whether intermediate and advanced classroom learners of Mandarin Chinese are able to understand what time sentences refer to, in isolation and without context.
I asked learners to read Mandarin sentences without adverbs and to choose the best interpretation of the sentence: past, present or future. Here is an example sentence that participants had to look at:
Lǐsì kāi-chē shàng-xué
李四 开车 上学。
1. Lisi drove to school.
2. Lisi drives to school.
3. Both meanings are possible.
4. Neither meaning is possible.
The expected answer is (2) and native speakers of Chinese chose (2).
One could make two kinds of predictions about the results. Note that linguists and second language researchers always make predictions before they do their testing!
One line of reasoning goes that, since Chinese and English differ in the way they mark past time in language, learners will have difficulty acquiring the expression new to them.
Another line of reasoning, though, is that all languages have to express when an event happens, that is, the expression of time is a universal meaning, and so learners will use universal language knowledge to understand it when learning or using a second language.
So in fact, one prediction is: acquisition will be hard; another prediction is: acquisition will be easy.
The results were very clear: advanced learners of Mandarin were highly accurate in interpreting the event time in sentences without adverbs and without context.
Even the intermediate learners were well above chance in their choices, which indicates that they were able to locate the action in time quite well. The findings, then, support the prediction for easy acquisition.
When second language learners are using a universal mechanism for calculating meaning, in this case, ‘aspect helps tell you the time of the event,’ learning language does not present a huge difficulty.
This is just one study among many. In this study, I was looking at the acquisition of Chinese, but the same acquisition mechanism is at work in other languages, too. Experimental studies help scientists understand the process of language acquisition in general.
Do you think that we all have a basic human ability for language which helps us learn other languages?
If I were asked about this a decade ago, I would have answered: no, we do not have any ability to learn any foreign language. However, I have changed my mind about many language issues. I learned things that at first sounded Greek for me. I'll explain. I once tried to learn Hebrew and I found a bit too hard, though, I was able to learn a little. It was very confusing to me when I realized that Hebrew is written from right to left, rather than left to right as in English and Portuguese, for example. Later on, I found that there are two versions of some letters and they are all written differently when they appear at the end of a word than when they appear in the beginning or middle of the word. This all was too difficult for me to understand Hebrew sentences. Unfortunately I stopped it, so I have forgotten most of what I learned, but now I agree that we all have a basic or a natural human ability for languages no matter how hard they seem to be.
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