What is hard in second language learning?

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

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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 a past participle like this:

I worked at the library

PAST TENSE

I have worked in this library for 25 year

PAST PARTICIPLE

The English Passive Voice uses the past participle, as well as a form of the helping verb ‘to be.’ Look at these two sentences:

1. Millions of people saw this movie

2. This movie was seen by millions of people

They have the same content but the second sentence is a passive sentence.

In the study published in 2006, the researchers Dabrowska and Street tested the understanding of passives, which is a rare construction in everyday English. They made their test sentences to reflect some plausible and implausible actions. Some actions for example, such as a dog biting a man, happen more often and are more plausible, compared to a man biting a dog.

Participants were asked to listen to the experimental sentences and then to answer the question of who was the doer of the action (the agent). Note that since the sentences have just a subject and an object, chance is set at 50%.

a. The dog bit the man.

(plausible)

b. The man bit the dog.

(implausible)

c. The man was bitten by the dog.

(plausible)

d. The dog was bitten by the man.

(implausible)

You think about it too. Who is the doer of the action in each sentence?

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Four groups of people participated in the study: graduate native speakers with more than 15 years of education, typically with MA or PhD degrees; non-graduate natives with no more than high-school education; graduate non-native speakers with MA or PhD degrees, and non-graduate non-native speakers who had not studied beyond high-school.

The results show that all groups were quite good at understanding plausible sentences (‘The dog bit the man’ and ‘The man was bitten by the dog’) when knowledge of the world could be used to help them identify the agent (the doer) of the action.

However, non-graduate native speakers had trouble understandingimplausible actives ‘The man bit the dog’ and ‘The dog was bitten by the man.’ Their accuracy went down from 64% to 36%. These results suggest that the speakers were not paying attention to the passive participle ‘bitten’ in order to understand the sentences.

Dabrowska and Street concluded that native speakers sometimes process sentences without paying attention to the grammar, but focus on word positions in the sentence: what comes before the verb is more likely to be the agent, what comes after the verb is likely to be affected by the action, as in ‘The dog bit the man’ or ‘The girl ate the apple.’

The results of Dabrowska and Street’s (2006) study, however, also suggest that some non-native speakers use grammatical morphemes to understand sentence meaning better than less well-educated native speakers. How do we know? The non-graduate non-native speakers did better than the non-graduate native speakers. Their percentages for accuracy in identifying implausible active and passive sentences were 90% and 94%. In understanding the passive, the learning of English as a second language may give an advantage to these speakers. So bilingualism may actually enhance attention to grammar in language usage.

Although this is just one study, there is a lot of research pointing to the difficulty of the little words and endings which hold and convey grammatical meaning. Morphemes in rare constructions may be hard to learn and hard to attend to in communication, for native as well as second language speakers. Some aspects of language are difficult for everyone to learn!

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What do you think? Which aspects of English (or any other language) have you found particularly difficult to learn?