reading sla

B6

Bongaert’s study concentrates on late starters who did manage to achieve native-like L2 pronunciation

• The most important result of the study was that the judges appeared to be unable to make a distinction between the group of highly successful learners and the native speaker control group

• the average score assigned to the group of native speakers was rather low (3.94) and (b) half of the participants in the group of highly successful learners received higher ratings than any of the native speakers

• The aim of the third study was to find out if the results of the second study could also be obtained in an experiment with languages that are typologically less related than Dutch and English.

• Ego permeability. [i.e. the willingness of learners to give up part of their own (L1) identity].

• Klein’s (1995) suggestion that a nativelike accent may be attainable for late L2 learners, provided that it is of vital importance to them to sound like native speakers and provided they have continued access to massive, authentic L2 input.

• They were all highly motivated individuals who reported that it was very important to them to be able to speak English or French without a Dutch accent, and they all received a large amount of input from native speakers from the time they entered the university around the age of 18.

‘Foreign language learning differences: Affective or native language aptitude differences’ by R. Sparks and L. Ganschow

• In their article these authors suggest that learners who have problems learning a second language may also have problems in their first language

• They also concentrate on one of these affective factors, anxiety

• Positive correlations, for example, have been found between anxiety and speech

• The referrals were made because of the students’ inability to meet the FL requirement at the university, giving rise to speculation that subtle native language problems became evident primarily because of the demands that the study of a new and unfamiliar symbol system placed on these studentsty and listening comprehension and ability to imitate.

• Even though children with a history of language difficulties eventually learn to speak and understand their native language, their FL aptitude profile could be related to and/or affected by these earlier problems – early learning problems in acquiring lead to later written language difficulties – may continue to adulthood

• ‘phonological awareness,’ ‘phonetic coding,’ or ‘auditory ability,’ it seems clear that specific difficulty at the phoneme level can cause difficulties with the acquisition of oral and written language in both the native and the FL. Carroll (1962) makes the point that ‘phonetic coding’ ability is a ‘. . . cognitive process which cannot be directly observed’ (1962: 128) and that ‘. . . a person low in this ability will have trouble not only remembering phonetic material, word forms, etc., but also in mimicking speech sounds’ (1962: 129).

• We cited studies above which show that some individuals have difficulty learning their native language in oral and/or written form and that this difficulty is likely to affect ability to learn a FL.

• We also provided growing evidence indicating a lack of phonological awareness as a primary source of difficulty in learning to read and write one’s native language

• Linguistic Coding Deficit Hypothesis (LCDH) is derived from the work of Vellutino and Scanlon (1986), who found that poor readers/writers had difficulties processing the structural and formal properties of spoken and printed words.

• ‘linguistic coding’ to refer to the use of phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects of the language to code information.

• good readers were attuned to both the meaning (semantic) and structural (syntactic and phonological) components of language but that poor readers were attuned primarily to the meaning

• of the thirteen students with phonological deficits, seven failed the FL in the first semester and six failed in the next semester

• = it is not really possible to separate affective factors from others such as L1 ability