The primacy of lexis
Reflective task 3
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If you had to communicate the following message using five words only, which words would you choose, and why? [Assume that 6.30pm counts as one word] As I said yesterday, I'm arriving by train in Brighton tomorrow evening at 6.30pm. What kind of problems might arise if we communicated in this telegraphic way all the time? Click here for Commentary. |
Emphasis on lexical items seems to be fairly consistent in the early interlanguage of naturalistic learners. It is a key feature of what Perdue (1993) and his fellow researchers refer to as the Basic Learner Variety, based on their investigation into interlanguage development among various groups of immigrants for the European Science Foundation. But it is also a feature of the French interlanguage produced by Myles et al's (1999) UK school learners of French. Examples from both these research projects are given below:
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Target language glosses have been added English naturalistic
learner French naturalistic
learner German naturalistic
learner French classroom
learners quelles activités
... à la Belleville? |
At the early stages of second language acquisition, then, learners only seem able to process and produce parts of the language to which they are exposed. It is particularly interesting to note the difficulties of Myles et al's school learners in producing grammatical questions in spontaneous speech, because we can safely assume that such questions had been modelled in class. (We will be looking further at Myles et al's research in section 2.1.5.)
In interlanguage, even when a grammatical feature does start to appear, it will often be used inconsistently, at least in terms of the target language grammar. Learners in fact often demonstrate their own form of consistency.
