Delphi module

2.1.5
Using chunks of formulaic phrases

Second language learners will often produce chunks of language or 'formulae' such as aId@n@u (I don't know), kEsk@se (qu'est-ce que c'est ) and iChab@ge@n (ich habe gern), well before they are able to operate the grammatical changes outside of the set phrases. It is as if they were treating these phrases as just long words. Weinert (1987) and Myles et al (1999) have investigated the extent to which UK school learners of German and French rely on chunks in the early stages of language learning. Reflective task 6 looks at their findings.

Reflective task 6

German
Weinert (1987), in a cross-sectional study of the acquisition of negation by Scottish secondary learners of German, found that:

In Year 1, learners were producing quite a few utterances correctly distinguishing between nicht and kein, eg Ich spiele nicht gern Fussbal (V+ nicht) and Ich habe keine Schwester (kein + N).
They used kein in 50% of obligatory contexts and nicht in 75% of obligatory contexts.
In Year 2, however, learners produced more incorrect utterances of the kind Ich habe nicht Katze* (nicht + N*) and Ich keine arbeitet (kein + V*). kein was 'almost never supplied where required', compared to 50% of cases in Year 1.
They also produced more incorrect utterances with the nicht appearing before, not after, the verb, eg Zola Budd nicht spiele Fussball. The proportion of correct postverbal negations decreased from 90% in Year 1 to 60% in Year 2.

French
A similar finding emerged from the study by Myles et al (1999) of the acquisition of question forms by English secondary learners of French. They found that:

Over the three years of the project (from Term 2 to Term 7 of learning French at secondary level), the number of questions without verbs produced by learners, eg quelles activités ø à Belleville, oú ø la piscine? in fact increased from 22% of all questions to 69%.

What explanation(s) can you offer for this apparent 'backsliding', highlighted in two studies of classroom-based second language acquisition based on different languages?

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