Discussion Details
| Title: | Re: 16.763, Disc: Re: 16.713: Controversies in AL |
| Submitter: | Noah Silbert |
| Description: | Although I don't disagree with the main thrust of Ronald Sheen's claims
about the state of Applied Linguistics, I find it more than a little ironic that in his offer to defend his position, he falls prey to the same intellectual pitfalls he is so eager to criticize. Sheen invokes the implicit acceptance and evident failure of developmental sequences in SLA. Although my knowledge of the relevant literature is limited, I don't see how the failure of ''classroom application'' of developmental sequences provides much grist for Sheen's mill. I'm not even sure what ''classroom application'' of developmental sequences means. My understanding is that developmental sequences serve as a description of what occurs during SLA, not a guide to how to go about acquiring a second language, and certainly not a theory predicting when (or if) SLA will occur. I could be wrong, but I thought the basic idea of developmental sequences was that second language learners will acquire, for example, syntactic structures in a particular order, assuming they acquire the structures at all. Failing to acquire a second language is certainly consistent with, if only tangentially related to, the validity of developmental sequences. Now, I won't argue that developmental sequences have or have not been misused and misrepresented by the Applied Linguistics community. My claim here is simply that the idea of 'applying' developmental sequences in the L2 classroom is, as far as I can tell, incoherent. On the other hand, it makes good sense to attempt to test whether or not they play a role in SLA and, if indeed they do, designing curricula to accomodate them. Sheen's claim that the application of developmental sequences has ''NOWHERE been demonstrated to result in an ability to produce accurate grammatical language'' is also problematic. I may be misinterpreting this statement, but if by 'grammatical language' he means native-like in every respect, then it seems entirely likely that all theories of SLA are doomed to failure simply because the goal is very probably unattainable. If anything is clear in Applied Linguistics, it's that second language acquisition is not first language acquisition. For whatever reason, the process is arduous and the end state (insofar as 'the end state' is a coherent concept) is incomplete. Since we're on the subject of the end state of SLA, Sheen's claim that ''there is empirical evidence to demonstrate that such an application is more a recipe for fossilisation'' is his most glaring example of unwitting acceptance of a dubious theoretical construct, exactly what he takes as the field's worst failing. As far as I can tell, fossilization is, in principle, untestable. The implication is that a second language structure becomes fixed in some non-native-like state. But no matter how many times you test a subject (or population of subjects) and find some stable L2-ism, how do you know that, the very next time you test them, it will still be the same? I have no doubt that L2 structures stabilize, making further progress extremely difficult, but I very much doubt the value of a construct like fossilization. Again, I agree with Mr. Sheen that an unfortunately large number of dubious ideas have been, and continue to be, erroneously accepted in Applied Linguistics (as they are in many relatively young fields of research, it's worth adding). I just wanted to draw attention to what appears to be the same problem in Ronald Sheen's offer to support his argument. For previous messages in this discussion, see: http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-713.html http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-763.html http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-776.html |
| Date Posted: | 17-Mar-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Applied Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 16.819 |
| Posted: | 17-Mar-2005 |
