FOSSILIZATION, COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY AND COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Fossilization was first defined in 1972 as a failure, or an ultimate attainment in adult second language acquisition that falls short of native-speaker competence. It represents a final stage in the interlanguage development of the individual learner and characterizes all but a very few adult second language learners. Over the 40 years or so since the term appeared, fossilization in adult second language acquisition has come to be widely accepted by scholars as a genuinely existing phenomenon. Fossilization is now viewed as permanent and resistant to correction either through instruction or acculturation. However, no universally accepted definition or explanation of fossilization has achieved universal acceptance. This paper attempts to add an extralinguistic perspective on fossilization and its possible outcome in the communicative practice of adult L2 speakers by building a bridge between linguistics and teaching languages, on the one hand, and philosophy of communication, on the other. Habermasian concept of communicative rationality is applied to demonstrate that oratory and writing skills ensure a more significant role in a dialogue, which seems to be sufficient grounds for fighting fossilization. In terms of the theory of speech acts, the paper attempts to trace the mechanism of fossilizing in a transition from the inner space of an individual consciousness and intent (illocution) to the outer space of the perlocutionary consequence when a locutionary distortion of the speech itself does not affect the speaker’s intent and he / she receives no feedback of the error made. Several factors inhibiting the effectiveness of such corrective feedback are touched upon, as well as certain strategies adopted by second language learners in their communicative efforts.

Adult second language acquisition

This review article selects and elaborates on the important issues of adult second language acquisition research in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The fundamental question of whether adult second language acquisition and child first language acquisition are similar or different is addressed throughout the article. The issues of a critical period for acquisition, the importance of the linguistic input, and processing are discussed. Generative as well as usage-based perspectives are considered. Future research concerns and promising areas of investigation are proposed.

A Cross-linguistic Perspective on Questions in German and French Adult Second Language Acquisition

Several studies have been conducted to try and understand and explain the morphological and syntactic aspects of adult second language acquisition (SLA). Two prominent hypotheses that have been put forward concerning late L2 speakers' knowledge of inflectional morphology and of related functional categories and their feature values are the Impaired Representation Hypothesis (IRH) and the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH). The cross-linguistic comparison of the acquisition of questions in German and French provided in this study offers a new perspective to differences and similarities between first language acquisition (FLA) and adult SLA. Comparing a Germanic and a Romance L2, differing not only in their overall linguistic properties (such as i. e. OV/VO, V2, clitics), but explicitly in the formation and regularities of questions, we present striking similarities in adult SLA, and irrespective of the first and the second languages and of instructed versus non-instructed learning. The investigation of the adult SLA of morphological and structural aspects of questions in French and German strengthens the assumption that the acquisition of morphology and syntax is connected in French and German FLA but is disentangled in adult SLA. Our data reveal variability of question syntax, and with the syntactic position of the verb in particular. Instead of discovering the correct position of the verb at a certain stage of acquisition which can be accounted for by parameter setting in FLA, the adult learners gradually approach the target word order but still exhibit a great deal of variation after several years of exposure to the L2. The findings provided here contradict the predictions of the MSIH (Prévost/White 2000; Ionin/Wexler 2002; among others), for not only morphological features, but syntactic finiteness of finiteness are problematic in adult SLA, and that the Impairment Representation Hypothesis (IRH) (Beck 1998; Eubank 1993/1994; among others) accounts for these differences in first and second language acquisition. IRH and FDH mirror our findings, by predicting the use of (domain-general) strategies instead of agreement or feature checking mechanisms.