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Lund, Karen: Lærer alle dansk på samme måde? En længdeundersøgelse af voksnes tilegnelse af dansk
[Does everyone learn Danish the same way? A length investigation of adult acquisition of Danish].
Herning: Special-pædagogisk forlag, 1997, 414 pages
ISBN 8773994545
Revised version of PhD dissertation, Copenhagen University
Anette Hagel-Sørensen
"Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." McLaughlin 1987 - quoted in Karen Lund: 1997, p. 316.
The new standard textbook for teacher education on L2 acquisition is out!
In her book "Lærer alle dansk på samme måde?" [Does everyone learn Danish the same way?], Karen Lund provides a thorough introduction to language acquisition theories as well as offering a well-supported argument in favour of a much-needed shift of paradigm in acquisition research. In that connection she touches on the pedagogical implications which a (re-assessed) functional view of language would inevitably have for any teaching that lays claim to being communicatively oriented.
Despite the fact that a communicative view of language has coloured the debate - and, for good and ill, practice as well - ever since the launching of the concept in the early 1970s, discarding the structural approach has been no easy matter - at any rate within the research that dealt with L2 acquisition during the 1980s.
This has meant that acquisition research, in its reaction against behavourism and the contrastive hypothesis, has virtually operated within a paradigm where neither input, the native language nor the learner play any significant role. These theorists have focused on what are referred to as so-called natural acquisition sequences. With theories such as the identity hypothesis and the hypothesis of natural acquisition sequences linguistic development in L2 is perceived as being in all significant aspects on a par with L1 development - a development which also happens to take place in universal stages of development, controlled by an innate, autonomously functioning grammatical acquisition device (referred to as LAD = Language Acquisition Device).
Language development is equated with the development of structural competence, with acquisition research being characterised by the investigation of interlanguage for signs of what they call grammaticisation. Thus, one carries out structural analyses of, in particular, morpho-syntactic features of the interlanguage of various learners. One scans the interlanguage for evidence of there such features as inversion in yes/no questions actually being acquired earlier than wh-questions - stages that have to be accomplished before inversion is acquired in statements.
Karen Lund re-analyses the investigations of interlanguage, whose results regarding inversion and negation are assumed to represent the most unequivocal sign of a universal process of acquisition, comparing her results with analyses of her own length investigation of Danish as a target language. Karen Lund argues convincingly for the conclusion that the hypothesis of structural sequences controlled by an autonomous cognitive device is not valid. And it makes exciting reading when Karen Lund discusses the leading theories on their own premises (re-analysis), and when, on the basis of a scientific standpoint cracks the Popper whip over their methods and demonstrates the invalidity of making almost exclusive use of empiricism in order to verify one"s own theories.
Karen Lund also asks for a more interdisciplinary approach in that she i.a. ascribes the insufficiencies of acquisition research to the fact that it has mainly been carried out by linguists, whose primary focus is on the acquisition of the expression side of language, while the content side has been left out of consideration and entrusted to psychologists lacking sufficient linguistic insight to bring about any innovation in that area. Cognition research, however, paves the way for an acquisition research that deals with the interaction between expression and content.
As an alternative to the universal grammar oriented theories of acquisition, where research scans the learner"s language for signs of grammaticisation, Karen Lund advocates a linguistic basis that as its point of departure takes language as a means for communication and interaction. New language items can be acquired insofar as the learner is capable of ascribing them a function. So it is here a question of ascribing functions in a way that cuts across the traditional split between the form and content sides of language.
Structural grammar must not be allowed to have the monopoly on describing the system of linguistic expression. The split into content (acquisition of lexis) on the one hand and structure (grammar) on the other confines analyses of learner language to descriptions that do not give us real insight into anything except precisely grammaticisation. This can be excellent for describing learner language as products, but it provides us with no insight into the cognitive processes that lie behind the product.
Very much in line with the communicative view of language, Karen Lund - on the basis of her analyses - makes it seem plausible that it is the semantic and pragmatic functions of the linguistic expression that prompt acquisition. The first thing a typical learner asks himself or herself is presumably not "Why does inversion occur in Danish?" but rather how one asks questions. In other words, the springboard is a communicative need to express a given function. This functional approach makes it much more interesting to read about sequences of acquisition. While the sequence theorists put forward queer post hoc hypotheses to explain phenomena that do not support their theories (individual variation, periphery phenomena, universally defined markedness/unmarkedness, etc.), the cognitive-oriented, functional approach offers explanations of well-known learner language phenomena that most teachers will probably find both plausible and pedagogically productive.
The fact that inversion in statements is acquired relatively late - and, for many people, never - can very well be due to the unclear semantic/pragmatic function this syntactic phenomenon it has for the learner. The Dutch informants in Karen Lund"s own length investigations are also late in acquiring inversion in statements, despite the fact that they are familiar with inversion in declarations in their native language.
The UG-based sequence researchers investigate the presence in learner language of the relatively abstract feature of inversion, whereas researchers with a functional view of acquisition look in learner language for both the presence and the absence of the phenomenon, so as subsequently to be able to put forward hypotheses about what sort of ascribing of content has caused the learner to use a given structural feature. Structurally oriented sequence researchers are inclined to interpret the presence of, for example, inversion in contexts where it is required as a sign of acquisition. By doing so, they run the risk of overlooking the presence of the same phenomenon in contexts where it is unsuitable, such as when the learner says, for example "Når kommer han hjem" [When comes he home].
Karen Lund"s critique of language acquisition research over the past 40 to 50 years and her proposed functional language acquisition hypothesis - much broader than any seen before - have given us a thorough presentation in Danish of central issues of language acquisition research. At long last, we are on our way out of sentence level - and the pedagogical debate about foreign and second language has now got a solid foundation on which to build. Not least in the subject-related and pedagogical development of Danish as a second and foreign language exciting perspectives are opened up in the direction of such subject disciplines as intercultural communication and contrastive rhetorics.
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