Developing Basic Conversational Ability in a Second Language

time to make use of negative input, and in the interim will continue to operate with old, as-yet-unmodified hypotheses. A related phenomenon was observed by Nelson (1980) in a study of intervention input and first language acquisition of tag questions by children. During an observation session, one of the children, a 3-year-old, used a tag question for the first time"20 hours and 37 minutes after the child hadlast heard an experimenter's use of a tag question." Since the child's parents were reported virtually never to use tag questions with the child, Nelson assumed the original tagquestion formation occurred, after a considerable amount of elapsed time, as a result of the intervention input. It is reasonable to assume that if a NNS repeats a supplied form correctly or incorrectly, or uses it in subsequent speech in a TLor non-TL manner, then that supplied form is part of a NNSs intake. On the other hand, it is not DE VELOPING BASIC CONVERSA TIONAL ABILITY reasonable to say that if he or she does not use the supplied form in any way, then IN A SECOND LANGUAGE: the corrective feedback is not part of the NNS intake. Thus, while we have been A CASE STUDY OF AN ADULT LEARNER looking for observable effects of corrective feedback on NNS' ILs, and have not yet found much evidence of such effects, their absence in the short term does not OF POR TUGUESE1 necessarily mean that they do not exist over time. Richard W. Schmidt REFERENCES The University of Hawaii at Manoa Chaudron, C. 1977. A descriptive model of discourse in the corrective treatment of learners' errors. Sylvia Nagem Frota Language Learning, 27(1): 29-49. Pontificia Universidade Cat6lica do Rio de Janeiro Chun, A. E., R R Day, N. A. Chenoweth, and S. Luppescu. 1982. Errors, interaction and Universidade Federal do Maranhao correction: astudy of native-nonnative conversations. TESOL Quarterly, 16(4): 537-547. Cohen, J. A. 1960. A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educationaland Psychological Measurement, 20: 3746. Prick, T., and M I. Semmel. 1978. Observer agreements and reliabilitiesofclassroomobservational measures Review of Educational Research, 48(1): 157-1 84. Jefferson, G. 1972. Side sequences. In D. Sudnowf ed.). Studies in Social Interaction. New York: This chapter is a descriptive, analytical study of the development of conversa- The Free Press. tional ability in Portuguese by one subject during a 5-month stay in Rio de Levine, M. 1975. A Cognitive Theory ofLearning: Research in Hypothesis Testing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Janeiro, Brazil. The chapter attempts to deal with two basic issues: (1) the kind Nelson, K. E. 1980. Theories of the child's acquisition of syntax: a look at rare events and at and amount of language that was learned in order to communicate with native necessary, catalytic, and irrelevant components of mother-child conversation.Annalsofthe speakers, and (2) the ways in which both instruction and conversational New York Academy of Sciences, 345: 45-67. interaction contributed to learning the lang~age.~The chapter is based on two Richards, J. C., J. Platt, and H. Weber. 1985. Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics. data sources. The learner, the first coauthor of this paper, hereafter referred to as London: Longman Schachter, J. 1982. Nutritional needs of language learners. In M. Clarke and J. Handscombe(eds.). R, kept a journal throughout his 5 months of exposure to Portuguese, recording On TESOL '82. Washington, D.C.: TESOL. whatever seemed on a day-to-day basis the most salient aspects of his learning Schachter, J. 1984. A universal input condition. In W. Rutherford(ed). Universal! andsecond experience. As in numerous other diary studies, Rrecorded his experiences and Language Acquisition Amsterdam John Benjamins. observations only semisystematically, in greater or lesser detail at various Selinker, L,and J. Lamendella. 1979. The role of extrinsic feedback in interlanguage fossilization. times, and with varying time intervals between events and the journal entries Language Learning, 29(2): 363-375. reporting them. Some conversational exchanges were written down within Vigil, N., and J. Oiler. 1976. Rule fossilization: a tentative model. Language Learning, 26(2): 281-295. seconds, while other events were recorded at the end of a day or even several days after the fact. Many of the entries deal with communication and learning strategies, hypotheses being formulated concerning the target language, and the R's Language Learning History degree to which these seemed confirmed or disconfirmed in interaction, issues especially relevant to SLA theory. Baltra has pointed out that only language learners themselves can be in a R's previous personal language learning history, with self-assessments of his position to observe their experiences, but the fact that we cannot observe what proficiency in each language, is summarized below. Languages are listed in goes on in another person's mind should not automatically lead us to assume descending order of proficiency. thatwe necessarily do know what goes on in our own( Armando Baltra, personal Arabic Arabic is the only language other than English that I have ever communication). The weaknesses ofdiary studies are in general well recognized been able to speak well. I first studied Arabic in a 6-month intensive audio-lin- (Bailey and Ochsner 1983). In addition to being idiosyncratic and of dubious pal course in the United States. This was followed by 8 years' residence generalizability, what they report is subjective, already filtered through the (spread over a total of 12 years) in Egypt and Lebanon, during which I also perceptions and possibly the biases of the learner (especially important when studied intermittently with private tutors. I was evaluated and assigned official the learner is a linguist professionally interested in SLA theory), and exceed- FSI ratings twice: after finishing the initial course, I was rated an FSI S-l+; ingly difficult to verify. With respect to the processes of learning, these are after 2 years of exposure, I was rated an FSI S-3+. I'm not sure of my final level important limitations, since those who believe that language acquisition goes on of attained proficiency, since while I was very comfortable in the language there almost entirely below the level of conscious awareness might argue that one were still things I had trouble expressing, especially in higher registers, and still simply cannot observe oneself learning a language (Seliger 1983; Derek gaps in my comprehension. I have always thought that the reason I learned Bickerton, personal communication). McLaughlin, Rossman, and McLeod Arabic quite well(which most English speakers I knew in the Arab world did not (1983) have argued that introspection and subjective reports are notoriously do) was that I made a point from the beginning of making friends who were unreliable and easily mistaken, and as we shall see, R was not able to identify monolinguals: whatever was to be said had to be said in Arabic. For the past 8 accurately some of the hypotheses and rules that define his Portuguese years, I have neither spoken nor heard Arabic except for a few brief encounters interlanguage. Even with regard to the products of language learning, there are with native speakers. important limitations to self-report data. Learners cannot say with assurance French I studied French for 3 years in high school and a year in college, when their rules and outputs match those of native speakers, cannot be relied but my competence in French is almost entirely passive. I attribute this mainly upon to identify their errors and areas of difficulty, and may not even be able to to patterns of interaction developed in Lebanon. Many Lebanese are bilingual in report accurately what they have said (still less, what was said by native Arabic and French and prefer to speak French with foreigners. I therefore heard speakers) on particular occasions. a lot of French during the period in which I was committed to improving my In order to compensate partially for such weaknesses in the self-report Arabic, and it was not uncommon for me to have long and detailed conversa- data, the paper alsodraws upon the evidence from a second, more objective data tions in which I spoke only Arabic and my interlocutor spoke only French, both source, a series of four tape-recorded conversations in Portuguese between the of us unable or unwilling to switch. To this day, I am extremely inhibited about two coauthors, varying from 30 to 60 minutes per conversation, recorded at speaking French, and I'm not sure what kind of French I would produce if I had approximately 1-month intervals. These conversations were unstructured, and no way to avoid trying. covered a range of topics dealing with biography, current activities, and future Japanese I have never studied Japanese, but I have lived with several plans. The tapes were transcribed, errors were identified, and various aspectsof native speakers and made four trips to Japan, varying between a week and a the Portuguese noun phrase and verb phrase were analyzed by the second month. I know about 100 vocabulary items in Japanese and perhaps a dozen coauthor, a linguist who is a native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese. This formulaic expressions, only one of which (subject-wa NP desu) is at all analysis is complementary to that which emerges from R's journal, and in the productive. My comprehension is poor, and I can only rarely get the gist of development of the paper there has been an interplay between the data sources, overheard conversations. a method recommended by Cohen( 1984). Subjective reports in the journal have German I studied German for one semester in graduate school, with suggested things to look for in the recorded data, and phenomena initially intensive cramming before taking a foreign language proficiency exam and identified from the conversational transcripts have often been illumintated by almost zero retention thereafter.

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