This message goes out to our family, which we’ve seen a lot of this week. Hello! It’s been good having you all over. (Actually, I don’t think my side of the family reads my blog, but I’ll let them know, hehe) I’ve got to write a post that won’t bore everybody.

Acculturation – “the social and psychological integration of the learner with the target language group” (Schumann, 1978)

Acculturation includes:
-Social Factors
—Social dominance patterns
—Integration patterns (assimilation, preservation, adaptation)
—Enclosure, Cohesiveness, Size
—Congruence, Attitude, Intended length of residence

-Affective Factors
—Language Shock
—Cultural Shock
—Motivation
—Ego-Permeability

Schumann claims that one degree of acculturation will lead to one degree of SLA.

Some research evidence was provided from the Heidelberg Research Project and the Alberto Data.

The Pidginization Hypothesis is presented in the third section of Schumann’s paper. He presents a fossilalized interlanguage as a pidgin, creolization, and decreolization.

There are some limitations to this model, namely:
1. It explains SLA in natural setting only (not classroom)
2. Not causal relation, merely coorelation
3. Other factors not considered

There are some similarites to Krashen, in particular, that they both view affective factors and input as important. Their purpose is to identify causal variables for SLA. Both of these models were published around the same time.

Here are some links that I found regarding these ideas:
Schumann’s own bio page at UCLA
UCLA Applied Linguistics Faculty page
Somebody’s class notes on this
Norton’s Identity and Language Learning
A Study of Educated Chinese Women’s Acculturation in US
Culture Shock Information for Travel

Today when I got to class a fellow student of mine told me that she didn’t quite understand a concept from class, and that she had searched for it online. She said that she found a great page with some kind of crazy language at the top that was dead on. She said that this guy explained it just right! Then, she looked up top and saw my picture and said, “This is Zach’s blog!” So, then the professor told her to tell everyone about it, even though I told them not to. Maybe I’ll get some extra hits from the publicity, hehe.

6. Choose any one of the empirical studies we discussed so far, provide a brief summary of the findings of the study, and then discuss potential pedagogical implications of its findings.

Rosa & Leow’s study looked at the relationship between learning conditions, awareness, and learning outcomes. A detailed summary of this study can be found in my answer to question 5. This answer instead will focus on its potential pedagogical implications, namely that of explicit instruction and testing.

Often in my teaching career, standardized tests have been a required part of the curriculum. These standardized tests have taken many forms, including multiple-choice and controlled production. These tests almost inevitably test the student’s explicit knowledge of a language. Thus, the results of Rosa & Leow’s study have great pedagogical implications for me, namely how I can modify my own teaching to cause my students to score higher on these tests.

Though I often lean more toward the Monitor Model school of thought in my teaching, this at times has lead to my students scoring lower on these standardized tests. Thus, this study implies to me that to improve my students’ scores on explicit knowledge tests I need to give them explicit instruction on the structures to be tested. This explicit instruction, as shown by this study, will lead to an increased awareness of the target structures, and higher scores on these types of tests.

5. Both de Graaff (1997) and Rosa & Leow (2005) studied the relationship between instruction and SLA, and both showed that instruction affected SLA. However, there are many differences between the two studies. Discuss the major differences between the two studies in terms of a) their specific research questions, b) the independent variables and their manipulations, c) how acquisition was measured, and d) their conclusions.

De Graaff asked “Does explicit knowledge facilitate acquisition?” De Graaff’s study has a 2 x 2 x 3 design, namely Explicit vs. Implicit group x Timed vs Un-timed x Task Type (3 types). In de Graaff’s study, acquisition is measured by a grammatical judgment with time pressure, a grammatical judgment without time pressure, a translation, and a fill-in-the-blanks test. De Graaf concluded that explicit instruction will improve proficiency on test, though the hypothesis regarding complex, time-constrained, and syntactic nature of the test items remained unproven.

Rosa & Leow asked, “Do different learning conditions affect awareness? And does awareness affect learning outcomes (on two different types of tests, namely multiple-choice recognition and controlled production)?” Rosa & Leow’s study has a 2 x 2 x 3 design, namely task essential(+/-) x explicit pretask (+/-) x immediate feedback (- / +explicit / +implicit). In Rosa & Leow’s study, acquisition is measured by multiple-choice recognition tests and controlled production tests, one given immediately following the treatment and one delayed. Rosa & Leow concluded that “learners who had received explicit information on their target structure had a clear tendency to report higher levels of awareness” than those who received less explicit information. Further, the study concluded that those with greater awareness (at “understanding” level) did score higher than those at lower awareness levels.