Language acquisition as construction refinement

Nick Ellis, a linguist from UMich, has been on campus this week discussing his theories of second language acquisition (L2A) and I was finally able to attend a session Friday afternoon. Although I would have preferred to attend an earlier session in which he discussed the need for an Academic Phrase List (in addition to Paul Nation's Academic Word List), I found his linguistically-heavy discussion of L2A theories fairly interesting. Although I have only ever skimmed the surface of L2A theories (I took my graduate course in L2A during my first summer semester of grad school), I was still able to follow some of it while I sat near the back and worked on my laptop.

As I listened, it seemed like Ellis's theories of L2A validate my teaching approach. From what I understand, it appears that Ellis is claiming that L2A is less about learning rules than it is about noticing and refining phrases (aka constructions). This is what I have been trying to get my more advanced levels to do. They frequently ask me to give them rules about language - and I try whenever possible - but the truth is that many of their questions cannot be answered by rules. Language isn't really a collection of rules, as much as grammarians would lead us to believe. Instead, language is rules by usage, not grammar. If students want answers about complex language, a rule book will not help them.

I answer these questions with corpus research. I show students that seeing how language is used is the best way for them to build and refine their own constructions of English. The easiest way to do this is to type an example phrase into a corpus viewer (such as Mark Davies's viewer). Even better, I encourage them to pay attention to constructions as they read and listen to authentic academic material. Of course students don't like this method because it takes more work, but in truth this is how I learned academic language, and this is how all native speakers learn language: noticing and refining constructions based on reading and listening.

Yet, as I came to this conclusion, a part of me questioned whether Ellis really was supporting my theory of learning, or whether I was interpreting his lecture in order to justify my own approach. Either way, I'll share my thoughts with my students next week and see what they think.

So what was I working on during the lecture? I was trying to finish the integrated writing tasks for this semester's final exams. I had written Level 1-4 earlier in the day, but due to the second language writing research group (L2WRG) meeting I had to put Level 5 on hold. So when a group of us moved directly from L2WRG to the Ellis lecture, I opened my laptop and wrapped up. Even though there was no internet access in the basement, I had taken enough notes on the selected exam prompt topic that I was able to write the reading passage without the source text. And as I wrote, I couldn't help but realize that everything that I was writing was, in fact, a series of constructions that I had learned exactly as Ellis explained it.