First Language Acquisition 35

that method. At the end of the year Gouin, having reduced the classical method to absurdity, was forced to return home, a failure.

But there is a happy ending. Upon returning home Gouin discovered that his 3-year-old nephew had, during that year, gone through that wonderful stage of child language acquisition in which he went from saying virtually nothing at all to become a veritable chatter box of French. How was it that this little child succeeded so easily in a task, mastering a first language, that Gouin, in a second language, had found impossible? The child must hold the secret to learning a language! So Gouin spent a great deal of time observing his nephew and other children and came to the following conclusions: Lan­guage learning is primarily a matter of transforming perceptions into concep­tions. Children use language to represent their conceptions. Language is a means of thinking, of representing the world to oneself. (These insights, re­member, are being formed by a language teacher over a century ago!)

So Gouin set about devising a teaching method that would follow from these insights. And thus the Series Method was created, a method which taught learners directly (without translation) and conceptually (without grammatical rules and explanations) a "series" of connected sentences that are easy to perceive. The first lesson of a foreign language would thus teach the following series of 15 sentences:

I walk towards the door. I draw near to the door. I draw nearer to the door. I get to the door. I stop at the door.

I stretch out my arm. I take hold of the handle. I turn the handle. I open the door. I pull the door.

The door moves. The door turns on its hinges. The door turns and turns. I open the door wide. I let go of the handle.

The 15 sentences have an unconventionally large number of grammatical prop­erties, vocabulary items, word orders, and complexity. This is no simple "Voici la table" lesson! Yet Gouin was successful with such lessons because the lan­guage was so easily understood, stored, recalled, and related to reality. Unfor­tunately, he was a man ahead of his time, and his insights were largely lost in the shuffle of Berlitz's popular Direct Method. But as we look back now over a century of language teaching history, we can appreciate the insights of this most unusual language teacher.

Comparing and Contrasting First and Second Language Acquisition

The increased pace of research on first language acquisition over the last two decades has attracted the attention not only of linguists of all kinds but also of educators in various language-related fields. In language arts education, for example, it is not uncommon to find teacher trainees studying first language acquisition, particularly acquisition after age 5, in order to improve their understanding of the task of teach­ing language skills to native speakers. In foreign language education most standard texts and curricula now include some introductory material in first language acquisi­tion. The reasons for this are clear: We have all observed children acquiring their first language easily and well, yet the learning of a second language, particularly in an educational setting, often meets with great difficulty and sometimes failure. We should therefore be able to learn something from a systematic study of that first language learning experience.

What may not be quite as obvious, though, is how the second language teacher should interpret the hundreds of facets of first language research and theory. How does each facet relate to second language learning and teaching? It would be con­ceivable at this point simply to ask you to make your own interpretations and draw your own conclusions about the implications of theories and research in first language acquisition. But that very process of interpretation invokes so many thorny issues that it is easy to draw false analogies. The purpose of this chapter is to set forth explicitly some of the parameters for comparing and contrasting the two types of language acquisition.

The first step in that interpretation process might be to dispel some myths about the relationship between first and second language acquisition. H.H. Stern (1970:57-58) summarized some common arguments that have cropped up from time to time to recommend a second language teaching method or procedure on the basis of first language acquisition:

1. In language teaching, we must practice and practice, again and again. Just watch a small child learning his mother tongue. He repeats things over and over again. During the language-learning stage he practices all the time. This is what we must also do when we learn a foreign language.

2. Language learning is mainly a matter of imitation. You must be a mimic. Just like a small child. He imitates everything.

3. First, we practice the separate sounds, then words, then sentences. That is the natural order and is therefore right for learning a foreign language.

4. Watch a small child's speech development. First he listens, then he speaks. Understanding always precedes speaking. Therefore, this must be the right order of presenting the skills in a foreign language.

5. A small child listens and speaks and no one would dream of making him read or write. Reading and writing are advanced stages of language development. The natural order for first and second language learning is listening, speaking, reading, writing.

6. You did not have to translate when you were small. If you were able to learn your own language without translation, you should be able to learn a foreign language in the same way.

7. A small child simply uses language. He does not learn formal grammar. You don't tell him about verbs and nouns. Yet he learns the language perfectly. It is equally unnecessary to use grammatical conceptualization in teaching a foreign language.

These statements represent the views of those who felt that "the first language learner was looked upon as the foreign language teacher's dream: a pupil who mysteriously laps up his vocabulary, whose pronunciation, in spite of occasional lapses, is impeccable, while morphology and syntax, instead of being a constant headache, come to him like a dream" (Stern 1970:58). The statements also tend to up resent the views of those who have been dominated by a behavioristic theory of language in which the first language acquisition process is viewed as consisting of rote practice, habit formation, shaping, over learning, reinforcement, conditioning, association, stimulus and response, and who therefore assume that the second language learning process involves the same constructs.

There are flaws in each view. Sometimes the flaw is in the assumption behind the statement about first language learning and sometimes it is in the analogy or implication that is drawn; sometimes it is in both. The flaws represent some of the misunderstandings that need to be demythologized for the second language teacher. The process of demythologizing requires a broad understanding of first language theory and issues, as well as a keen awareness of the variables that come into play in drawing analogies to second language learning. By characterizing and classifying those variables in this chapter I hope that you will be able, on the one hand, to avoid the pitfalls of these and other false assumptions and analogies, and on the other hand, to draw enlightened, plausible analogies wherever possible, thereby enriching your understanding of the second language learning process itself.

As generative and cognitive research on first language acquisition gathered momentum, second language researchers and foreign language teachers began to recognize the mistakes in drawing direct global analogies between first and second language acquisition. Some of the first warning signals were sent up by the cognitive psychologist David Ausubel (1964). In foreboding terms, Ausubel outlined a num­ber of glaring problems with the very popular audio-lingual method, some of whose procedures were derived from notions of "natural" (first) language learning. He warned that the rote learning practice of audio-lingual drills lacked the meaningfulness necessary for successful first and second language acquisition, that adults learning a foreign language could, with their full cognitive capacities, benefit from deductive presentations of grammar, that the native language of the learner is not just an interfering factor—it can facilitate learning a second language, that the written form of the language could-be beneficial, that students could be over­whelmed by language spoken at its "natural speed" and that they, like children, could benefit from more deliberative speech from the teacher. These warnings were derived from Ausubel's cognitive perspective, which ran counter to prevailing behavioristic paradigms on which the audio-lingual method was based. But Ausubel's criticism may have been too far ahead of its time, for in 1964 few teachers were ready to entertain doubts about the widely accepted method. (See Chapter Twelve for a further discussion of the audio-lingual method.)

By the late 1960s and early 1970s generative linguistics was becoming the accepted theoretical mode of thinking, and criticism of earlier direct analogies between first and second language acquisition was mounting. Stern's (1970) article, along with articles by Jakobovits (1968), Cook (1969, 1973), Macnamara (1975), and others began to address the inconsistencies of direct analogies between first and second language learning, but at the same time recognized the legitimate similarities which, if viewed cautiously, allowed one to draw some constructive conclusions about second language learning.