The Language Teacher

The Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) held its annual meeting November 7-9, 1997. Since Boston University professor Paula Menyuk launched this student-run conference 22 years ago, it has grown steadily, and is now considered to be one of the most comprehensive and influential conferences in the field of first and second language acquisition.

Each year, 90 papers are chosen to be presented at the meeting. The papers cover a wide range of fields: bilingualism, cognition and language, Creoles and pidgins, sociolinguistics, language disorders, literacy, pragmatics, discourse, speech perception and production, and linguistic theory.

Two experts were invited to give the keynote and plenary addresses. This year's keynote address was "Is Abnormal Development Necessarily a Window on Normal Language Acquisition?" by Annette Karmiloff-Smith (Medical Research Council, Cognitive Development Unit and University College, London). The plenary address, "Remarks on Early Null Subjects and Root Infinitives," was given by Luigi Rizzi (University of Siena). Whereas the plenary address focused on purely theoretical issues of syntax, the keynote address contained insights with practical application to second language acquisition.

Karmiloff-Smith compared language acquisition of children with William's Syndrome (WS) with that of normally developing children. In her study, WS patients outperformed normally developing French children in repetition tasks of nonsense words. When normally developing children heard nonsense words, instead of repeating them, they applied the French equivalents to them. Karmiloff-Smith suggested that the manner in which the WS patients process some aspects of language is somewhat parallel to second language acquirers' processing of the target language. When we face our students, we automatically assume that their L2 proficiency should be lower than those of their native speaking counterparts in all areas of language. However, Karmiloff-Smith's result clearly shows that the reality is more complex. Teachers should be aware that some aspects of language acquisition are cognitively conditioned.

This year, a special reception was given in honor of conference founder Paula Menyuk. The tributes given by her former students, some of whom are professors now, were moving. They told us how rare it was to find female researchers 22 years ago, and their remarks made us realize how dramatically times have changed.

Of the 90 papers presented, three were Japan-related: "Rigidity Effects and Strong/Weak WH-Features in SLA" by Miyamoto Yoichi (Osaka University) and Takata Yasuko (Ohio University), "Factors Influencing Students' Proficiency Development in Foreign Languages" by Hykyung Sung and Amado Padilla (Stanford University), and "Qualitative and Quantitative Differences in the Discrimination of Second Language Across Three Language Groups" by Cynthia Brown (McGill and Hokkaido Universities) and John Matthews (McGill and Hokkai Gakuen Universities).

Miyamoto and Takata explained how the linguistic structure of Japanese influences the interpretation of wh-questions. Japanese university students in their study were shown pictures of several people and asked two types of wh-questions: (1) WH- did everyone + verb? (e.g., Who did everyone meet?) and (2) WH- + verb everyone? (e.g., Who met everyone?). The researchers studied how the students interpreted ambiguous wh-questions. For example, Who did everyone meet? is ambiguous because of its collective and distributive readings. This question may be asking whom each person met individually (distributive) or whom everyone as a group met (collective). Miyamoto and Takata found that the Japanese university students whose English proficiency was low strongly preferred the collective reading for both types of wh-questions, while intermediate and advanced level subjects observed the contrast correctly.

Sung and Padilla studied how factors such as students' motivation and their language learning strategies, and parents' attitudes and their involvement in their child's language learning influence oral proficiency development. The researchers surveyed 1, 217 fourth to twelfth-grade students in California who were enrolled in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Russian language classes. They also surveyed the students' parents. The strongest correlations they found were between the students' oral proficiency and cultural heritage (i.e., children studying the language of their cultural roots), and between students' perception of parent's involvement and their actual involvement in the child's foreign language study. However, in all age groups, the students' oral proficiency had no relationship with the students' school-related motivation or with any personal interest-related factor. Other findings by Sung and Padilla concern the developmental changes of motivating factors. For older students, the strongest motivating factor lay in their personal interests, not in parental involvement or in school-related factors. The study suggests that it would be effective for foreign language teachers of older students to offer materials which match their personal interests.

Brown and Matthews investigated the speed at which non-native speakers of English could distinguish between the following four English contrasts: /b/ vs. /v/, /f/ vs. /v/, /s/ vs. /th/, and /l/ vs. /r/. Forty Japanese university students heard two stimuli and indicated as quickly as possible whether the minimal pairs with the above contrasts seemed the "same" or "different." The results showed that it took more time for the subjects to distinguish the s/th and l/r contrasts than the other two. Brown and Matthews found that although the adult learners mistakenly perceived some English sound segments, they remained somewhat sensitive to differences between certain sounds in English. Brown and Matthews' findings have an important implication for teachers: adult learners, who are thought to be unable to hear phonological differences are actually capable of doing so to some extent. The proceedings of the BUCLD are available from Cascadilla Press:

<sales@cascadilla.com, http://www.cascadilla.com>. The web address of the BUCLD is <http://web.bu.edu/LINGUISTICS/APPLIED/conference.html>. Automated seasonal information about the BUCLD may be obtained by sending a blank e-mail message to: <info@louis-xiv.bu.edu>.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Cathy O'Connor, Annabel Greenhill, and Pamela Siska of Boston University for their assistance with this report.