Running head: SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING

Second language acquisition in an ESL setting: A case study Paige Shaw University of Southern Mississippi

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING Second language acquisition in an ESL setting: A case study Introduction Second language acquisition is a very broad field that involves many sub factors. These factors can be different for each person learning a second language and yet many still successfully acquire the language. There are many linguistic factors, learning processes, age variables and instructional variables as well as different contexts and purposes to consider when learning a second language and different combinations work better for certain personality types (Brown, 2007). Literature Review This case study approaches language acquisition with a constructivist theory in mind. There has been a significant amount of research over the past two decades considering the sociocultural aspect of language (Gass & Sellenker, 2008). This study considers second language acquisition from a sociocultural perspective to observe how a particular learner is acquiring and interacting in an immersion environment. Purpose of Study Many people come into contact foreign languages in their lifetime and a great number of these people desire to learn or acquire one or more foreign language. The purpose of this study is to observe one learners process of language acquisition in order to aid in the determination of the most successful methods in learning second languages. This is a qualitative study and therefore only shows one learners process, however this can still be useful in determining which practices have been beneficial to the learner and which ones could have been better.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING Participant Background Sophia is nineteen years old and is from a small town outside of Bgota, Colombia called Fusagasug. She has one older sister whom she lives with while at school in the city of Bgota. Sophia is currently studying law and economics at the Universidad de la gran Colombia. She has been in the United States since January and will return to Colombia at the end of July. She wants to eventually become a criminal justice lawyer and an economist. Sophia comes from a small, average-income family in the mountainous regions of Columbia. Sophias parents own a plant store in Fusagasug which is a typical job for the region due to the warm climate. She had a typical childhood which consisted of attending a local school and being on the swim team. She enjoys recreational and competitive swimming and has fond memories of going to public pools on weekends with her family. She also likes to travel but has only traveled by car and has only been to one other country before flying to the United States, Ecuador. She has extended family in Ecuador and her dad occasionally has business meetings there. This is, therefore, her first experience being both away from her family and in an English speaking country. Education She began to learn English at the age of ten but this was not a constant development and so she had pauses in her second language development throughout her adolescent life. Sophia started to study English consistently again when she started college at the age of sixteen. Second language learning is required for all universities in Colombia and the most commonly chosen are English and French according to Sophia. There are eight required levels of language learning in the Colombian university that she attends and she has completed all of these.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING She is in the United States studying English because she wants to learn English well and she thinks it will be beneficial to her career. She is currently in level three of five in the English Language Institute (ELI) here at the University of Southern Mississippi. Personality She has had relatively good experiences integrating into American culture. She has a positive outlook on her interactions with English speakers and, though she is a fairly quiet person, is eager to make friends and interact with others. She has friends from several nationalities both in the ELI and in other programs of USM. She speaks in English most of the time and only when she is around her two closest Hispanic friends does she speak in Spanish, though, I find this to be useful in demonstrating her true personality better and better judge her English skills. Sophia lives in a dormitory on campus and has a Japanese roommate, with whom she is also very close friends. She is very open the cultural differences she is exposed to and finds these differences to be very interesting. She is a quiet girl, but very kind and easygoing in social situations. Methodology

Information was gathered in a variety of ways and atmospheres in order to collect the most accurate data possible and to see if there were differences in her personality in these different situations. I observed her at social events, in restaurants, on the campus of USM and in other casual environments. The first several hours of observation were not recorded and were intended to simply gain some general knowledge about the participant and make her more

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING comfortable with the observer. The remaining observations were intended to focus more on observing specific acquisition information and to gather linguistic data from the participant. Materials and Procedure The participant was observed through speaking, reading and writing contexts in order to learn about her second language acquisition experience. The materials used in this study are audio recordings, an observation log and a personality test. She was observed in a number of different locations on and off campus as well as with varied company. The participant was observed in both formal settings such as the classroom and informal settings such as social events, restaurants and the pool. The participant was observed in her native language as well as her target language in order to observe the possible similarities and differences in her personality and learner characteristics when in or out of her comfort zone. Learning and communication strategies, motivation, personality factors and competence versus performance were considered in this study to determine her specific acquisition situation. Each informal setting observation was a natural conversation which was meant to be as realistic as possible, without directing attention to the linguistic aspects of her speech. One observation involved only the observer and the participant, and the others involved various other people. Sophia was relatively quiet in all of the settings and with all of the company unless directly asked questions. She almost never talked just to talk. This was one of her defining personality traits which made her a bit difficult to analyze at times.

Analysis Sophia is a highly complex person to study, in my opinion, because she is so quiet and reserved. It is difficult to understand what she is truly thinking and what she can truly do with

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING the language because of her quiet nature. I therefore had her fill out a series of personality tests to aid in the understanding of how her mind works and how she processes information. Personality The participant took the Myers-Briggs personality test from HumanMetrics.com to help to determine what type of learner she might be. She read all of the questions aloud and asked for further explanation when she did not understand a word or sentence structure. The results showed that she was an ESFP which is entitled The performer on personalitypage.com and is definitely not Sophias personality. Sophias personality was also observed based on an eye movement test which says that the dominant brain hemisphere can be determined based on the direction a persons eyes move when thinking. She did not strongly prefer one side or the other, although she seems to be more of a right-brain thinker than a left-brain thinker. She is very intelligent and responsible, but also more impulsive than reflective at times, doing what she wants, when she wants, simply because she wants to. Sophia also seems to be highly internally motivated. She is only in the United States studying English because she wants to learn another language. She enjoys learning about other cultures and is very studious. She is attentive in class and devotes appropriate amounts of time to her assignments. She also contacts her conversation partner regularly to practice her English and speaks mostly in English to the other ELI students. She tries to be as involved as she can be in social gatherings and activities with other students on campus as well which shows her motivation to interact with other English speakers.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING Communication strategies She often uses rising voice pitch when she is unsure of a word or phrase. She also uses circumlocution to describe something she does not know how to say or uses hand motions for further clarification. Competence vs. performance. Sophia does try to stay in the target language as much as possible but she also seems to be in the quiet stage at this point. When around other English speakers, she is very reserved, yet seems like she is trying to understand what is being said. This could be simply because she is naturally just not a very talkative person but she still seems to understand much more than she is able to easily express. Noticing. Sophia seems to have relatively good awareness for corrective feedback. She is fairly good at noticing phrasal or word formations that native speakers say that is different to what she previously thought. Grammar Sophias grammar was observed through audio recordings of spoken conversation and written formal and informal text. She typically uses common words and phrases in all discourse and seems hesitant to use new or unfamiliar structures. Sophias second language acquisition is definitely influenced by her native language phonology as well as lexical and syntactical transfer though there are also some prevalent interlanguage errors. Speech. Sophia has expressed many thoughts in English that show direct lexical and syntactical transfer from Spanish, her native language. She has several problems with preposition choice,

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING omission of articles as well as word choice and order. These are all errors that are due to her native language influence. The following are examples of this: She says We visit all the cities in the way to Ecuador instead of on the way because in Spanish, the preposition en is used for the English equivalents in and on. She says I want to work in a company of petroleum instead of a petroleum company. Do you have (a) roommate? In many cases in Spanish, the a is not required such as do you have a boyfriend/tienes novio. I like to go shopping window In Spanish, most modifiers are found after the noun or adjective it modifies. I always put more black This is a direct translation of word choice that is different in Spanish and English: Me pone mas morena. Writing. Sophias writing errors were observed through Facebook or cell phone messaging, and school writing assignments. She makes similar errors in writing as she does in speech, though they are more noticeable because written mistakes can be more easily noticed and observed. She seems to make more mistakes with direct native language word choice in writing. People compared do diet with do exercise The verb to do is necessary in Spanish but not in English. in the other hand This is similar to the earlier situation of translating the Spanish en to in instead of the correct form on. to eats a good food This is a combined problem of subject verb agreement combined with a problem of count and noncount nouns.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING My birthday is in the same day than yours This is a direct translation of the Spanish equivalent mi cumpleaos est en el mismo dia que el tuyo. Discussion Sophia is a very good student and is learning a lot in her immersion experience. She has expressed her interest in reading and I believe this definitely helps to amplify her vocabulary. She is also improving a great deal in her basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) because of her frequent contact with colloquial phrases of native speakers. As stated by Gass & Selinker, she is now in the transfer stage of SLA and with the interaction she is currently exposed to, will greatly improve her abilities (Gass & Selinker, 2008). Sophia is a dedicated student and, I believe will continue to grow in her language acquisition, though I doubt she will reach nativelike proficiency or pronunciation because she did not consistently study English from a young age, she still has a strong sense of a Colombian identity, and she is not a perfectionist, and therefore her language will probably fossilize at understandable instead of excellent (Brown, 2007). I believe she is very advanced in many areas of communicative competence but there are some things she still struggles with. Personality Sophias results on the Myers-Briggs personality test did not match her actual personality. The personality that the test gave her was ESFP which is the performer. This personality was said to be very attention thriving and outgoing. This could not be farther from the truth. Though Sophia does enjoy the company of others she is usually a quiet onlooker and not in the center of attention. I think that she should have scored introverted and intuitive instead of extroverted and sensing. I believe the reason for this inaccurate analysis had to do with the language barrier of being able to understand, not only the meaning of each word in the sentences,

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING but the underlying significances of the wording. I also believe it was due to the limited responses of either yes or no. There were many situations, in which she wanted to answer differently depending on the circumstance, and this made her answers depend heavily on the way she was feeling at that moment. On the particular day that she took the test she was excited about going to a party that night, and so she answered the questions with her more social goals in mind. She does enjoy being around people, but she is definitely not the center of attention, nor is she in constant need of others acknowledgement and approval. Sophia is a very hardworking and intelligent person. She tends to be a more right hemisphere oriented thinker and therefore a more integrative and feeling based thinker, though she also exemplifies many left hemisphere traits which make her a very logical thinker and someone who pays attention to detail. This combination makes her very smart and talented in facing challenging situations, whether social or scholastic. She is highly tolerant of ambiguous situations and this makes her very good at filling in the gaps where her language is lacking in order to communicate a thought or idea. Communication Strategies Sophia will be successful in language acquisition because of the many communicative strategies she exhibits and because of her ability to recognize feedback and native structures. She easily finds different ways to express her ideas and, when possible, uses gestures to further aid native English speakers understanding. She is attentive to new structures and new ways to say things that she is unfamiliar with and is not afraid to ask if a person says something that she does not understand. Though she can be quiet at times, she still seems to be paying close attention to the structures and sounds of the language and learning from her exposure to native speakers.

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SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING A drawback to her ability to use strategies for communication is that her vocabulary may suffer. Because she is so good at making people understand using already familiar words, she may not be as motivated to expand her vocabulary. She may also have trouble learning particular grammatical aspects for the same reasons. Grammar Sophias major grammar issues were discussed in previous sections of the case study. These issues are mainly language transfer issues from her native language. These problems are common and usually do not cause statements or ideas to be incomprehensible. These grammar problems are ones that can easily be aided by a variation of activities that draw specific attention to her language acquisition issues. Conclusion Sophias language acquisition process is what many would consider to be a fairly typical one. She has already grown a noticeable amount since her arrival in the United States and she will continue to grow in her language acquisition process. I believe that, though she will probably never reach native-like acquisition, she will still have the ability to communicate effectively and use the language as a tool in her future career.

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SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING Activities Activity 1-communicative The purpose of this activity is to lower Sophias affective filters about speaking and help her to understand the correct usage of the prepositions in and on in context. In this activity, the student will have to ask a series of questions that provoke the use of prepositional phrases and keep a log of the uses of each preposition in context. Depending on the lesson studied, the teacher can match the questions to the vocabulary or context of the lesson. The student will ask direct questions such as What are some phrases in which you use in? as well as more abstract ones such as where do you put your clean/dirty clothes? if the lesson is on household tasks or where did you put the remote? Activity 2-writing This activity is intended to expand vocabulary and improve the quality of written discourse. In this activity, the student will write a story about a topic that fits in with the current lesson. This writing assignment should be roughly one to 2 pages in length. The student will write the story and then go back and review the story, underlining a given number of verbs, nouns or adjectives (can be a mixture or just one category). The student will then look up at least one synonym for the chosen words and replace the first words with the new words. A follow up activity can be to play a guessing game such as Taboo with the new words the students have found. Activity 3-count and noncount nouns This activity will assist in the understanding of when nouns need to be accompanied by articles and when they are not necessary. It will also aid in the general understanding of

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SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING language in context and amplify vocabulary. The student will be required to find a recipe and prepare the dish for class (or not prepare if not permitted). The student will analyze the recipe and discuss with a partner or group which items are count nouns and which are not. The class can then write all of the count nouns in one column on the board and the noncount nouns in the other column. They will then, either together or separately, create their own recipe using these nouns correctly in context and read it to the class. Activity 4-connectors This activity will assist the student to connect sentences logically and smoothly in writing activities. The student seemed to have some problems with the fixed phrases of some logical connectors, so in order to practice this the student can be given a paragraph with blanks where the connectors would go, and a word bank at the end denoting which connectors to use. The students can then fill in the paragraph with the correct connectors. As a follow up activity, the student can then use the connectors from that activity and write their own sequence of events or story using the same connector phrases.

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SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN AN ESL SETTING References Brown, H.D. (2007). Principles of language learning and teaching. (5th edition). White Plains, New York: Pearson Education Gass, S.M & Selinker, L. (2008). Second language acquisition: An introductory course. (3rd edition). New York, New York: Routledge Human Metrics (2012). Jung typology test. Retrieved from http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgiwin/jtypes2.asp Shrum, J.L. & Glisan, E.W. (2010). Teachers handbook: Contextualized language instruction. (4th edition). Boston, Massachusetts: Heinle, Cengage Learning

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