Proficiency in Input and Output: Fossilization

beneficii   Tue Jul 17, 2007 12:44 am GMT
It seems that people fossilize in their output, but not so much in their input. Over time, it seems like they can generally start to understand everything that comes there way, but their output remains to be lacking.

I was wondering the opinion of the others on the forum about this.

Also, I'm wondering what it is that makes people fossilize: What are some of the possible reasons? I'd like to see what people here have to say.
K. T.   Tue Jul 17, 2007 12:54 am GMT
I think people are content to be where they are and don't put new things into practice with speaking. This is a topic among language learners, but really it's a question of personality, I think.

Ever meet older people who do the same thing every year, take the same vacations, meet with the same people every week? That's okay, but what are they learning? I like it when I meet a senior citizen who is active, or simply curious about what is happening-taking classes or volunteering and discussing with people of all ages.

Fossil?
I think the reason for this is, LOL, a lack of motivation or simply-laziness.

I say that I speak five languages well enough to get out of trouble, but I'm always learning something new. Language isn't stagnant. People shouldn't become fossils...
Guest   Tue Jul 17, 2007 2:02 am GMT
I second K.T's opinion. Never stop learning. As a native speaker of my native language, I can not claim to know all the words in the language and I am addding some of them from time to time. When you are reaching to a high proficiency level n your target language, it is easier to get into a comfort zone and have a long hiatus in your studies. So improve your motivation factor. For example, I am learning English but I don't talk to native speakers on a daily basis so for me it is easier to have long breaks and become a lazy person. That's probably the reason why I don't write and speak well consistently.
beneficii   Tue Jul 17, 2007 4:41 am GMT
K.T.,

Hmm, interesting. There does seem to be more pressure on kids to perform correctly and there is that socialization interest with regards to kids as opposed to adults.

I wonder if my 2 trips to Japan in the past year and a half have been repetitive and if I should perhaps change my destination in December to Europe or something (which would be interesting). Then again, I do not want to neglect my Japanese. So, decisions, decisions.

I do have Japanese people around and I practice with them and I take in lots of input, but I am slow right now in adapting to new terms. I remember having delayed language (I was hyperlexic) as a kid and I wonder if it may have something to do with it.
beneficii   Tue Jul 17, 2007 4:42 am GMT
By "adapting to new terms," I mean producing output using newly learned forms from my input. I find that I can more and more better understand the input I receive as time goes on, however.
beneficii   Tue Jul 17, 2007 7:21 pm GMT
It seems that the author of antimoon.com argues that fossilization occurs as a result of making mistakes and having those mistakes become a bad habit. What is the opinion of others on this?

Additionally, I wonder about the methods that people learn and the methods that people judge by. I wonder for example receiving input and knowing things in context; it may help people with their reception of input, but a person's ability to produce output may still be lacking or slow to come behind. _I think the reason why a person may be unable to produce something in output but recognize it in input has to do with fully understanding the structure or not._ They may understand it enough to see recognize it in input, but they do not understand it enough yet to be able to produce the full structure in output (output requires knowledge of the full structure).

With regards to the methods that people learn, it seems like the classroom method and analyzing rules and stuff seems like it would accelerate the process of language learning at first, over comprehensive input, but it seems that it does not help in the long run, _and there is a possibility that it may even hinder it._ The hindering might have to do with how the person looks at the language, the structure of the language, and what is acceptable or not and lead to things such as hypercorrection.

The biggest hypercorrection I have seen among non-native English speakers with relative pronouns is to reverse the subject and its verb, such as in "Do you know where is it [sic]?" It is very clear that they are overgeneralizing the reversing for interrogative pronouns by applying them to relative pronouns, and I wonder if that is a result of instruction saying something like, "Whenever you see that kind of clause reverse the verb and its subject." Native speakers I see don't usually run into this problem.

Among native speakers, the biggest I've seen has to do with the use of the first person pronoun, such as "He talked to Bob and I [sic]," which is technically incorrect, as it should be, "He talked to Bob and me." But this seems to be the result of a chain of events leading from prescriptively incorrect usage of compound pronouns as a subject. Native speakers have a tendency to say things like, "Me and Bob are getting ready to go to the store," or, "Me and her went shopping," which, knowing the prescribed rules for pronouns, is technically incorrect, but it still sounds natural and many native speakers violate it. In elementary school, we were taught that in such cases the pronoun was supposed to be "I" and that it was supposed to go last (because, for some reason, the first person pronoun is always supposed to come last in compounds--I guess for humility reasons). Well, people overgeneralize it, and when they attempt to hypercorrect, they also incorrectly apply it to objects, which call for the use of "me" as opposed to "I."

Of course, why native and non-native speakers make different mistakes like this which, when you split them into the native and non-native groups, they begin to look uniform among each other is unknown. People come up with reasons saying different starting points, learned the languages in different ways (one in a classroom and the other just out living life), a universal grammar device having gone non-functional, etc. I don't know, but _I do wonder if some of these differences are a result of the way the language is presented differently to a language learner in a foreign country than it is to a kid being brought up in the country._

Let's see here, some want immediate results in language learning, or they may have pressure from those around them expecting immediate results, so they use methods to accelerate it as much as they can, which taking language classes helps. That way, they can "wow" their friends and perhaps native speakers with their abilities. (Of course, the native speakers turn around to each other and say how horrible the person still is.) But I wonder if trying to learn like that is, as Franco says, "vain" and if a better method would be trying to get yourself into a situation like that of being brought up in your own country, even though it is at first much slower. Though it is slower, it may in the long run help prevent fossilization and you take the language more as a kid seeing all the things they can explore as opposed to getting to a point where you can "wow," and things are good from there.

Of course, the Chomskians would object, postulating that the people in question are too old and can only learn by a classroom method and explicit instruction because their universal grammar devices have gone non-functional, but I believe counterexamples to that do exist, and counterexamples are what disprove postulates. Of course, the "too old" comment is employed by learners themselves and I believe that it hinders them. Another issue is that of accent; _I had a fellow language learner comment to me that if you know somebody who speaks a foreign accent and then they stop using the foreign accent and start coming closer to the accent of the region, it creates a weird impression as though they are pretending and trying to be who they are not._ Another thing he relayed to me was my telling him of the weirdness I got when I saw a woman of apparent East Asian descent speaking with a thick southern (American) accent once. He said that for a foreign-looking person to speak the non-standard accent of a language would just come across as weird. I also mentioned in the movie _Fargo_ there was a Japanese man who seemed to speak with a hybrid Japanese-Minnesotan ("Yer darn tootin'!") accent, and he responded mentioning the weirdness of that too.

On the subject of weirdness, usually arising when a person uses bad syntax in a language and is heard by a native speaker of that language using it, but I do wonder if it's more than about just using bad syntax. I wonder if it's more about whether you are talking like you are expected to and the way society expects. I wonder if, say, the same weirdness arises in Japanese from using bad grammar as, say, a man using feminine grammar (Men and women in Japanese have different ways of talking, different particles to use, etc.). The weirdness is just a feeling of, There is something wrong. This makes me wonder about the Chomskians too, because they seem to argue it arises purely from bad grammar and it violates the grammar knowledge of others around them, but I'm not sure the feelings of native speakers are necessarily the best judge for that. It seems to have more to do with what is expected and what is out of the blue and surprising. Also, what is interesting are invented syntaces, which for some reason sound refreshing and surprising to native speakers, but do not sound weird. I wonder what the elements of those are.

The Chomskians make me wonder if they worry about syntax too much, and a child being able to learn it. A common example builds on the simple interrogative, "Who are you?" and expands it to longer sentences such as, "Can someone who is a good speaker come?" They wonder why native speakers don't say, "Is someone who a good speaker can come?" It's clear the second sentence violates the tree structure building, as "who is a good speaker" is clearly a subordinate clause, an independent building block of the sentence when combined with "someone" to make "someone who is a good spaker," but I guess they think that building on tree structures is a component of universal grammar?

Also, I think they ignore the simple point of, How does a child in the first place figure that, "Who are you?" is a question and not something else? How do they deduce the meanings of each of those components? Is it simple principles or is it perhaps social situation situations where they figure it out or is it perhaps a combination of them all? Also, I wonder if certain structures in a language have to be that way, or if they were different, even slightly, it might make the language impossible or much more difficult to learn, because either it would make 2 structures that memory depends on being close to be too far away, or vice versa. It's an interesting question and I feel that it too often goes ignored and I find it extremely frustrating.

Anyway, I'm going to stop now, as I'm trying to catch a friend before they leave, and I might post some more. I hope somebody reads it and posts feedback. ^_^
Jérémy   Tue Jul 17, 2007 8:09 pm GMT
<The biggest hypercorrection I have seen among non-native English speakers with relative pronouns is to reverse the subject and its verb, such as in "Do you know where is it [sic]?" It is very clear that they are overgeneralizing the reversing for interrogative pronouns by applying them to relative pronouns, and I wonder if that is a result of instruction saying something like, "Whenever you see that kind of clause reverse the verb and its subject." Native speakers I see don't usually run into this problem.>

I think your explanation is only partial. I know a big lot of French people (I'm French) who reverse the word order the way you showed. They don't reverse the order of words because they are overgeneralizing the reversing for interrogative pronouns. The reason is in French, in that type of clauses, we DO REVERSE the subject and the verb.
Examples:

Je me demande où est mon chat.
I wonder where is my cat.
=> I wonder where my cat is.

Sais - tu où est ton jouet ?
Know you where is your toy ?
=> Do you know where your toy is ?

However, in some cases (mainly when the subject is a pronoun), the order is not reversed:

Sais - tu où il est ?
Know - you where he is ?
=> Do you know where he is ?

But on the whole, a majority of sentences of the type contain the inversion in French. And I know for sure that a lot of French people commit the mistake in English precisely BECAUSE they use the same order as in French. Even when they're explained it's not the same order, they sometimes happen not to understand why. That's a problem of word-for-word translation. And I guess that the same thing must happen for native speakers of other languages that also use the inversion.
However, I also agree with you that in some cases they mistake relative pronouns (even if the status of "when", "where" ... in relative clauses is debatable) with interrogative words and use the classical order of a question - probably because questions beginning with "where is/are ..." are frequent.
Of course I am speaking of non-native speakers of English. Nevertheless, I want to point out that native speakers of English, or even native writers of English, use the inversion. They are to be found in some novels for example. It is generally labelled as "hybrid discourse".


You talked about the uses of "I" and "me". I guess there are empirical rules and theoretical rules. I guess native speakers of English frequently say "me" just because that's what they hear and rules are often generated by what is said in practise. On the other hand, non-native speakers generally learn the fundamental grammatical rules in order to understand what they say and why they say it. Strictly speaking, "Me and her are going out" should not be said because "Me and her" is the subject of "are going", and subjects have to be nominative.
Non-native speakers learn rules that native speakers don't learn, hence what must be perceived as hypercorrection to native speakers. I won't dare say that "me" in that case is not correct. It is correct because it is said and I think that what's most important in a language is what's said. But from a strict syntactic point of view, "I" should be the correct form. Correct me if I am wrong, I may be.


Finally, concerning what you say about weirdness and the Chomskian theory. I do believe in generative syntax, and above all in the principle of universal grammar. At least in the languages that fit it. You were talking about things said by a non-native speaker, which a native speaker would find wierd. On that point I agree with you to say there is nothing syntactically correct or incorrect but that it is only a "feeling" of weirdness. In fact I think universal grammar does exist, a universal grammar that gets together a huge lot a languages and whose rules are somewhat the same. Yet I think each language has evolved over the ages, each language has its own particularities, say its own "default rules", its own "language customs". I think certain syntactic rules are kind of "activated" in some languages, are activated differently ino ther languages, or not activated at all in other languages again. But on the whole that's al the same syntax, which just varies depending on the languages. But there's no FUNDAMENTAL correctness or incorrectness. Just the "habits" of using this or that trait of syntax in this or that language. But Language with a capital letter is much more that what's said in English, what's said in Italian, what's said in Turkish or whatever. It's a whole system with subsystems. But the human mind goes beyond the mere subsystems and is able to more or less grasp the hypersystem, which may be, according to me, the reason why we can adapt to languages whose grammars are totally different from ours.
That does not answer all that you said but only some parts of it.
Just my point of view anyway. I may be high :-o.
Jeremy   Tue Jul 17, 2007 11:32 pm GMT
"You talked about the uses of "I" and "me". I guess there are empirical rules and theoretical rules. I guess native speakers of English frequently say "me" just because that's what they hear and rules are often generated by what is said in practise. On the other hand, non-native speakers generally learn the fundamental grammatical rules in order to understand what they say and why they say it. Strictly speaking, "Me and her are going out" should not be said because "Me and her" is the subject of "are going", and subjects have to be nominative.
Non-native speakers learn rules that native speakers don't learn, hence what must be perceived as hypercorrection to native speakers. I won't dare say that "me" in that case is not correct. It is correct because it is said and I think that what's most important in a language is what's said. But from a strict syntactic point of view, "I" should be the correct form. Correct me if I am wrong, I may be. "

It is the correct form. I think you may have missed the more detailed part of my post--I'm sorry I didn't make it clearer. I was referring to native speakers hypercorrecting that to something like "The dog bit Bob and I [sic]," which is incorrect, but is a result of native speakers have it pushed in their head of making sure to put the first-person pronoun at the end of the list and changing it to "I." Since it is often the inclination for native speakers just to say "me and Bob" in any circumstance, they forget to distinguish just which ones they are supposed to change to "I" for.

I'm not sure if you still are having trouble, so here is a Wikipedia article that deals with the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection#Personal_pronouns

They might explain it better than me.

Anyway, I'm working on the rest of your post. :)
beneficii   Tue Jul 17, 2007 11:35 pm GMT
Sigh, that last reply was by me addressed to Jeremy.
beneficii   Tue Jul 17, 2007 11:42 pm GMT
As a challenge, there is a typo in my last post about hypercorrecting, in this paragraph:

"It is the correct form. I think you may have missed the more detailed part of my post--I'm sorry I didn't make it clearer. I was referring to native speakers hypercorrecting that to something like "The dog bit Bob and I [sic]," which is incorrect, but is a result of native speakers have it pushed in their head of making sure to put the first-person pronoun at the end of the list and changing it to "I." Since it is often the inclination for native speakers just to say "me and Bob" in any circumstance, they forget to distinguish just which ones they are supposed to change to "I" for. "

This typo causes a sentence to become ungrammatical. Can you spot it?
JP   Wed Jul 18, 2007 3:08 am GMT
Is this the one you mean?

"...but is a result of native speakers *have* it pushed in their head of making sure..."

About "I" and "me"...

The way I was taught when to use "I" and when to use "me" was to mentally run through the sentence without referring to the other person, and see what sounded right, and then insert the appropriate pronoun. Of course I don't consciously do this when I'm talking, but it may be going on subconsciously by now, especially since I grew up being corrected for such things (essentially a correction for the hypercorrection).

I would also point out that most people learn their native language both "in vivo" and "in vitro"; for me, "English" was a class in school all the way through college, and to say I learned nothing of my native language in these classes is simply not true.

You learn both by having the rules presented to you and seeing how they are applied, and, in the case of exceptions, how they are *not* applied. Getting one without the other is where problems start arising. So for a while, children will say "goed" instead of "went" because the rule "to form the past tense of a verb, add -ed," was initially presented to them without the additional information of when this rule is not applied. But eventually "went" takes over as they see how the rule is *not* applied, and are corrected accordingly.

As an aside, this is what I don't understand about mistakes becoming "fossilized" and becoming "bad habits" as one learns another language; most of us made all sorts of mistakes in our native languages as we first learned them, but these didn't become "fossilized," or "bad habits," or permanently impair our ability to read, write, or speak them. So what gives?

Finally, I think native speakers and non-native speakers are taught the same set of rules; the process is just different. Hence the difference between "that just sounds right" and "that is correct according to the grammar of this language" to describe precisely the same sentence. The same set of rules is being applied, but is simply being formulated differently.

Sorry for rambling on so long, but I found the last few posts quite interesting and just wanted to add my thoughts...
edo   Wed Jul 18, 2007 5:05 am GMT
beneficii,

On the subject of weirdness: it's just a matter of people getting used to certain things. It wasn't all that long ago that people weren't used to Asians speaking ANY type of English with a native speaker accent. Now that you have hundreds of thousands growing up in the South, New England, etc., people will slowly get used to them with different dialects. It took me a while to get used to non-whites (blacks, Asians, Pakistanis, etc.) sounding like Brits; now it's quite normal. Yiddish coming from native Caribbeans, Hebrew from Ethopians, Cantonese from Europeans--I've heard (or heard about) just about everything. (Like the Vietnamese woman who learned perfect Black vernacular English from her soldier lover--without ever having left Vietnam.)

I think the more interesting point is foreigners improving their accent. I've seen many people make a determined effort and get better over time. (I had a linguistic professor, who spoke about 14 languages, who claimed he had an extremely strong Hungarian accent when he came to the States. He can now pass for a native speaker of English.) People should not get discouraged by others who think that this is "weird," or that they are "trying to be what they are not." We should all encourage and congratulate people who make the extra effort in getting as close as possible to a native speaker level.
beneficii   Thu Jul 19, 2007 1:35 am GMT
JP,

"Finally, I think native speakers and non-native speakers are taught the same set of rules; _the process is just different_. Hence the difference between "that just sounds right" and "that is correct according to the grammar of this language" to describe precisely the same sentence. The same set of rules is being applied, but is simply being formulated differently."

Hmm, it would actually be interesting if you could elaborate a little more on this.
JP   Thu Jul 19, 2007 3:26 am GMT
<<JP,

"Finally, I think native speakers and non-native speakers are taught the same set of rules; _the process is just different_. Hence the difference between "that just sounds right" and "that is correct according to the grammar of this language" to describe precisely the same sentence. The same set of rules is being applied, but is simply being formulated differently."

Hmm, it would actually be interesting if you could elaborate a little more on this.>>

What I meant was that it seems to me that the process for native speakers involves internalizing the rules so early that no formal codification is needed. But that doesn't mean the rules aren't there; if they weren't, there is simply no way a native speaker could have the uncanny ability to "read this out loud and make sure it is right," and then, upon subsequent grammatical analysis, have it prove to be so.

To me, at any rate, it is simply that in one case, the rules are unconsciously applied, while in the other, they are consciously applied; there aren't two separate sets of rules. It can feel like that sometimes, though.
beneficii   Thu Jul 19, 2007 4:02 am GMT
JP,

In that case, it would really be good to define native speaker wouldn't it? Because we are talking about people in the process of learning a language and we are dividing them into 2 groups: native speaker and not. What steps could, perhaps, I take to ensure that I learn like a native speaker instead of like a non-native speaker?