The Effect of Technology on

Second Language Acquisition

(and vice versa)

Elizabeth Hanson-Smith

Professor emeritus, Calif State Univ, Sacramento, USA

Computers for Education
Command Performance Language Institute

http://webpages.csus.edu/~hansonsm

ehansonsmi@yahoo.com

Topics
- What are the problems facing CALL researchers?
- What is SLA?
- Are there any solutions?

de Lisle's summary of Clarkes (1994) Media Will Never

Influence Learning:

Instructional Methods differ from Instructional Media

Methods are fundamental ways of working to bring
about a change in the learner's cognitive processes

Media are the means by which the method is delivered

to the learner
Media attributes are the delivery methods which a
particular medium offers (e.g., zooming in video)

"there is no single media attribute that serves a

unique cognitive effect for some learning task,
[so]
the attributes must be proxies for some
other variables that are instrumental in learning
gains"
(Clarke, 1994, p. 22).

Media are like the delivery truck

we are grateful to UPS, but the
content of the box isn't theirs.

De Lisle's summary of Clarke:

The learning effects demonstrated are

due [not to the delivery method, but] to
superior Instructional methods being built
into Computer Based learning situations.

In brief, my claim is that media research is a

triumph of enthusiasm over substantive
examination of structural processes in
learning and instruction.
(Clarke, 1994, p. 27)

What is SLA? - Definition(s)

Krashen's Input Model

Graph constructed at Gliffy.com

The above is admittedly a very simple version,

based on Stevick's illustration (1980, p. 270).
Krashen by 1981 has a much more elaborated
version (see especially p. 101) that takes into
account the impact of learning on acquisition,
though clearly he never strayed from the
idea that input is primary to the process of
SLA.

What is SLA? - Definition(s)

An Interactionist Model

Based on Chapelle, 1998, Fig. 2, p. 23 (see also, Swain, 1985).

Graph constructed at Gliffy.com

What is SLA? - Definition(s)

Stevick's Levertov Machine

Graph constructed at Gliffy.com

The "Rheostat" in Stevick's model turns up attention

and hence acquisition and output capabilities. Social
forces are important: How learners feel about school
and learning, and also the reactions of others during
communication. What we acquire and what we learn
interact with each other. Reactions to our output aid
both acquisition and learning. (Stevick, 1980, pp.
270-279.)

What is SLA? - Plato's Problem

or

How do we we acquire so much

knowledge on the basis of so little
information?

Landauer & Dumais (2004): "A typical American seventh

grader knows the meaning of 10-15 words today that she
didn't know yesterday" (p. 2). Most of these words must
have been acquired through reading because the
majority of English words are used only in print, and she
has already acquired the full complement of oral
vocabulary; however, she has acquired less than one word
through direct instruction since yesterday.
About one word for every twenty paragraphs read in a
school text goes from wrong to right on a daily
vocabulary test. Yet the typical seventh grader would
have read fewer than 50 paragraphs since yesterday.
How did she acquire these words she didn't encounter?

Plato's solution for this "mystery of

excessive knowledge" is that people are born
with most of their knowledge and need only
hints or contemplation to retrieve it.

What is SLA?

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)

A general theory of "acquired similarity and knowledge
representation" (Landauer & Dumais (2004): p. 1).
Landauer and Dumais used the Grolier Encyclopedia, an electronic
text for young students, to analyze 30,473 articles with a mean text
length of 151 words. (Some articles were only one sentence long, e.g.,
"Constantinople; see Istanbul," and longer articles were cut off at
2,000 characters.) The words were placed into a matrix, each column
representing an article, and each row one of 60,768 word-types that
appeared in at least 2 articles. Each cell contained the frequency with
which a word appeared in that article:

Table based on Landauer & Dumais, Figure 2, p. 13

Word/
Article

..

..

30,000

60,000

Latent Semantic Analysis 2

The computer is then able to determine logrithmically what
words (i.e., strings of characters) appear in what contexts
(i.e., with other words/strings), but even more importantly,
what words might appear in similar contexts.

When given the synonym portion of the TOEFL, the

machine approximated the average scores of EFL applicants
to U.S. colleges. The model got 64.4% correct, and the
students got 64.5% (Landauer & Dumais, p. 14).

This is all without the computer understanding the

words tested semantically, and
without being able to use grammar/syntax cues.
"A substantial portion of the information needed to
answer common vocabulary test questions can be
inferred from the contextual statistics of usage
alone" (Landauer & Dumais, 2004, pp. 2-3)

The machine acquired knowledge about

synonymity "from the kinds of experience on
which a human relies"
(Landauer & Dumais, p. 15).
That is, the hundreds of billions of neural
networks in the brain can exploit both indirect
inference and co-occurrence relations, both
within and beyond a particular text.

Several observations by Landauer & Dumais:

- ...weak local constraints [e.g., in the search for
synonymity] can combine to produce strong inductive
effects (p. 6)
- ...the effects of constraints [which may be very weak
in themselves] may emerge only in very large naturally
generated ensembles. In other words, experiments with
miniature or concocted subsets of language may not be
sufficient to reveal or assess the forces that hold
conceptual knowledge together. (p. 6)

(To learn a language, you need masses of input

data as encountered naturally by people.)

- Knowledge comes not just from an immediate stimulus

or direct experience with something, e.g., encountering
a word, but "with everything else ever experienced." (p.
11)

What is SLA? - LSA 4

The LSA model accounts for other aspects of human
knowledge:

First- through fifth-graders learn about 10

words a day, despite learning only about one
word a week by direct instruction. (p. 17)

This is possible because:

A late grade school child will have read about 3.8 million
words. The direct learning effect is calculated at .0007
words per word encountered X 70 (the approximate
number of words in a paragraph). The indirect effect
is .15 words per word encountered.

An average student reads 50 paragraphs daily,

amounting to 10 new words/day learned. (p. 22)

What is SLA? - LSA 5

Landauer & Dumais (2004):
Expert readers "get more" out of what they read.
There is "inductive power inherent in the possession of
large bodies of old knowledge." (p. 31)
By the end of secondary school, a knowledge of
100,000 words is probably a low estimate.

The expert reading her 2 millionth paragraph has a

.56 probablility of correct extrapolation when
encountering a new term in, say, an academic journal,
while the novice encountering only his second sample
of a similar context has a .14 probability of correct
meaning: he is about 1/4 as able to read for meaning.
There is "inductive power inherent in the possession
of large bodies of old knowledge." (p. 31)

Is the medium the message? Back in 1994, Clarke told us

no, it was not. If you drill and grill on the computer, it's
no different than doing it in the classroom. You can click
for animation or zoom for details, but these are delivery,
not content or methods.
- Only superior methods can produce better learning.
Therefore,
- CALL researchers are in fact investigating methods.

Does CALL provide us with superior

methods of delivering instruction?
Or superior quantities of natural language?

Or something else?

A 4-year-old, when asked what she was fishing

for behind the TV, replied "the mouse."
(Carr, 2008, C7)
Another 4-year-old asked to see the movie she
had just viewed on broadcast TV at the
babysitters' house. When told it wasn't on TV
just then, she asked, "Is it broken?"
(Carr, 2008, C7)

- You point, you click, you don't wait.

- You don't have to allow others to select
what you read or listen to.

So possibly both method (in the largest

sense) and input--and the methods of input-as well as motivational quality are all superior
in a CALL environment.

Putting together all these sources:

* "Methods" may in fact be seen as less important
than the delivery of input--and how input is delivered.
* Masses of input are more important than direct
instruction. (Are we back to Krashen??)
* Authentic content is more important for indirect
learning than prepared texts with narrow foci.

* Human readers can readily disambiguate terms

through local context, using their hundreds of billions
of parallel computational elements (Landauer & Dumais,
p. 32); hence, concordancers should be important tools
in language input.
* Since humans are exposed to spoken language as
well as print, the newer forms of oral Web interaction,
such as VoIP should become increasingly important for
communication beyond classmates and teacher.

* Since, in language, learners can produce the same

events that they perceive--and receive feedback on
their approximations (remembering Stevick's Levertov
machine)--opportunities for communicative production
are very important to expanding the knowledge base
and neural networks.
* Some degree of autonomy in the selection of media
and learning goals appears to be useful both for
motivation and in making inferences about content and
linguistic structures.

The media-rich, Internet-enhanced computerbased environment offers multiple

opportunities to expand input and interaction
far beyond schoolroom walls.

Additionally, it offers the potential for

learner autonomy and motivation.

Taking into account these ideas, what can we

conclude about the proper functions of CALL
--and by extension what should be the scope
of CALL research?

* Content-based learning is important--it

provides the contextual clues that allow
inferred induction to develop
* Authentic, extensive materials are
important--they provide the large masses of
information necessary for inferential learning
* Learners need opportunities to direct
their own learning

* Opportunities for creative output and

interaction are important, e.g., in extensive
project-based learning involving an authentic
audience--they allow learners to experiment
and refine hypotheses about what they are
learning
(see CALL Environments, Egbert & HansonSmith, eds., 2007, particularly Chapter 1)

Of lesser importance in SLA and hence in

researching CALL:
* Learning of discrete items, e.g., parts of
speech in decontextualized sentences
* Tests judging rote learning, e.g., lists of
vocabulary items

A significant problem is how to control the

variables when dealing with autonomous
learner choices, massive amounts of
authentic materials (as in extensive reading
and long-term projects), and multiple media
resources for both receptive and expressive
communications--and often all of these at
the same time.

References
Berry, M. W. (1992). Large scale singular value computations.
International Journal of Supercomputer Applications, 6(1), 13-49.
Carr, D. You want, you click (no waiting). 2008. New York Times,
Business Day, 31 March, pp. C1 + C7.
Chapelle, C. A. (1998). Multimedia CALL: Lessons to be learned
from research on instructed SLA. Language Learning & Technology,
2(1), 22-34. Available at
http://llt.msu.edu/vol2num1/article1/index.html.
Clarke, R. E. (1994). Media will never influence learning.
Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 21-30.

References, cont.
de Lisle, P. (n.d.) Summary of Clarke (1994): "Media will never
influence Learning" (M.Ed. Project). Available at
http://hagar.up.ac.za/catts/learner/peterdl/ClarkeKozma.htm.
Egbert, J. & Hanson-Smith, E., eds. (2007). CALL Environments:
Research, practice, and critical issues. Alexandria, VA: TESOL.
Krashen, S. (1981). Second language acquisition and second
language learning. New York: Pergamon Press.
Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (2004). A solution to Plato's
problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis theory of acquisition,
induction and representation of knowledge. Available at
http://lsa.colorado.edu/papers/plato/plato.annote.html.

References, cont.
Stevick, E. W. 1980. The Monitor Model and the Levertov
Machine. In E. Stevick, ed., Teaching languages: A way and ways,
pp. 267-282. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence: some roles of
comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its
development. In S. M. Gass & C. G. Madden, eds., Input in second
language acquisition, pp. 235-253). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

*Notes:

A free software version of the program used to

analyze large matrices by Landauer and Dumais is
available from
http://www.netlib.org/svdpack/index.html
(see Berry 1992).
University-affiliated researchers may obtain a
research-only license and complete software to
replicate Landauer & Dumais' work in LSA by
contacting Susan Dumais at the Information Sciences
Research Bellcore, Morristown, NJ 07960.

An outline of this paper may be viewed at

http://tesol-tech-sla.wikispaces.com/

Links to my other papers and work in software and

Webware design are found at my homepage:
http://webpages.csus.edu/~hansonsm