In Zimbabwe: “Let’s we go.” Solution is to expand the contraction. Ishmael learned vocabulary first, and later grammatical terms.

Tatiana: she knows the rules but not the exceptions and usage so she feels that native speakers are the better teachers. But I think we’re not as good as knowing the rules, but only the usage. Her early learning involved listening but no analysis; memory but not grammar.

From Elka’s article…

Key fossilization factors:

• Physiological
• Neurological
• Social-psychological
• Cognitive
• Foreign language aptitude
• Nature of learning abilities involved
• Failure of the Subset Principle
• Nature and amount of input
• Interactive needs satisfaction
• Interactive feedback
• Language transfer
• Overgeneralization of target language linguistic material
• Transfer of training
• Multiple Effects Principle (MEP)

High-Risk Categories for fossilization

These are drawn from error analysis and interlanguage documentation, mostly from the 70s and early 80s.

• Categories lacking a straightforward form-function relationship. Articles are a good example. They duplicate the functions of other markers in the sentence, so it’s hard for learners to separate contextual from grammatical information. Articles are the #1 error.

• Semi-productive rules: When the exceptions don’t make up a clearly defined set. Irregular plural or past tense forms are examples, as are different word formation rules, negative prefies, stress shift in v —> adj formations… Also, intransitive verbs: “There seems to be no principled way why a too-big bite can chock and gag us but not cough us.”

• Units of highly arbitrary nature: They exist in all natural languages. Two highly arbitrary categories are prepositions and collocations.

Stabilization (v. fossilization) was described in one online resource as the step before fossilization, which may or may not lead to actual fossilization. It can be caused by affective problems that discourage future learning, lack of motivation, insufficient language input, faulty cognitive strategies. So we need to be on the lookout for stabilization since it might be a prelude to fossilization.

Socialization in the language-learning context: It’s a paradigm that I’ve had a hard time researching online. I found this from UC Berkeley: It’s about twenty years old. “How is language the means and the ends of the socialization process? How do children and other novices become competent members of communities?” Ahhh, here we go:

Socialization is when speakers are aware they have errors but they don’t care?

It is “…an attempt to locate the field of SLA within the study of social organization and behavior. The five premises of what Watson-Gegeo calls “language socialization (LS) theory” are as follows:

• [L]inguistic and cultural knowledge are constructed through each other
• [A]ll activities in which learners regularly interact with others … are not only by definition socially organized and embedded in cultural meaning systems, but are inherently political
• [C]ontext refers to the whole set of relationships in which a phenomenon is situated
• [C]hildren and adults learn culture largely through participating in linguistically marked events, the structure, integrity, and characteristics of which they come to understand through primarily verbal cues to such meanings”
• [C]ognition is built from experience and is situated in sociohistorical, sociopolitical contexts…

Terminal 2+ (Higgs & Clifford, 1982)

Higgs and Clifford warn that deemphasizing form and concentrating on meaning may lead to irreversible error fossilization. A strictly communicative syllabus (be it based on situational or notional-functional considerations) might lead to a premature arrest in the development of linguistic accuracy.

They talk about a phenomenon they call “terminal 2s”: individuals with a relatively highly developed vocabulary but low grammatical accuracy in the form of fossilized errors that can no longer be remedied, even through extensive instruction. (I don’t know exactly what level of competency “2” refers to.) The authors maintain that “fossilized structures are a chronic problem among street learners of languages, such as students or servicemen stationed oversea.” The terminal cases whose foreign-language background was academic taught by instructors who themselves had not attained grammatical mastery of the target language or by instructors who had chosen not to correct their students’ mistakes for philosophical, methodological, or personal reasons.

All of this is in opposition to Krashen and Terrell’s theories.

An F Factor in Depth

How does it have an impact on learning in a negative way? How can we neutralize or minimize the effect?

I’d like to choose neurological factors to explore, since they are relevant to my life and we all know that “It’s all about me.” There is evidence that our brains lose plasticity and myelination sets in the older we get. Lateralization is, by my age, hard-wired so my brain can’t make an emergency reassignment of a language-learning task to another region. That, as I understand it, is proven. In Elka’s article she says that these are the most tenable age-related explanations but they’re not without flaws, primarily because of lack of supporting research. While adults have the benefit of greater competence in abstraction and intellectual strategizing, I find that clutter in my brain and holes in my short-term memory have had a profound affect on my capacity to pick up a new language with facility. Yet I used to be quite good at languages. Now a new word  is gone the second my eardrum stops vibrating.

By the way, I’m not referring to the nativelike accent acquisition that has been much studies, but the set of learning (and affective) challenges faced uniquely by adult learners.

According to Harmer in How to Teach English, adults arrive equipped with life experience, on the positive side, and life experience on the negative side. Prior learning experiences color our attitudes, and the more failures we have, the more we’re likely to have.

Some ways to address the challenges specific to age are finding ways to address the affective domain specifically for older adults. One way to do this, in addition to some of the usual ways of lowering the affective filter, is to raise motivation.

I would be very interested to read more about this area and want to ask Elka for resources: not ones that go over the same terrain about lateralization and accent, but about methodologies best suited to build on the characteristics of older learners, over, say, forty.