Wolfgang Butzkamm

Relevant results from acquisition research

Findings from neighbouring disciplines support our theory.

(1) In cases of naturally occurring bilingualism both languages help each other out, supplementing each other reciprocally, and disrupting each other’s development far less than previously assumed. Saunders (1988) and Tracy (1996), among others, clearly argue that languages can promote each other’s development reciprocally. The proper model for foreign-language teaching should really have been not first-language acquisition but rather the natural acquisition of a second language. Numerous studies of children growing up with two languages in the family have shown that they employ both languages in such a way that the one is used as a help for the other. If, for instance, the child wants to phone its grandparents in France to tell them about something which it has not yet processed in French, it will first get help by asking "Comment dit-on, I cut my finger?" The lack of vocabulary is solved in the most easily conceivable way (Kielhöfer & Jonekeit, 1983). Requests for linguistic assistance take different forms, they are the rule, not the exception. Also, bilingual speakers often feel the need to reassure themselves in their stronger language. I find those examples most convincing where the children provide for themselves translations which have been deliberately withheld from them. Leopold (1949: 33), author of the classical four-volume study on his own children raised bilingually, once spoke of "Unterwäsche" and overheard his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter saying "Unterwäsche means underwear." She was reassuring herself in her dominant language. There is another note in his diary at a later date: “When she asks me for the meaning of an unfamiliar word…, I give her as a rule not the English translation, but a simple explanation in German. Often she says then the more familiar English equivalent to show that she has understood.” (Leopold 1949: 146). Bilingual children thus create clarity of meaning and consciously practise their languages at the same time.

(2) A bilingual approach is gaining ground in the schools for the congenitally deaf. More and more teachers use sign language, the natural L1 of the profoundly deaf, as a bridge to verbal languages.

(Hager Cohen, 1995; Butzkamm & Butzkamm, 1999).
(3) A “generalized capacity to process syntax” is postulated which helps the acquisition of a native, as well as a foreign language, according to Skehan (1989: 33), for example. The ability to learn foreign languages easily can, therefore, be predicted by looking at the mother tongue. Ganshow & Sparks (2001: 87) summarise the results of the studies related to this topic, concluding that “Native language skills in the phonological / orthographic, syntactic, and semantic codes form the basic foundation for FL learning.” For a century, a large part of the language teaching profession has ignored the very foundations on which FL learning is built.