Private speech and L2 learning Analysis of corpus Objective: to comprehend the importance of private speech to L2 learning (private speech as means of internalization) Corpus: children and adults in foreign language classroom situation

Children De Courcy (2002) 12- to 15-year-old middle school French- immersion children in Australia Saville-Troike (1988) Nine children between the ages of 3 and 8 years old in an English-speaking North-American classroom setting (native languages: Chinese, Korean and Japanese)

De Courcy (1993) Private speech as a sign of participating, though silently, in the lesson Reasons (according to the students themselves): 1.Reinforcing one’s answer 2.Saving face 3.Making sense of the question 4.Getting practice in using the language

Saville-Troike (1988) Silent period: for realizing that people surrounding them did not speak their language and for finding difficulties to communicate in English (foreign language) Criteria: Lack of eye contact Apparent lack of expectation of response Reduced volume of utterance *When struggling with nonlanguage issues (say, math), private speech emerged in L1

Saville-Troike (1988) Patterns: Repetition Recall and practice Creation of novel forms Expansion and substitution Rehearsal for interpersonal communication

Saville-Troike (1988) Repetition: (1) PEER: I want you to ride the bike CHILD: Bike (2) TEACHER: What’s happened there? [sic] CHILD: What’s happened there? *Imitative utterances in reduced volume, lack of eye contact and no expectation of response

Saville-Troike (1988) Expansion: (3) TEACHER: Let’s go outside. CHILD: Out. Outside. *By decomposing the word “outside” and then repeating it, the child apparently makes sense of a new word, similar to one he/she already knew (in case, “out”). That’s what internalization is all about.

Saville-Troike (1988) Creation of novel forms: (4) TEACHER: You guys go brush your teeth. And wipe your hands on the towel. CHILD: Wipe your hand. Wipe your teeth. *Persistent imitation: creating new forms based on something previously heard, even though it might not make total sense (“wipe your teeth”)

Adults Ohta (2001) Six first-year and four second-year university students of Japanese as a foreign language Original 37-year-old female native speaker of Korean Lantolf & Yañez-Prieto (2003) Adult classroom learner of Spanish as a foreign language

Ohta (2001) High frequency of private speech utterances Patterns: Repetition (most frequent by far) Manipulation of patterns produced by others Vicarious response (learner responds privately to a problem posed by the teacher to some other student)

Ohta (2001) (1)(…) T: You’re not free (in Japanese, correction negation) H: Oh, not free (in Japanese, overlapping with teacher) C: not free (in Japanese, whispered and overlapping H) (…) *C was not engaged in the interaction between T(teacher) an H, but she participates from the periphery, repeating softly the correct form of the negative adjectival noun, as a way of internalizing it.

Original (1)T: Important or notable (providing synonyms for “significant”) L: Ah, notable (rising intonation) Notable (rising intonation) Mm (very softly) *Use of rising intonation indicates not knowing the word “notable”, contrarily to the teacher’s assumption

Original (2) T: Were you taking a nap, a little sleep? (directed at another student L: nap, I take nap… ing *Persistent imitation: experimenting with the word “nap”. Pause (“…”) indicates uncertainty with regard to the form “napping”.

Lantolf & Yañez-Prieto (2003) Use of L1 Metacommentary

Lantolf & Yañez-Prieto (2003) Use of L1: (1)T: Mi pintura favorita… L: Fue pintada de Monet T: Fue pintada…? L: De Monet? T: Por… L: Por, no de (privately, while overlapping T’s correction) T: Mi pintura favorita fue fintada por Monet L: From, from, from (while T moves on to work with other students)

Lantolf & Yañez-Prieto (2003) * Utterance of “from” several times at the end of the transcript indicates an inner attempt of differentiating “por” and “de” in Spanish, which was the apparent difficulty demonstrated by the learner. This internalization will quite likely lead him/her to a problem, once the meaning of “de” in Spanish is not necessarily “from”, depending on the context (which are many, by the way).

Lantolf & Yañez-Prieto (2003) Metacommentary: (2) T: Más autos fueron vendidos el año pasado. C1: Se vende más autos. T: Se what? C2: Se vendieron L: Vendieron… I knew it! *“I knew it” is an evaluative metacomment, once it exposes her assumption of the correct answer. She probably was not so sure of it, though, once she produced private speech instead of social speech (direct answer to the teacher).

Conclusion Children and adults rely on similar processes of internalization: Imitative process (adults however are less prone to persistent imitation, it means, they are less likely to experiment with language) Differences: Metacommentary (adults generally have a more enhanced metalinguistic awareness in relation to children)

Conclusion *L1 was not overtly accessed by any of the speakers. *Dominant social language was English, therefore speakers might have felt compelled to rely on this language for self-regulation (even non-native speakers, which was the case of the original research). *Children are more likely to succeed in the transfer from private to social speech.