馬 拯

(上海海事大學(xué),上海,201306)

Robert DeKeyser博士,美國馬里蘭大學(xué)語言、文學(xué)和文化學(xué)院教授,在二語習(xí)得研究領(lǐng)域久負(fù)盛名。本專訪嘗試以簡單易懂的語言,以一名普通的二語學(xué)習(xí)者的身份與DeKeyser進(jìn)行交流,由此希望借助最專業(yè)的教授的視角,幫助讀者更清楚地理解二語習(xí)得研究的一些抽象而復(fù)雜的概念和理論。DeKeyser本人來自于比利時(shí),作為美國大學(xué)的教授,也算是一名二語學(xué)習(xí)者。他熱情地接受了采訪,并就二語習(xí)得的一些關(guān)鍵問題分享了他的觀點(diǎn)和看法。

外語學(xué)習(xí)看似非常簡單,它不像學(xué)習(xí)數(shù)理化那樣高門檻。評(píng)價(jià)外語學(xué)習(xí)的效果看起來也很容易,輕易就能找到本族人作為參照。這也是為什么隨處可見市場(chǎng)化的語言培訓(xùn)廣告和機(jī)構(gòu),卻很少能看到類似的數(shù)理化培訓(xùn)機(jī)構(gòu)。然而,事實(shí)上外語學(xué)習(xí)又不那么容易。在二語習(xí)得領(lǐng)域,有一個(gè)廣為所知的事實(shí),那就是幾乎沒有一個(gè)成年的外語學(xué)習(xí)者外語水平已經(jīng)或者能夠達(dá)到像本族人一樣(native-like),成年的外語學(xué)習(xí)者甚至被認(rèn)為是“殘疾”(disabled)的語言學(xué)習(xí)者,這就是二語習(xí)得中的年齡效應(yīng)(Age Effects)。

DeKeyser教授認(rèn)為,孩童的隱性學(xué)習(xí)能力(implicit learning capability)隨著年齡而逐漸下降,因此與年齡相適應(yīng)的顯性學(xué)習(xí)(explicit learning)和系統(tǒng)性的練習(xí)非常重要。年齡效應(yīng)研究的啟示不在于說我們?cè)皆缃绦『W(xué)習(xí)語言則越好,而在于它強(qiáng)調(diào)教學(xué)活動(dòng)應(yīng)該與年齡相適應(yīng)。對(duì)小孩來說,不應(yīng)該教給他們過多的顯性信息,使他們負(fù)擔(dān)過重,而應(yīng)該給他們提供高質(zhì)量的語言輸入;相反,對(duì)于青少年和成年學(xué)習(xí)者,則應(yīng)該給他們提供顯性的信息,再加上大量交際性、系統(tǒng)性的練習(xí),從而促進(jìn)陳述性知識(shí)(declarative knowledge)的程序化和自動(dòng)化。他認(rèn)為,任何形式的語言教學(xué)和學(xué)習(xí)的成功,不管是在外語課堂里、在國外學(xué)習(xí)的環(huán)境里,還是在移民語境下的學(xué)習(xí),都取決于與學(xué)習(xí)語境和學(xué)習(xí)者年齡及學(xué)能相適應(yīng)的顯性信息、語言輸入和練習(xí)的正確組合。

因此,DeKeyser教授認(rèn)為,“native-like”可以作為語言學(xué)習(xí)的理想(ideal),但以此作為語言學(xué)習(xí)的目標(biāo)卻有些不切實(shí)際,這反而容易讓學(xué)習(xí)者感到沮喪、失望。同樣,外語教師與其過多強(qiáng)調(diào)語音的完美,不如更多地關(guān)注語言表達(dá)的“準(zhǔn)確與流利”。因?yàn)榧热徽Z音是語言習(xí)得最難的方面,不如更切實(shí)際地關(guān)注語法、詞匯等層面的提高,從而達(dá)到流利、準(zhǔn)確。DeKeyser以自己為例:雖然他口語表達(dá)“流利、也相當(dāng)(reasonably)準(zhǔn)確”,寫作上達(dá)到跟本族人很難區(qū)分的程度,但他仍具有很強(qiáng)的、很容易就能跟本族人區(qū)分開來的口音,可他仍是一位成功的語言學(xué)習(xí)者。在美國課堂,經(jīng)?？梢钥吹胶芏嘟淌?操濃重口音的英語,教授美國大學(xué)生語言、數(shù)學(xué)、物理等課程,他們可能來自印度、日本等國,但從沒有一個(gè)學(xué)生抱怨他們的語音。DeKeyser教授認(rèn)為,就是本族人自己也有各自的口音,作為語言教師,“以自己都無法達(dá)到的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)去讓學(xué)生堅(jiān)持或者去評(píng)價(jià)他們,其實(shí)是愚蠢的”。美國大學(xué)尚且如是,英語作為外語的中國大學(xué)就更應(yīng)如此了。從這一點(diǎn)來看,我們?cè)谠噲D開展以內(nèi)容為依托的教學(xué)時(shí),應(yīng)該弱化教師的語音考察,而注重內(nèi)容表達(dá)的流利和準(zhǔn)確。因年齡效應(yīng)研究的開展目前存在許多技術(shù)上的難題,直到今天,學(xué)界對(duì)年齡效應(yīng)產(chǎn)生的原因仍然眾說紛紜。

二語習(xí)得領(lǐng)域另一個(gè)著名的理論就是技能習(xí)得理論(Skill Acquisition Theory),這也是DeKeyser教授研究的一個(gè)重點(diǎn)。他認(rèn)為,任何學(xué)習(xí),不管是學(xué)習(xí)騎車、學(xué)習(xí)基本的計(jì)算、學(xué)習(xí)開車,還是學(xué)習(xí)游泳等等,從一開始,我們都會(huì)對(duì)正在學(xué)的這些事情想得很多,而且會(huì)有專門的人,如教練或者教師等,在一旁指導(dǎo)。再后來,通過訓(xùn)練、實(shí)踐,我們不僅能更快地做這些事情,而且犯的錯(cuò)誤也更少,也更不費(fèi)勁。最終做這些事情時(shí),也不會(huì)再想得很多。正如一個(gè)熟練的司機(jī),他能夠一邊開車一邊與人對(duì)話,但仍然不會(huì)闖紅燈,或者跟別的車相撞等?！白詣?dòng)化的力量是神奇的”,DeKeyser教授認(rèn)為“相同的事情,也一樣可以應(yīng)用于語言學(xué)習(xí)”。技能習(xí)得理論一開始強(qiáng)調(diào)顯性知識(shí)(explicit knowledge)的學(xué)習(xí),把顯性知識(shí)視作為通向隱性知識(shí)(implicit knowledge)的工具手段。同時(shí),DeKeyser認(rèn)為,在強(qiáng)調(diào)“熟能生巧”時(shí),我們也應(yīng)該注意練習(xí)(practice)的層次,需要對(duì)練習(xí)進(jìn)行精致化(fine-tuned),具體說來就是要讓練習(xí)的層次與學(xué)習(xí)者個(gè)體層次相一致,而非僅僅強(qiáng)調(diào)練習(xí)的量,這樣才能達(dá)到練習(xí)的最佳效果。

DeKeyser教授也對(duì)語言教學(xué)的“技術(shù)主義”、大規(guī)模的“電腦化”現(xiàn)象發(fā)表了自己的看法。他認(rèn)為,語言最根本的是用來交流意義(meaning),而這正是電腦很難實(shí)現(xiàn)的地方。放開語言學(xué)習(xí)的其他方面不說,單是用語言表征意義就是一件很難做到的事情。把句子或者文本放在上下文語境來理解,這是電腦很難做到的事情,或者至少無法做到像人那樣。從語言學(xué)習(xí)來看,電腦在基礎(chǔ)層面上有它的作用,比如用于基礎(chǔ)的操練、用于展示、重復(fù)等等,但是根本上,語言是一項(xiàng)很復(fù)雜的技能,是為人與人之間進(jìn)行交互的,也只有通過與人的交互,才能最終掌握這項(xiàng)技能?！叭绻f有什么電腦不擅長的,語言教學(xué)就是其中之一”。從這個(gè)角度看,語言學(xué)習(xí)和教學(xué)的“大規(guī)模的技術(shù)主義和消費(fèi)主義”傾向(楊楓、吳詩玉2013),以及由此導(dǎo)致的課堂教學(xué)的“娛樂化”傾向(秦秀白2013)值得深思。

用Ortega(2013)的話來說,今年是二語習(xí)得研究四十周年(盡管很多人不贊同這個(gè)觀點(diǎn))。本訪談也請(qǐng)DeKeyser就這過去的四十年進(jìn)行了總結(jié)。就此,他首先回顧了前輩學(xué)人如Dulay,Burt,Krashen和Schumann等對(duì)二語習(xí)得這門學(xué)科創(chuàng)立所做的開創(chuàng)性工作,然后主要談到了在二語習(xí)得領(lǐng)域已經(jīng)得到較為滿意解決的一些進(jìn)展和一些仍然需要學(xué)界進(jìn)行更多研究才能獲得答案的問題。這些觀點(diǎn)將幫助人們更深入地認(rèn)識(shí)二語習(xí)得這一重要研究領(lǐng)域。

DeKeyser教授曾擔(dān)任二語研究的著名期刊LanguageLearning的編輯,并即將成為Bilingualism的副主編。因此,本訪談也特別提及了中國二語研究者在國際期刊發(fā)文困難的問題。他認(rèn)為,這并不是由于歧視造成的,實(shí)際上中國的學(xué)者已經(jīng)和正在國際期刊上發(fā)表越來越多的研究成果,而且中國學(xué)者群體大,從而必然獲得國際關(guān)注。但是DeKeyser教授又指出,要做好研究,我們?nèi)匀恍枰@得專業(yè)的訓(xùn)練,這包括基本研究方法的訓(xùn)練和寫作技巧等能力的訓(xùn)練,如:如何引用、如何組段成文,等等,“這是一門專門的藝術(shù)”。從他的審稿經(jīng)驗(yàn)看,有些研究者對(duì)研究論文的寫作過于生疏,缺乏經(jīng)驗(yàn)和訓(xùn)練。但他相信,假以時(shí)日,將會(huì)有更多中國學(xué)者的研究獲得國際二語研究界的認(rèn)可。

DeKeyser還對(duì)《當(dāng)代外語研究》的發(fā)展提出建議。他認(rèn)為,由于期刊界所形成的一種慣性和潛在規(guī)則,好期刊總是能獲得更多的資源,而小期刊卻又總是被忽視。要打破這一怪圈,一方面需要時(shí)間的積累,另一方面,可以嘗試在學(xué)術(shù)界先建立一種聯(lián)系,邀請(qǐng)國際作者先從短文供稿開始,從而最終形成更多的融合。

DeKeyer教授治學(xué)勤奮、嚴(yán)謹(jǐn)。盡管他在學(xué)界早已成名,但仍常常只行走于家庭與學(xué)校辦公室的兩點(diǎn)一線。一方面為研究仍然不知疲倦地付出,另一方面正如他自己說的,“學(xué)生優(yōu)先”,這一理念也給了他不竭的動(dòng)力。在馬里蘭大學(xué)陪先生訪學(xué)的日子,偶爾路過時(shí),或在白天見他在辦公室與造訪學(xué)子侃侃而談,或已天黑,他亮燈的辦公室讓人感受到的是學(xué)府里特有的寧靜。此時(shí)也不禁有些感慨起來。

Ma: Robert, in some sense, you are also an ESL learner?

DeKeyser: Yes, of course, yes. I started learning when I was in middle school in Belgium.

Ma: Do you think you are successful as an ESL learner?

DeKeyser: Hm, well yes, by the standard of most learners. You could say well I am fluent and reasonably accurate, and from my writing, most people couldn’t tell it is not by a native speaker. But of course there are people who are more successful. I do have an accent that is easy to recognize; some people have a better accent. The aptitude for having the perfect accent is a bit different from the aptitude for learning vocabulary and grammar. So yes, successful, above average, but certainly not perfect.

Ma: Yes, you mentioned “accent” this sort of things, can I use a term SLA researchers often use—“native-like”—to describe your proficiency?

DeKeyser: You know we make a distinction between near-native and native-like. In that sense, no, I am not native-like, because native-like in a strict sense means that one cannot be distinguished from a native. That is not the case; a native speaker can tell that I am not a native speaker.

Ma: Then do you think “native-like” should be the goal of a language learner?

DeKeyser: Hm, I think it’s good to say that is an ideal, but given that basically no language learner ever gets there, I am not sure that we should tell our students, our colleagues, that that’s where they should get, because it is very, very difficult to do; and one of the reasons, I think, why people sometimes get so disappointed in language learning is that they have an unrealistic goal. They think within just a few years they will sound like a native speaker,and of course when they find out that is not the case at all, they tend to be disappointed.

Ma: Yeah, ok, I really hope that we, teachers and educators in China, could hear what you are saying, ‘cus I think we sometimes just put too much emphasis on factors like accent; people get a lot of practice in this, trying their best, spending a lot of time, imitating the accent of a native speakers, yes too much time. And some teachers and educators judge their students by these factors, and of course, they themselves were also judged in this way when they began to learn a language. But here, the situation is quite different: I noticed that some professors from other countries speak with accents, yet people never mind this.

DeKeyser: Well, yes. That’s an interesting question you are getting at, because underlying what you’re asking, I think, is the question of how important accent is compared to grammar, compared to vocabulary, and that is a hard question because how you answer the question always depends. Obviously, if you have a very very bad accent, that is a problem; if you have very bad vocabulary, that is a problem; if you have very bad grammar, that is a problem. But if all of them are reasonable, and the question is which is most important to improve, then it still depends. For instance, on whom you are going to talk with. Like here in this academic environment, everybody is used to accents. None of undergraduate students have ever complained about my accent. They always have other teachers who have stronger accents, teaching them subjects like chemistry and physics, who are from Indian or Japan, wherever. So that is not an issue. But if you are dropped in a really rural area, there you would stand out more because of a foreign accent. People may care less about your grammar there, whereas in academia, having an accent is normal, but if your grammar is bad, that would sound bad because that is often associated with a lack of education. So it really depends on whom you are talking to. As a tourist for instance, there I would say accent is more important because if you have a strong accent people might have a hard time understanding you. If you make grammar mistakes, it is unlikely that it will interfere with comprehension. So it really depends on whom you are talking to for how long.

More generally speaking, what you can say about accent, and grammar, and vocabulary, it is that often we are obsessed too much with correctness. It is not just pronunciation, but maybe even more in grammar, because it takes a very long time before people can be perfectly fluent and perfectly accurate. So that is not really a realistic goal. For most people, being able to communicate fairly fluently, at a more or less normal speed, is a very important goal; otherwise they feel embarrassed that they speak slowly, and the native speakers get impatient, so it is important to have a certain degree of fluency, even if that means you might make grammatical mistakes.

Ma: Ok, so we could put more attention to fluency as opposed to so much on accent...

DeKeyser: Yeah, it is hard to generalize, but in many cases I think that is the problem when people come out of class with very little fluency and also with little confidence in speaking.

Plus talking about pronunciation again, if it is one thing that is almost impossible to teach well for a non-native speaker, it is, of course, pronunciation. You know non-native speakers typically have accents themselves. So they cannot be the perfect model. So how much sense does it make to hammer on correct accent, if you cannot do it perfectly yourself. It is very difficult to have perfect accuracy, pronunciation or grammar. It is silly for teachers to hold students to norms that they themselves cannot meet.

Ma: Ok. Maybe also related, let’s move on to another thing, let’s talk about age effects, for which you are well known. In the beginning, you seem very radical, like, you once said that an adult language learner is a disabled language learner?

DeKeyser: I didn’t use that term, certainly not in writing, but I know what you are saying. To some extent, it is true in the sense that I don’t believe that an adult can learn a language completely as a child does because, as you know, a child does not sit there, think about grammar; a child learns things implicitly, without consciousness of what he/she is learning and still eventually ends up like a native speaker of his or her age. So in that sense, I really do believe that an adult cannot do that anymore. And I don’t think I have changed my mind on that point...

Ma: (Laugh)...

DeKeyser: Not at all.

Ma: I have read your recent article published inLanguageLearningin March...

DeKeyser: Ok, I see why you are asking that, because that paper is a very different paper from the other ones. It is not an empirical study, but just recommendations for future research. That was our goal. We had a little conference in Michigan a couple of years ago. We were all asked to talk about one of our research specialties, and to say where we thought the field is going. So I tried not to say anything in that article about what I think about age effects, only to say things about methodology for research on age effects. That’s why I am deliberately taking a very neutral stand, so that the article is equally interesting, I would hope, for people who believe in age effects, and for those who don’t believe in age effects, for people who think they are maturational and for people who don’t think they are maturational. So that’s why that article is very neutral. It is not because I have changed my mind.

Ma: Ok, so it is still a “very controversial yet poorly understood topic”...

DeKeyser: Yes, it is very controversial and I would say poorly understood, yes, because if it were well understood, it wouldn’t be so controversial. The only thing I think we all agree on is that typically the adult learner does not get as far as the much younger learner. But then the big controversy is why that is. Is it because all sort of things that we have found change with age: that people become less interested in sounding like a native speaker, that they have less good input, all these kinds of things? Or is all this because of the cognitive maturation, the psychological development as such that it is not possible to learn exactly the same way anymore? Well, I don’t happen to think that it is just a matter of confound... but it is not easy to show that; that is why I try in that article to tell people “Look, whether you believe in age effects or not, much of the research is a little bit na?ve”.

I don’t think that there is any study so far that is really perfect. And one point I am hammering on in that article you are quoting, is that so often we take convenience samples. That means in this case people who are living in a community that speaks predominantly their native language, and who speak the local language as a second language. That means you can fairly easily access a large number of people which you need for statistical purposes, but of course, these people are not the ideal second language learners in the sense that they spend quite a bit of their time using their native language, and that might have an effect. So, ideally, we would do research with people who are isolated, like parachuted somewhere in a middle of very, very small town with nobody else speaking their language, and at the same time, we should have many many many people so that we could do appropriate statistical analyses. The combination of these two is, of course, almost impossible to reach.

Ma: Yeah, still concerning the age effect. You know, in China, very interestingly, many parents, especially those in big cities like Shanghai, send their kids to learn English at rather young age, at kindergarten, at primary school or through private tutors. Some parents come to me, saying that “their kids should not lose at the starting line” and asking me for advice, “What should I do to help my kid learn English; should I have a private tutor for my kid?” People do not seem to mind the huge amounts of money and time put into it. What’s your advice for them?

DeKeyser: All right, it is important for people to understand that age is only one of the factors, though it is an important factor. But if everything else is the same as before, for instance that people learn a foreign language four hours a week in the classroom, if you simply start doing that early, the effect is not going to be very big. You can see in some European countries or other countries, many countries where people have for many years now started at young age, and really what they have achieved after several years of school teaching is not that much. Of course starting early is going to be better than starting late, because you would have many more hours in total at the end. But at the beginning these hours are not used very efficiently, because there is a certain incompatibility between the way a child learns at that age and the way you have to teach in the classroom. So I would say, the important question is not so much at what age people start, but more how many hours a week people have and what is done during these hours. So if a young child gets 20 hours a week, talking to a native speaker, about topics they are interested in, that should have a big effect. But if that same child at the same age, spends 4 hours a week in a classroom going through the same old drills as years ago, then that would hardly have any effect. So age, in combination with other factors, is very important.

Ma: Another big worry is that: Will it have detrimental effects on the learning of their native tongue?

DeKeyser: No, there is no evidence of that. If you look, for instance, at the Canadian immersion programs, which started decades ago, they have always been very well documented, you would see that immersion has never led to a deficit in their native language, that it never has led to an academic deficit. The only difference is that they do much better in their second language. But of course I am talking about immersion programs from a very young age, where teaching is largely in a second language, many hours a week, teachers are native speakers, are fully bilingual, have been trained to be bilingual teachers and so on. That is the ideal way of doing things probably, and so they received no detrimental impact, not on the native language learning, not on academic learning, but still we see that the learning of a second language is not perfect. This is much better than traditional foreign language learning, but they still are not like native speakers when they are 18 years old.

DeKeyser: Yeah, some of the literature in that domain is very technical, but the basic idea I think is not really difficult to grasp. In any kind of learning we do, whether it is learning how to ride a bicycle, or learning how to carry out computations, or learning how to swim or learning how to drive a car, at the beginning we think very much about what we do, and often we learn to do these things, through verbal information, that is we have a coach that tells us how to throw the ball, we have a teacher to tell us how to work with a computer or we have teachers tell us what computations to do in what order, and so on. Then through practice, we not only can do these things much faster, we can also do them with fewer errors, and with less effort, eventually without thinking about them. An experienced driver can drive a car while having a conversation about any topic but still not go through any red light, not bump into any other car, and so on and so on.

So the power of automatization is really amazing. When you see how easily and well you can do something later on that, at the beginning, you could not do very well at all with great efforts and with a lot of mistakes. So that is something we know from many areas of learning. I don’t see any reason for saying “No, it does not apply to language learning”. It doesn’t apply to language learning maybe the way a little child learns, Ok, fine. But when dealing with an adult who is learning a language at school, that is a very different situation. There, I think, skill acquisition theory has something to say.

Ma: It seems that we should not always believe that “practice makes perfect?”

DeKeyser: Hm, well, it depends on what kind of practice, because often people think that practice simply means lots, lots, lots of practice. But practice has to be appropriate for the level you are at. If you are a fairly advanced person and you do mechanical drills, that is a waste of time; if you are still a beginning learner, and you are told, “Go, practice, talk to that native speaker over there”, that practice is not very useful either. So you have to have practice and start from where you are and then let you become a more fluent user of the knowledge you have, and at the same time maybe acquire a little bit more knowledge. So practice has to be fine-tuned and that is not easy to do, because even in a given classroom, different students might be at different levels. So more generally speaking, when you are talking about any kind of learners, of course the kind of practice they need is very different from one to another.

Ma: I see. So how is skill acquisition theory related to implicit and explicit learning?

DeKeyser: Skill acquisition theory very much insists on explicit knowledge of the beginning, and sees explicit knowledge as a tool to eventually get to something like more implicit knowledge.

Ma: You say “l(fā)ike”...

該方案的優(yōu)點(diǎn)：①系統(tǒng)獨(dú)立，降低外界干擾；②縮短自動(dòng)燃燒控制系統(tǒng)的設(shè)計(jì)和制造工期；③自動(dòng)燃燒控制系統(tǒng)組態(tài)編程（復(fù)雜的燃燒計(jì)算及控制邏輯） 和調(diào)試（相關(guān)程序根據(jù)現(xiàn)場(chǎng)情況需不斷進(jìn)行修正）由焚燒爐獨(dú)立完成，成套集成度高，可有效縮短現(xiàn)場(chǎng)調(diào)整作業(yè)時(shí)間。ACC就地控制柜和DCS可以實(shí)現(xiàn)數(shù)據(jù)通信，常規(guī)設(shè)備運(yùn)行狀態(tài)監(jiān)控也可以由DCS系統(tǒng)完成；④作業(yè)培訓(xùn)后，上位機(jī)操作及現(xiàn)場(chǎng)控制柜維護(hù)比較簡單（ACC柜不需經(jīng)常維護(hù)，核心PLC免維護(hù)）。

DeKeyser: “I say like” is because some psychologists make a distinction between highly automatized explicit knowledge and the real implicit knowledge. The difference between the two in practice can be impossible to tell, or it’s only through a very careful set of experimental techniques that maybe you can tell the difference. So from the psycholinguistic point of view, these two are very important; from the practical point of view, the only thing important is that you can use that explicit knowledge at the beginning, engage in a kind of practice that then allows you eventually become fluent and accurate enough so that you may sound like you were an implicit learner. That is what really matters: Are you functionally equivalent to an implicit learner? But that does not mean you learn it implicitly.

Ma: All right. Probably that is also the significance of classroom teaching; the learner develops kinds of automaticity.

DeKeyser: Yes. Because in the classroom we typically don’t spend a sufficient amount of time on this. The reason for that I think is classrooms are, of course, part of an institution, even a bureaucracy, and it is very important for teachers and for students to be able to show to their parents and to their principal, to the ministry and so on that “l(fā)ook, we have taught this much and they have learned this much.” And if you teach a number of rules, the teachers have done their job and if the students have paid attention you can show their learning. Whereas, if you deal with fluency, with skill, it can take a long period of time before you have measurable differences, and people in school contexts won’t be able to show that every single week the students perform noticeably better than before. And that’s why the teachers are strongly inclined to constantly teaching new things instead of making sure what was taught can be integrated and can be used in their work.

Ma: I see. Ok, now let’s talk about second language acquisition in general. In the words of Ortega, “SLA has completed 40 years of existence and moves forward into the 21stcentury”. I think if Ortega is true, these should be uneventful 40 years for SLA.”

DeKeyser: Hm, are you talking about her article that is in the sameLanguageLearningthat shares with my article?

Ma: Right.

DeKeyser: So some things in it I agree with, other things I don’t agree with.

She pointed out many things that I disagree with. I would say one of the things she insists on there is that we should realize that second language learners are bilingual to some extent and you cannot expect the same things from bilingual as you can expect from monolinguals in many areas of language. I agree with all that in principle, but I think that is really overblown here, and comparing learners to what a native speaker can do is truly a useful thing. That does not mean we think that bilinguals are two monolinguals in the same mind. No, it just means that if you are going to have a standard for what people can do, well, that standard, in my opinion, it’s ok if it comes from a native speaker, as long as you don’t exaggerate that standard, for instance, as long as you don’t demand that a non- native has a perfect accent and so on. I also disagree with what she says about research methodology; I think she emphasized the sociocultural a little bit too much, compared to the cognitive paradigm anyway.

Ma: Ok. If we say 40 years, and if we could just look back on what problems, you think, in SLA, have been resolved in a satisfactory way, then what important problems are still awaiting there, to be resolved?

DeKeyser: 40 years, that would mean first started in the early 1970s, as now we are in 2013. And indeed, in the early 1970s SLA as a discipline was born, so to speak, because people like Dulay, Burt, Krashen, Schumann, Hakuta,and many others, started documenting second language acquisition outside of the classroom, and they showed that things are learned in a certain order by people at different ages, in different native languages, and that often what they learned was in an order that was very different from what people were teaching in the classroom at the time. So that is what made the field, because people started realizing that “Aha, there are certain things that we can generalize about SLA”, and they are not quite the same as what we can say about first language acquisition. So that’s how the field was born, since then we have learned certain things. We have learned to understand better what aspects of language learning are harder than others, and why, not a hundred percent, but we understand that better. We have learned how important it is to make a distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge and between the automatized, procedural and declarative. We have learned that teaching has to be as communicative as possible. We have also learned that it is important to pay as much attention to form as possible because just being 100% communicative is not ideal either. So we have learned we have to focus on word form and meaning. And some people stress the meaning aspect, some people would stress the form aspect, and I think that kind of distinction is a bit silly because anything in language is about conventional linking of form and meaning. So you cannot leave either of these out of the picture. So I think we understand all these things better now. Sometimes one gets the impression from outside, that we go back and forth that grammar is important, then grammar is not important and so on. I don’t think that is really the case. In fact, we understand better how grammar is learned, how it could be learned, how important AND not important it is. Another problem is what are the implications of what we know, because even we understand language acquisition process completely that still does not mean that problems are all resolved, like even we understand a certain kind of disease, that does not mean we have a cure, ok. Even if we have a cure, it does not mean we can always use it efficiently, with everybody everywhere. So it is a bit like that too: that language learning is a very involved process, it is not something that we could do in a couple of weeks, it is something that some people are better at than others. If we have unrealistic expectations, we are just going to make ourselves unhappy. So I think that is one thing SLA has contributed to: having more realistic expectations showing that yes, you can learn to communicate fairly efficiently, as an adult, but you are likely to always be different from a native speaker, especially in the area of accent. Your accent is certainly going to be different from a native speaker.

Ma: Yes, SLA in some sense is abstract, yet you have made it easy to follow. Robert, do you mind that we talk about things in China?

DeKeyser: Go ahead.

Ma: In China, these days, English teaching in many universities is largely computerized. With many computerized self-learning centers constructed and computerized English courses provided, educators and, also university authorities, seem quite confident in the efficiency of computers in language education. But you don’t seem so confident?

DeKeyser: No. Because given what I said before, given that language is a skill that is about communicating meaning, that is what computers have trouble with, because even leaving aside for a second language learning aspect, just representing meaning in language is very difficult to do. Getting computers to do machine translation, or to interpret meaning of texts, is difficult because computers are not as good as humans, at taking into account the whole context in understanding sentences in context and so on, so that is one thing. I do believe that computers can be very useful for the basic levels, for doing basic drills, for presentation, for repeating something, for a certain kind of individualization, i.e. in terms of speed. All that is easy to do. Then what is a little bit harder is individualizing in terms of how students learn, having a student model. What a student really knows declaratively and procedurally, what is automatized and how can we give different exercises to this student compared to that one, that sort of more sophisticated use, what people might call computerized tutoring and teaching. But ultimately language is really a very complex skill for human interaction that you can only fully learn from interaction with other humans. So I have nothing against the use of computers but they should not be seen as a replacing human interaction. That wouldn’t work. If there is anything that a computer is bad at teaching, it is probably a language.

Ma: Yeah. I think this could serve as good practical guidelines for us to follow. Here I want to mention college English teaching (CET) in China. You know it is really a huge thing, large in scale, with many learners and also teachers. Yet, CET is constantly under public criticism, mainly for its low efficiency. Much time and money is spent on it, yet our students are not proficient, especially in speaking and listening. And now changes are taking place there. Some people hold that traditional CET, GAP in nature, should be replaced by ESP. What college students need, they believe, is English for specific purposes, not the present system, English for general purposes. If this is correct, it would have far-reaching influences on English education in China.

DeKeyser: A couple of things about that. So first of all, I agree that the outcomes of many years of language teaching in high school or college are very disappointing. But I think it is easy for the average person to see how imperfect it is because they can say “Look, this is a native speaker, this is how this person communicates. That one obviously cannot do that.” When it comes to a subject matter like physics, it is much harder for people to tell where they would like to be and where the students get. So that is one thing. Another thing is that definitely things can be improved, given what I said about instilling more skill, not insist so much about ever more words, ever more grammatical detail, but make sure instead that people can fluently use what they have learned for speaking and listening and so on. And then, of course, finally I would also agree that different people are using the language for different purposes, that it is good to adapt teaching to that. If somebody is going to be mainly a reader of English texts, that is one thing; if somebody is going to attend business meetings, that is something else. Yet everybody who is learning English will, I assume, at some point, learn it or use it for basic interaction with other English speakers. So it is not that all teaching is for special purposes. There is a common core of words and structures that all teachers cannot avoid. But it is certainly true, I think, that at some point, you need to start to think about what people are using the language for, or likely to use it for, and there you can individualize more. That is probably easier to do in China than in other countries with such a large number of people learning English.

Ma: Another topic concerns second language researchers in China. You once served as editor ofLanguageLearning, and soon will be associate editor ofBilingualism. Why, do you think, is it so hard for Chinese researchers to get published in international journals? What could they do about it?

DeKeyser: One thing is that they are beginning to publish more and more. If you look at how many Chinese names you see in journals likeLanguageLearning, orBilingualism, just to mention a few, you see that there are quite a few these days, where there were almost none twenty years ago. These are not just people living abroad: there are people from Mainland China or Taiwan who publish in these journals. But what is certainly true is that, first of all, the standards in these journals go up all the time, because the field has grown so much, grown more than the number of journals and the number of pages. So it is more competitive than it used to be. And typically the journals will have a rejection rate of between 75 to 90 %, so it is only the top 20% that get in. So that means every aspect has to be pretty good, from the research question, to the research design, to the analysis of the data, to the writing. It all has to be very good. And I think sometimes when people from China have been studying for a PhD in this country just for a few years, they have learned some of these aspects very well, but there is something else sometimes they still have to learn. Don’t forget that typically in graduate school you don’t have a class that teaches you how to get published. Everybody has to know how to publish, but few people have a course about that, and few people work closely with an adviser who says “Well, in order to get published do this and do that”, so I think there is something lacking in PhD education there. Looking at my own case, I went to graduate school at Stanford, which is certainly a very good university, and still I failed the first time I tried to publish something in a good journal, because I wasn’t fully prepared for that even though I thought I had a good idea of what that was like. So I think people need a bit more training specifically on that point and I think any kind of research methods course, or the end of the course at least, should try to deal with that: What is the difference between a dissertation and a journal article, not just shorter, you have to focus differently, and there is specific writing style affecting everything from organizing the text into paragraphs, to how to quote people. All that is really a specialized art, and all this reminds me that when I grade undergraduate papers from students who are native speakers of English, I see how clumsy they can be at quoting something. It is not because these students are Chinese, or Arab, no. It is because they haven’t learned this very particular style of writing.

So I don’t think there is a bias in the Western publishing world, against people from China or Asia. I think all publishers have realized that China is an enormously important market; that is certainly the case for applied linguistics, certainly the case for a journal likeLanguageLearning, because they have detailed statistics about how many copies are sold in China, who has a subscription, and what articles they read and so on. So I think it is a matter of time, before more and more people who maybe got their PhD in China and did not study in North America or Europe, before more and more of these people start publishing in these journals. It is a bit like, if you look at what was the case 50 years ago and see that in American academia there were hardly any women professors, and now in many cases there are more women than men. But you can’t change it overnight. It takes a couple of decades for changes like that.

But having been an editor, I must say that very often you just glance at a paper, and you see the authors are extremely inexperienced and really do not know what it takes to write an article, both in terms of content and in terms of writing. So I think in PhD courses, especially for foreign students, we should pay more attention to that, make sure they are on top of everything they learned, the theories, the statistics and so on, that they really learn what is specific to writing articles for journals in the field.

Ma: Ok, I see. You know, compared to the journals where you served as an editor, this journal,ContemporaryForeignLanguageStudies(CFLS), is trivial. Its dream, yet, is big. Besides publishing papers in Chinese, it plans to have international issue. Difficulties, however, are always there. International contributions are hard to get...

DeKeyser: That’s probably because of two things. First of all, academics tend to be overworked, they are overscheduled, or much behind schedule, as in how am I going to write this for last month, and so on. So they are not exactly looking for more work. And secondly, what is happening more and more, is that there is an elaborate system for measuring how much people have published, where and what the impact factor is for that journal. In other words, how important, how prestigious is this. And of course that sort of thing leads to a vicious circle. More people want to publish in the leading journals, because they are the leading journals, and that makes them the leading journals even more clearly. So it is difficult to break out of that circle, but I think it is a good idea to invite people to at least provide short contributions to your journal, to create these links, and here again, over time there can be more integration. It won’t happen overnight.

Ma: I am very much impressed by your devotion to your research. I’ve learned that, besides a very good teacher, you are very much devoted to your research. When I just arrived here, people told me that professor Robert is the most “accessible” professor, because people could always find you in your office, working hard at your research. As a matter of fact, you are already established in the field of SLA research, what, then, drives you...

DeKeyser: Yeah, I come to my office basically every day, in part because I am a habit person, in part because I live nearby. So it’s not a big effort to come in. But I come to the office a little less often now, because I have a dog now, and I don’t want it to be alone at home all day long. But still I come to the office a lot, and I always think students are our first priority. It’s hard to juggle these things sometimes, whether you should work on a draft of a manuscript that you promised to a colleague or on a draft of a dissertation that you promised to read for a student, but I try to give the students priority I think because most people would

still see our first duty as professors as teaching and mentoring...and also it’s a little bit easier to do once you have tenure or are a full professor, and you don’t have to worry as much as before about exactly how much you get published. There is still a lot of pressure to publish, but you are not going to lose your job because of one article more or less.

Ma: Very impressive, because you are already well established in SLA and still you work so hard.

DeKeyser: Oh well, that is, I think, fairly typical of American academia, not for everybody everywhere, but still most people tend to work pretty hard once they have tenure. It becomes a habit (laugh). Also, there are still pressures on us to bring in research money and to sponsor students and so on, so there are many reasons why we need to keep working hard even if we have a permanent job.

Ma: The last question. What are you doing currently?

DeKeyser: Currently I am trying to get some new grants to do research on age effects, but I am also, as always, writing various chapters that people want me to write for various books. That’s part of the problem. Of course that also takes time and it’s not really empirical research, just reading and writing, so a good chunk of my summer always goes into that. Right now I am going to start writing a chapter for a new edition of this book on theories of SLA, and they require a section on implicit and explicit learning, so as that is one of my areas of interest I see that as a sign of progress, and I am eager to write it.

Ma: Many thanks, Robert.

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