Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

32

---

2.4 Principles and parameters grammar
Principles and parameters grammar 33
Box 2.4 Processability
●
Learners acquire a second language in a sequence of six grammatical
stages.
●
These stages relate to the learners’ growing ability to process language in
their minds.
●
Sequences of teaching currently do not fit these six stages and may place
undue demands on learners.
●
Do you think that you learnt your first language entirely from your parents or
do you think some of it was already present in your mind?
●
If you came from Mars, what would you say all human languages had in
common?
Focusing questions
Universal Grammar: the language faculty built into the human mind consisting
of principles and parameters
principles of language: aspects of human language present in all human
minds, for example, the locality principle – why you cannot say ‘Is John is the
man who happy?’
parameters: aspects that vary from one language to another within tightly set
limits, whether or not subjects are required in the sentence – the pro-drop
parameter
Keywords
So far, this chapter has discussed grammar in terms of morphemes, content and
structure words, and movement. All these capture some aspect of L2 learning and
contribute to our knowledge of the whole. A radically different way of looking at
grammar that has become popular in recent years, however, tries to see what
human languages have in common. This is the Universal Grammar theory associ-
ated with Noam Chomsky. Universal Grammar (UG) sees the knowledge of gram-
mar in the mind as made up of two components: ‘principles’ that all languages
have in common and ‘parameters’ on which they vary. All human minds are
believed to honour the common principles that are forced on them by the nature
of the human mind that all their speakers share. They differ over the settings for
the parameters for particular languages. The overall implications of the UG model
are given in Chapter 12.

---