“Scenes from Darkest Africa”
“Life on the Slave Ship”
“Typical Day on the Plantation” (Whitehead 2016: 130/1).
Cora is suspicious of the accuracy of the presentations and wary of the visitors’ behavior in “disrespectful fashion” and “rude suggestions” (ibid.: 132). Neither is she too convinced that her “habitat” really “illuminate[s] the American experience” (ibid.: 138), because her life as a slave tells her otherwise (cf. ibid.: 137-140).
Back in the last century, the anthropologist Boas assigned his twenty-three-year old student Margaret Mead a study on adolescence which she accomplished as an interrogation of Samoan girls about their sex lives:
With an introduction by Boas and a cover showing a bare-breasted girl rushing to a tryst with her lover beneath tropical palms, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” published [by Mead] in 1928, was both an aphrodisiac and a call to arms. … dwelling on her tales of teen-age girls choosing strings of lovers with lighthearted ease, Americans conspired in the fantasy of a society in which there was no adolescent angst, no unhappy marriage, no jealousy, no Oedipus complex, and no emotional suffering of any kind. The utopian aspects of Mead’s book were as gratefully seized on as the sex: if nurture could so conclusively trump nature, then we, too, could be anything we wished—sexually free, unneurotic, even happy—just by changing the cultural rules (Roth Pierpont: 2004 n.p.).
Nature or nurture? Boas’ point of view supported Margaret Mead’s findings in that his data about immigrant children in the US had opened minds to possibilities that were not covered by the contemporary scientific claims of hereditary limitations. Thus, it might boil down to the question of heredity or culture?
In the twenties, people were discovering that they lived in a culture … Although Boas argued for the recognition of plural cultures, he suggested not that all human achievements were equal … but that the range of intelligence and virtue ran the gamut about equally in every group. Thus, each person can be judged only as an individual. The challenge that remained was to demonstrate the power of culture in shaping lives. It was nature versus nurture with the scales reset: against our sealed-off genes, there was our accumulation of collective knowledge; in place of inherited learning, there was the social transmission of that knowledge from generation to generation. “Culture” was experience raised to scientific status. And it combined with biology to create mankind. Boas sent his students off to learn how the delicate balance worked. And then Margaret Mead came home and wrote a best-seller that turned American culture upside down (ibid.; my emphasis).
3.1 The Fundamental Difference Hypothesis
As a cultural phenomenon, whether language learning is effective and sustainable largely depends on interaction with the respective environment and (school) setting. But of similar importance is the question whether this learning is based on innate capacities (nature) or a result of carefully planned and effectively implemented teaching strategies (nurture). Especially for the purpose of an integrative CLIL methodology it is pertinent to differentiate, at the same time and if necessary, between children and adolescent language acquisition as it will have decisive consequences for any teaching strategy. The Universal Grammar theory and its derivatives had assumed an inherent biological feature as a linguistic mental module, whereas the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (FDH) breaks a lance for external factors in language learning, especially the assumption that L2 learning contrasts with L1 development in two major aspects: SLA is nonconvergent and unreliable1.
(I) SLA is supposed to be nonconvergent, as domain-specific mechanisms available in early childhood—and part of the UG mental module—allegedly are not accessible for language learning in adulthood. Therefore, adults learning a foreign language need to rely on domain-general problem-solving skills, which develop during a maturation process and are part of dynamic cognitive skills. On the one hand, a fundamental difference between child-language acquisition and L2 learning is as much confirmed as, on the other hand, the existence of a UG—rich or minimalist in the sense of the aforementioned recursion. When Robert Bley-Vroman called this proposal the “Fundamental Difference Hypothesis” (1990), he argued that adult L2 learning would replace the domain-specific acquisition by his own native-language experience and a general abstract problem-solving system.
(II) L2 acquisition is deemed to be unreliable, as the development of knowledge and competence in a second—and further—language differs widely from learner to learner, his or her individual learning strategies and routines and very rarely ends with a nativelike performance. Overall, the answers to three questions are still contentious: Does a UG exist at all? If this is the case, is UG accessible to adult learners at least in part or as a “spin-off” from one’s own mother tongue and its lexis and grammar? When does the age of adult learners’ start? Frequently assumed to be the case for an individual to be above 18 years of age, the additional issue arises where adolescent learners, in other words pupils and younger students, can be placed. And if they are in a transition situation, how does this effect mental language modules (Chomsky) or general problem-solving skills?
In the light of conflicting evidence for positions that argue in favor of the availability or at least some role for UG in second language acquisition and the unresolved questions above, common sense and experience even point to the fact that older learners do not take longer to study another language successfully, but in fact acquire new languages often faster than their younger peers. What can be assumed from our “theory of practice” is threefold: some aspects of L2 features are not learnable from input but depend on former language learning experiences, some are not even part of the learner’s L1 and they are unlikely to have been taught by instructors, especially those competences linked to intercultural or transcultural knowledge.
As far as empirical differences between L1 and L2 (child and adult) acquisition and learning are concerned, a number of observations have been discussed (cf. Meisel: 192 ff, 200 f) and confirm the FDH in several ways. Adults learning a second language have, in contrast to children, a first language to relate to, so that their acquisition process—apart from being less uniform—follows different ways of input (see above) and can rely on prior knowledge and linguistic experiences. These differences are not a matter of controversy but establish themselves in multiple ways:
That the overwhelming majority of adult L2 learners does not attain native-like competences is the most crucial point but not the only one … A further particularity of L2 acquisition is that L2 learners exhibit a much larger range of variation, across individuals and within learners over time, than L1 children. This concerns the rate of acquisition as well as the use of target-deviant constructions and also the level of grammatical competence that they attain (ibid.: 194).
That first and second language acquisition differ fundamentally can also be inferred from the following observations: whereas a child’s brain is still developing, adults have a first language that guides their thinking and speaking; despite high levels of proficiency, L2 learners’ pronunciation mostly remains non-native; when an L2 learner’s proficiency reaches a certain plateau, fossilization occurs—and variations produced by non-native speakers are often similar or the same: failing to produce the third-person-singular “s” in English is a case in point. My conclusion is that an adult learner does not show the same but different potentials for (natural) language acquisition as a child,