Daily Excerpt: Communicative Focus (Shekhtman): Why is the language performance of native and non-native speakers different?

 



Excerpt from Communicative Focus:

Why is the language performance of native and non-native speakers different?

 

    On the face of it the answer to this question is quite easy. The difference in language performance between native and non-native speaker can be explained by the degree of their command of the language. Native speakers have excellent command of the language and non-native speakers, poor command of it. But why is this so?

                                                             

    In his book The Native Speaker: Myth and Reality, Alan Davies (2003) defines 6 factors which make a person a native speaker. The most important factor is the acquisition of language in childhood. Successful acquisition of language typically happens by the age of four and is

 

guaranteed for children up to the age of six.  After that, the potential for native  language acquisition is steadily compromised until shortly after puberty and is rare thereafter. Maturational changes in the brain, such as the decline in metabolic rate and number of neurons during the early school age years as well as the bottoming out of the number of synapses and metabolic rate around puberty, are plausible causes. (Pinker, 1994, p.293).[1]

 

    There are other very important factors too, such as  “intuition about grammar” (Davies, 2003, p.210),  the “unique capacity to produce fluent spontaneous discourse”,  and “a huge memory stock of complete lexical items“ (Pawley and Syder, 1983 cited in Davies, 2003, p.210).

 

    Unfortunately, Davies’ identifiers of a native speaker do not help us much in teaching. We cannot change the childhood of our non-native speaker; we cannot inject him or her with intuition about grammar; and we cannot put a complete set of lexical items in his or her head.

 

    In answering the question with which we began this chapter—why does the language performance of native and non-native speakers differ—understanding the essence of speech itself is as important as, if not more important than, understanding the traits of native and non-native speakers. The essence of speech is rooted in the fact that speech consists of two parts: (1) meaning (i.e. the content of speech) and (2) language (i.e. the form of the utterance/writing). This corresponds to the what and the how, that is, to the ideational plane and mechanical plane. (Figure 1.1.) For example, in the sentence, “Watch me,” the meaning is a request to pay attention and the form is the verb, to watch, in the imperative mood, followed by a pronoun in the objective case. Of course, meaningless speech can be, and sometimes is, also produced, but in such cases, the purpose is either to make a joke or to make a point related to the linguistic nonsense.


[1] There is another opinion reflected in the work of David Birdsong (1999) who has documented the lack of a critical period in some people.




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