Stephanie Hazel Wold

This project recognises the need to strengthen foreign language teaching in Norwegian schools. Some find that this requires awareness on the part of teachers, and subsequently learners, of the mechanisms behind language acquisition and of the thought processes that govern the choice of linguistic structures. It is my belief that the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics is particularly suited to achieve this objective. This claim will be explored through an investigation of L1 and L2 learners’ acquisition of the English progressive. The investigation will focus on the comparison of L1 and L2 production at two points in time, and on the comparison of developmental tendencies. The resulting descriptions will be considered in light of potential pedagogical applications.

The first objective of my project is to contribute to the general understanding of language acquisition through the study of acquisition of a particular grammatical construction. Acquisition of the construction in L2 will be compared to acquisition in L1.

The second objective is, through a parallel investigation of L1 and L2 learning, to explore the relationship between L1 and L2 and help achieve knowledge about processes involved in “thinking for speaking” in English. The project also allows for investigation of Norwegian learners’ construal of the meaning underlying the present tense as they move into English, i.e. construal patterns in L1. The data may reveal important information about L1 transfer and thereby source language thinking patterns, thus one aim will be to show to which extent L1 construal is transparent in the L2 texts at different stages of learning.

The specific research questions that will be addressed in this project are: How does L1 and L2 production vary at two different points in time? Is there any correspondence between L1 and L2 linguistic development?

For these purposes I intend to use written material (in English) elicited from native speakers of Norwegian and English, around ten and sixteen years of age. This will be done by means of a series of pictures (the so-called “frog stories”) that the learners will use as a basis for writing a story.

Wold works at the Department of Foreign Languages.