Tag Archives: linguistics

“Tasks vs. Conditions: Influences on Second Language Performance” by Professor Peter Skehan

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This post was contributed by Chieri Noda, a PhD student in Birkbeck’s Department of Applied Linguistics and Communications.

linguistics_50_finalWe had the pleasure of hosting a lecture by Peter Skehan, Professorial Research Fellow at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham on 27 October. Being the first Applied Linguistics student to complete a PhD at Birkbeck, Peter was the perfect speaker to kick off the series of talks marking the department’s 50th anniversary. The lecture hall was packed with attentive students and academics from not only Birkbeck but neighbouring institutions – ‘the beating heart of Applied Linguistics’ as the emcee put it.

After reminiscing about his days at Birkbeck, Peter started by giving an overview of the dimensions commonly used for measuring second language task-based performance (complexity, accuracy, fluency and lexis) and by highlighting the differences between the two contrasting approaches in cognitive research in this area, i.e. Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2011) and his own Limited Attentional Capacity framework (Skehan, 2014), often referred to as the Trade-off Hypothesis. After pointing out some of the problems with the construct of task complexity on which the Cognition Hypothesis is built, he went on to establish his view that task conditions could better illuminate second language performance.

He took us through research on the effects of on-line planning, repetition and post-task planning he had done with his PhD students and co-researchers in Hong Kong. The studies can be found in a recent book he edited, Processing Perspectives on Task Performance. Particularly interesting was Zhan Wang’s 2014 study in which conditions of on-line planning (i.e. planning while speaking) were carefully controlled using slowed Mr Bean videos. The results suggested that on-line planning itself did not improve performance, but a combination of pre-task and on-line planning boosted accuracy and complexity. While at first glance this might seem to support the Cognition Hypothesis, Peter proposed that with the help of Willem Levelt’s (1989) psycholinguistic model of first language speech production, these effects could be explained to be due to two separate psycholinguistic influences, one of which raised complexity and one of which raised accuracy.

One thing that the audience had the privilege of hearing, which readers of Peter’s recent book would be missing out on, was the amusing but nevertheless insightful account of how his PhD students had been stimulated by past research and had developed their idea into well-designed research. Perhaps it was the accumulation of such experience that prompted him to share a piece of practical advice for MA and BA students in the audience. “In some ways,” suggested Peter, “the best thing to do is to find a study you half like. One that you like, but you’ve got reservations about.” He explained that students could redesign the study within the framework of the original study to correct problematic elements. He admitted this might be edging away from doing something brand new, but pushed students to master research techniques.

Peter’s talk was truly fitting as the first of our anniversary talks, not simply because it presented the findings of his extensive research over the years, but for showing us how he engaged with competing views and with his own data to drive his research forward. My doctoral research on Japanese researchers talking in English takes a conversation analytic perspective and so in terms of methodology very different from Peter’s, but his talk left me with a lot to reflect on.

  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: from intention to articulation. MIT.
  • Robinson, P. (Ed.). (2011). Second language task complexity: researching the cognition hypothesis of language learning and performance. John Benjamins.
  • Skehan, P. (Ed.). (2014). Processing Perspectives on Task Performance. John Benjamins.
  • Wang, Z. (2014). On-line time pressure manipulations: L2 speaking performance under five types of planning and repetition conditions. In P. Skehan (Ed.), Processing Perspectives on Task Performance (pp. 27-62). John Benjamins.

A video of the lecture is available here.

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The perils of swearing in a foreign language

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This post was contributed by Matt Davis, a postgraduate student in Applied Linguistics at Birkbeck. He tweets about language at @word_jazz.

As every Birkbeck student knows, 6.30pm on Friday night is not the best time to listen to an academic lecture. But if there is any serious sociolinguistic discussion that’s going to keep members of the public from their weekends, it’s one about swearing.

Jean-Marc Dewaele is a Professor of Bilingualism at Birkbeck. A Belgian polyglot, he knows a thing or two about the subject. He has spoken academically about the experience of bringing up his daughter in north London to be trilingual (fluent in French, Flemish and English). He is also winner of an annual award for the rudest title of an academic article (unrepeatable here, but more soberly subtitled ‘Language preferences for swearing among maximally proficient multilinguals’).

Closing the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy’s series of events (‘To seek, to find, to live’) his lecture was about how speakers of a foreign language (what academics call ‘L2’) understand, experience and use taboo words in that language, and how it differs to how they swear in their first language (‘L1’).

Prof Dewaele described research, using lie detector technology, that shows we are uniformly less sensitive to the swear words we hear in our second language. He presented the results of his own survey of a number of proficient L2 speakers of English. In one question, they were asked to rank common English swear words according to what they thought was their relative level of power. This ranking was then compared to that by a group of native English speakers. Interestingly, L2 speakers of English tended to over-state the taboo of more benign words (like ‘idiot’), and under-state the taboo of some more powerful ones.

Prof Dewaele also introduced the idea of ‘sociopragmatic competence’ in a second language. This incorporates the idea that although it’s easy to learn a dictionary definition of a word – even taboo words – it takes experience to understand the various cultural values placed on that word by a society, and therefore where and when (if it all!) using it is appropriate.

Prof Dewaele is an engaging speaker and the talk was delivered with much humour as well as insight (sniggering among the audience was certainly not discouraged!) The talk was followed by a lively Q&A, where many people described their own experience in the subject. An American, now living in London, described how he had unwittingly caused great offence to a British family thanks to the greater emotional power of the expression ‘taking the piss’ in the UK. A lexicographer from the University of Portsmouth spoke about the nuances of writing taboo words into the dictionary.

So was it a better place to be than the pub? As a linguistics student, I certainly thought so but the test was whether my partner had found it interesting. A Canadian and native speaker of (North American) English, her mother tongue is actually Mandarin, but she has lived in UK for 6 years. She told me that she had enjoyed it too.

And did the findings of Prof Dewaele’s research fit her experience? I thought it through for a moment and realized I knew the answer: she never swears. As we had learned, when it comes to cursing in someone else’s language, it’s much safer that way.

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