Functional Approaches

Functional Approaches which are characterized as functional differ in emphasis and definition but share the following characteristics in general opposition to those in the Chomskyan tradition:Focus is on the use of language in real

situations (performance) as well as underlying knowledge (competence). No sharp distinction is made between the two.

Study of SLA begins with the assumption that the purpose of language is communication, and that development of linguistic knowledge (in L1 or L2) requires communicative use.

Scope of concern goes beyond the sentence to include discourse structure and how language is used in interaction, and to include aspects of communication beyond language (Tomlin 1990).

Four of the functional approaches which have been influential in SLA

are:

Systemic LinguisticsFunctional Typology.Function-to-form mapping.Information organization.

Systemic LinguisticsSystemic LinguisticsSystemic Linguistics has been

developed by M. A. K. Halliday, beginning in the late 1950s. This is a model for analyzing language in terms of the interrelated systems of choices that are available for expressing meaning. Basic to the approach is the notion, ultimately derived from the anthropologist Malinowski, that language structures cannot be idealized and studied without taking into account the circumstances of their use, including the extralinguistic social context.

Functional Typology

•Functional Typology based on the comparative study of a wide range of the world’s languages. This study involves the classification of languages and their features into categories (or “types”; hence “typology”), with a major goal being to describe patterns of similarities and differences among them, and to determine which types and patterns occur more/less frequently or are universal in distribution.

Function-to-form mapping.Function-to-form mapping. Another

functional approach which has been applied to the description and analysis of interlanguage emphasizes function-to-form mapping in the acquisitional sequence. A basic concept from this perspective is that acquisition of both L1 and L2 involves a process of grammaticalization in which a grammatical function (such as the expression of past time) is first conveyed by shared extralinguistic knowledge and inferencing based on the context of discourse, then by a lexical word (such as yesterday), and only later by a grammatical marker (such as the suffix -ed).

Information organization.Information organization.Information organization refers to a

functional approach which focuses on utterance structure, or “the way in which learners put their words together” (Klein and Perdue 1993:3). The task of studying SLA from this perspective includes describing the structures of interlanguage (called learner varieties by Klein and Perdue), discovering what organizational principles guide learners’ production at various stages of development, and analyzing how these principles interact with one another.

IN SUMMARIZING RESULTS, KLEIN AND PERDUE (1993:261–66) OFFER FOUR “BUNDLES OF EXPLANATIONS” FOR THE SEQUENCE OF ACQUISITION THEY FIND, AND FOR WHY SOME L2 LEARNERS ARE MORE SUCCESSFUL THAN OTHERS:

Communicative needs. Cross-linguistic influence. Extrinsic factors. Limits on processing

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