Development of syntactic errors

Swedish syntax is much more difficult to learn than morphology, as is confirmed by the high ratio of syntactic errors. The mean value in the first experiment was 0.43 errors per T-unit and this makes these errors the next most common category of error after lexical-semantic errors. How-ever, errors of this type develop most dynamically and during the three-year learning period their frequency decreased the most, with R = −74%

(the corresponding values for other error categories were −54% for lexi-cal-semantic errors, −66% for morphological errors and −25% for spell-ing errors). The general downward trend could be observed in almost all the participants, but as was the case with the other investigated features learners who developed earlier than their fellow students did not have such a high (negative) growth rate because they had approached the at-tractor earlier.

As in the case of the development of morphological errors the most significant decrease occurred in most students during the second semes-ter (Figure 6.26) and this phenomenon is common in both learners with high and low error ratios. The first year of learning appears to be the pe-riod of greatest change in development and the most crucial phase in the learning of another language. Of course, not all learners can master Swed-ish syntax at the same level and no one student develops along a similar

Figure 6.25. Students with high (left diagram) and low (right diagram) vari-ability

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path to the average. As the illustration below shows the development of syntactic errors in individuals is much more variable than the mean curve suggests. The achievement is especially remarkable in students who at the beginning had most difficulty in building syntactically correct texts.

The decline from about one error in every T-unit to one error in every fifth T-unit (S4) is an outcome that cannot pass unnoticed. This student was the “poorest” in terms of accuracy in almost all the experiments. And even though she made great progress she still had one of the highest er-ror ratios compared with the other students in the group. And when we look exclusively at the results from every experiment we could overlook the fact that she made much harder work of learning than learners with

“better” results, i.e. with lower error ratios.

Figure 6.26. Learners with a considerable decrease in syntactic errors during the second semester

On the other hand, students with the lowest error ratios in the first experiment (S3, S5, S7, S9) developed in a completely different way: their trajectories tended to resemble sinusoids and no downward trend was visible (see Figure 6.27). With the exception of S9, whose accuracy in the beginning phases in particular varied a great deal, the other three learners seemed to have already approached an attractor state in the first months of their learning. The sinusoidal developmental trajectories should not confuse us: the within-subject variability in these students is among the lowest for the entire group. Their syntactic system in Swedish developed

and stabilised early in the learning process. They approached an attractor state, which, however, is not the same as equilibrium.

Due to the interconnectedness of the systems a correlation between syntactic complexity and syntactic accuracy may be expected. The de-velopment of correctness can either proceed at the cost of complexity or it can go hand in hand with complexity. One possible developmental tendency may therefore be for students who learn to comprehend and master syntactic relations in a new language to be more careful at the beginning and use simple constructions in order to avoid errors. As in the case of lexical and semantic accuracy, we can expect to see both care-ful learners and risk takers who in the earliest phases of learning a new language are already willing to use complex syntactic structures, which can lead to a higher error ratio. Also a parallel development is expected to occur when an increase in syntactic complexity does not result in an increase in error frequency.

The analysis has shown that the developmental patterns observed in the development of lexical-semantic systems were also noticeable in the case of syntax, although with no such clear splitting into groups. There were two careful and two smart students who could be distinguished and this characteristic concerned both the subordination ratio and syntactic diversity (see Figures 6.28 and 6.29). Only one of them (Figure 6.30) can be labelled a risk taker and one (Figure 6.31) a wanderer. No such distinct dependency between the level of syntactic complexity and inaccuracy was observed in the other students.

Figure 6.27. Development of syntactic errors in “quick starters”

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Individual developmental characteristics mostly overlap. Learner S6, for example, seemed to focus mostly on accuracy. She has been classi-fied as careful with regard to both lexical-semantic and syntactic sys-tems. In order to avoid errors she chose to build short (her narratives were among the shortest in the group) and simple texts. On the other hand, the “smart” learners S11 and S12 needed a little more time to man-age the lexical and semantic systems in the new languman-age than they did to manage its syntax, but in general they had no difficulties producing correct texts that were also diverse and complex. Student S5 exhibited another tendency: he tended to focus on building interesting utterances, using a complex and diversified vocabulary that was syntactically simple but correct. He has therefore been classified as a smart learner in terms of his mastering of the lexical-semantic system and as a careful learner in his development of Swedish syntax. Student S9 is very clearly a risk taker: she tried to use new words and structures that she had learned, with no focus on accuracy. Correctness in the new language seemed to

Figure 6.28. Development of syntactic inaccuracy and syntactic complexity (DSC/S, C/T ) in careful learners

Figure 6.29. Development of syntactic inaccuracy and syntactic complexity (DSC/S, C/T) in smart learners

Figure 6.30. Development of syntactic inaccuracy and syntactic complexity (DSC/S, C/T) in the risk taker

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be of secondary importance for her. Finally, learner S4, who was referred to as a “wanderer” due to the fact that her production in Swedish was characterized by a high error ratio and a low level of lexical diversity and complexity, behaved in the same way with regard to the syntactic sys-tem: she made many errors even though her sentences were not complex.

The term “wanderer” reflects the dynamics of her development: as was described earlier in the chapter she made her greatest progress in syn-tactic accuracy during the second semester of learning, but she remained a learner with a highly variable development path and without any attrac-tor state, while her lexical and syntactic diversity and complexity were simultaneously rather low.

As we can see from the individual learner characteristics above an un-ambiguous classification of language learners is not possible. Thus we can-not focus exclusively on one aspect when we find regularities in a learn-er’s development. There are only a few individuals who represent a clear and identifiable profile. The continuous interplay of systems, the unpre-dictability of a learner’s development and the constant reorganisation of these systems make it impossible to define a “typical” language learner or a “good”/ “bad” one. Moreover, they necessitate viewing second language development as a complex phenomenon.