Second Language Acquisition
andMachine Translation
Satake Yukinobu

佐竹 幸信

青山ライフ出版

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements… ………………………………………

4

1. Introduction… ………………………… 5
2. Literature review… …………………… 7
2.1. The role of the first language…………………………… 7
2.2. Input……………………………………………………… 15
2.3. MT and second/foreign language learning… ………… 20
2.3.1. History of MT… …………………………………………………… 21
2.3.2. Previous studies regarding the use of MT in second/foreign
language learning… … 23

2.4. Aim of the current study………………………………… 36

3. Method… ……………………………… 39
4. Results and discussion… ……………… 43
4.1. Quantitative study… …………………………………… 43
4.2. Qualitative study………………………………………… 45
4.2.1. Control group… …………………………………………………… 45
4.2.1.1.Relationship between the nature of feedback and the students’long-term memory…………… 45
4.2.1.2. Benefits of writing business letters… …………………………… 67

4.2.2. Experimental group………………………………………………… 79
4.2.2.1. A difference between the input received from MT and theteacher’s feedback… … 79
4.2.2.2. MT and the mechanism where the students’ memory works… … 82
4.2.2.3. Why did they feel the words and expressions which they encounteredin the machine-translated text were fresh?……… 95
4.2.2.4. The relationship between input and output… …………………… 99
4.2.2.5. Other issues about MT… ………………………………………… 112
4.2.2.5.1. Can MT be a “role model”?… ……………………………… 112
4.2.2.5.2. Is MT a role model only for “vocabulary”?… ……………… 116

5. Conclusion……………………………

123

Appendices…………………………………………………… 128
Bibliography… ……………………………………………… 176

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 19K13268.
I would like to thank my students for participating in the current study and am
grateful to Mr. Jerre Bush for kindly offering to check my English. I also would
like to extend my gratitude to the staff of Jobu university for doing various tasks
involved in the procedure of applying for the research grant. Finally, I would liketo show my deepest gratitude to Professor Tom Gally for giving me a chance toinitiate this study and to my family for their continuous support and devotion.

4

1. Introduction

1. Introduction
Several years ago, when I was a graduate student, my supervisor said to me,“Machine translation (MT) has improved significantly since the neural network
system was introduced into Google Translate in 2016, so we don’t have to worry
about its low quality anymore.” At that time, I had serious doubts about hiswords because during the 1990s, as a high school and university student studying
English, I had sometimes tried using MT, and every time I had done so, I had
always felt severely disappointed about its quality.
After hearing my supervisor’s words above, and having doubted his words,
I tried translating a Japanese letter into English using Google Translate and wasshocked to see how perfect its translation was, and my feeling at that time would
be endorsed by the results of many empirical studies later. I was also shocked tosee how “practical” the words and expressions used in the translation were as they
were apparently different from those that I had learned in junior and senior highschool. I felt I could learn a lot from this method of translation at that time. A few
years later, I decided to utilize the advantages of MT while teaching English to
my Japanese university students. I asked them to translate a Japanese letter, which
I had written myself, into English using Google Translate, and then translate
another letter with similar contents into English while referring to the Google
Translate translation. This activity was very similar to the research procedure
adopted in the current study. Students’ answers to a questionnaire about thisstyle of learning English as a foreign language (EFL) writing showed that theiraffective responses were generally positive. Furthermore, many of the words andexpressions which they used in this practice seemed very “practical” to me. In
other words, they used words that they most likely would never have used without
the help of MT. I remember that at that time I began to feel that MT may be able5

to facilitate Japanese university students’ learning of EFL in some way.
There has been an ongoing dispute over the relationship between MT
and second/foreign language learning, particularly among practitioners. The
predominant standpoint has been that MT can potentially interfere with learning,
and there still seems to be a lot of support for this view. Considering thephenomenon mentioned above, however, I think that this standpoint should bechallenged by further research and debate. I think that there should be ways inwhich MT can facilitate second/foreign language acquisition. Therefore, uponreceiving a research grant from the Japanese government, I have taken thisopportunity to investigate the relationship between the use of MT and second/
foreign language acquisition: namely, how the former can or cannot facilitate thelatter.

6

2. Literature review

2. Literature review
Areas which have been discussed in second language acquisition theories
so far and are considered to be related to the use of MT, seem to be twofold: therole of the first language and input. In this section, theories which center on these
two areas will be briefly discussed. Next, empirical studies, which have been
undertaken regarding the relationship between the utilization of MT and second/
foreign language learning, will be reviewed in relation to the insight which was
gained through the above-mentioned second language acquisition theories.

2.1. The role of the first language
The role of the first language is considered more crucial to foreign language
learning than to second language learning. In general, a learner’s first language
is often used to teach them a foreign language, and it even becomes a “habit”
to use the first language while learning the foreign language. Second language
learners, on the other hand, often learn the target language in a natural settingwith little or no intervention of their first language, which is thought to reduce
the extent to which it can influence or interfere with the learning process. Thus,
it may be said that the first language is involved in the process of learning any
foreign language. However, the advent of MT is thought to have caused a change
in the relationship between second/foreign language learning and using the first
language. Particularly in the case of foreign language learning, MT can savelearners the time and effort required to think in their first language, though theextent to which it can do so may depend on the situation and the individual. In
other words, the process of thinking in the first language, which is considered to7

be inevitably involved in any foreign language learning, can be omitted from theprocess of learning foreign languages. Thus, it is not learners, but the “machine”
who thinks about how to translate the first language into the foreign language.
This phenomenon of “role-switching,” which has gradually become more common
with the use of foreign languages, has the potential to drastically influence andchange people’s attitude toward foreign language learning. However, before
investigating how it does so specifically, I would like to give a brief outline of therole the first language has been considered to play in second language acquisition
theories.
The period when second language acquisition had not yet gained independent
status as an academic field was described by Ellis as follows:
Up to the end of the 1960s, views of language learning were derived
from a theory of learning in general. There were few studies of SLA based on
the actual language that learners produced, and few attempts to examine theprocess of SLA empirically before this. The dominant school in psychology,
which informed most discussions of language learning, was behaviourism.
(Ellis, 1985, p. 20)
Behaviorism is the type of psychology that considered human behavior as a
response caused by a certain stimulus and explained that a habit was formed byassociating a particular response with a particular stimulus. As a stimulus takes
place frequently and a response is caused each time, the association will become
stronger and the response will, therefore, become automatic. It is expected thata habit formed in this way will interfere with a person’s learning of new habits.
This habit-formation process was applied to second language acquisition. Thatis, the previous learning (or the knowledge of the first language) can get in theway of new learning (or acquiring the knowledge of a second language). Thus,
errors are considered to occur when learners try to transfer their knowledge
from their first language into their second language production. In order to avoid
making errors, the “proactive inhibition” (Ellis, 1985, p. 22) should be overcome.
This behaviorist view of errors in second language acquisition triggered various

82. Literature review

attempts that have been made to predict when they would happen. Amongthem, the most famous attempt was the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis, whichassumed that, by comparing the first and target languages, their differences could
be identified and utilized to predict potential errors and, therefore, evaluate howdifficult the target language would be to learn.
The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis, however, was widely criticized.
The criticism was basically twofold: psychological and linguistic. From theformer point of view, there was no theoretical evidence to indicate that the moredifferent a target language is from the first language, the more difficult it is tolearn. In fact, Lee (1968) reported that when he had learned a foreign language,
he had experienced little transfer from his first language because they were“too” different. Moreover, it is not necessarily the case that “difficulty” leads to“errors.” Generally, if learners feel a target language is very different from theirfirst language and, therefore, find it difficult to learn, they may try to produce it
more carefully. On the other hand, if the two languages are similar, learners tend
to pay less attention to what they produce. “Avoidance” is also one of the crucial
issues in discussing differences between a target language and the first language.
Schachter (1974) compared East Asian (e.g., Chinese and Japanese) students’and Middle Eastern (e.g., Persian and Arabic) students’ English production task
performances and found that the former made fewer errors than the latter. She
speculated that behind this phenomenon was Chinese and Japanese students’tendency to avoid using grammatical features which they thought were difficult
to learn, in this case, relative clauses, because their native languages do not havesuch grammatical features. Finally, she argued that differences between one’s
target language and first language may provide a means by which to predict thedegree to which learners avoided using the target language, but not exactly how
difficult it was for them to learn.
The linguistic tenet of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis had also beenchallenged. In this hypothesis, the “translation equivalence” was consideredvery crucial when comparing two languages: that is, one needs to be completelytranslatable to the other. Moreover, in order to confirm that two languages
are translationally equivalent, they need to be proven to perform similar9communicative functions as well as share structural similarities. However, it
can be said that English and French, for example, do not always perform similar
communicative functions or share structural similarities, though both belong to
the same language family: the Indo-European family of languages. The same canbe applied, and undoubtedly more so, to two languages which do not belong to thesame family language, e.g., English and Japanese, etc. In this respect, a pragmaticfeature of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis had also been raising skepticism.
This pragmatic point of view, however, originated in Lado’s Linguistics
Across Cultures (1957), where many pragmatic issues involved in comparing cultural differences were discussed in a comprehensive way. Sajavaara (1981) did not
doubt the validity of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis per se but indicated thata problem existed in the way that the comparison was conducted. Lado argued
that in the process of comparison, pragmatic issues continued being neglected,
but should have deserved more attention. Ellis (1985) stated that these proposals
raised the following questions: “to what extent are the communicative parameters of language universal or language-specific? If they are language-specific, towhat extent are the rules of language use transferable from the first to the second
language?” (Ellis, 1985, p. 38). Ellis (1985) also referred to another issue: thesame communicative functions are realized differently between languages. Different languages often use different styles of making a polite request. For example,“Could you help me, please?” in English and “O-tetsudai itadake masu ka（お手伝 い 頂 け ま す か ）” in Japanese are thought to deliver the same message, but
their syntactic forms, etc. are very different. Taking advantage of Li and Thompson’s (1976) framework, Schachter and Rutherford (1979) classified languages
into two types: topic-prominent and subject-prominent. In the former type of
languages, which includes Mandarin, etc., the contextual discourse-function plays
a crucial role, whereas in the latter type, which includes English, etc., the grammatical subject-predicate relation is a key component. According to Schachter andRutherford, in order to convey the same message, they employ different formal
styles in the following respects: (1) In surface coding (a topic is always coded andoften occurs in sentence-initial position in the topic-prominent languages); (2) In
expression of voice (a passive voice is sometimes seen in the subject-prominent10