Language, Learning, Teaching

From where have I come???? Where am I going?????????? How do I get there??????

What is my status as a FL teacher? Influenced by a variety of approaches Aware of a wide variety of resources but don’t necessarily have access I have difficult questions I don’t have all the answers I have felt defeated I have therefore been asking more questions about how people learn Foreign languages

BE OPEN-MINDED

No magic formula! Be cautiously eclectic Make informed choices about methods, techniques, strategies Understanding theoretical foundations helps to make informed choices Study others’ research and your own!

Language, Learning and Teaching Learning a Foreign language: It’s a new culture! It’s a new way of thinking, feeling and acting! It requires: Total commitment, involvement Total physical, intellectual, emotional response

FL Learning is: Not a quick-fix A complex process Not to be confined to the FL classroom

Some important questions Who are your learners? What should they learn and what should I teach? How does this learning take place? When? At what age? How much time?

Some important questions (cont’d) Where? Immersed? Artificial environment? Sociopolitically supportive environment? Why? Why are your learners in your class?

You will need to find missing pieces of the puzzle to formulate your language learning paradigm.

Definitions of language Include:: The generativity or creativity of language The presumed primacy of speech over writing The universality of language among human beings

An expert’s view… “Can foreign language teachers teach effectively if they do not know, even generally something about the relationship between language and cognition, learning, writing systems, nonverbal communication, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition…? Teachers…cannot hope to teach a part (the language) of reality without knowing how that part fits into the whole (language in general).” (Brown, 1994)

You as FL teachers need to realize that: “Your understanding of the components of language will determine how you teach a language” “There are few right and wrong answers to questions about language” “Truth is multifaceted and is usually surrounded by undecipherable gray areas” (Brown, 1994)

What is Learning? Learning is: Acquisition or getting Retention of information or skill Implies storage systems, memory, cognitive organisation Involves active, conscious focus on and acting upon events outside or inside the organism

What is learning ?(cont’d) Relatively permanent, but subject to forgetting Involves some sort of practice, perhaps reinforced practice A change in behaviour

What is Teaching? Teaching cannot be defined apart from learning

Teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, setting the conditions for learning.

Your understanding of how the learner learns will determine your philosophy of education, your teaching style, your approach, methods, and classroom techniques

Link between Linguistics and Psychology LINGUISTICS Structural Generative PSYCHOLOGY Behaviouristic Cognitive

Characteristics of Behaviouristic Psychology and Structural, Descriptive Linguistics Repetition and reinforcement Learning, conditioning Stimulus-response Publicly observable responses Empiricism Scientific method Performance Surface structure Description – what?

Characteristics of Cognitive Psychology Generative/Transformational Linguistics Analysis and insight Acquisition, innateness States of consciousness Rationalism Process Mentalism, intuition Competence Deep structure Explanation – “why”

From Theory to Practice Theories are cyclical. No single theory or paradigm is right or wrong Some truth or worth can be found in virtually every theory

From Theory to Practice(cont’d) Theories ‘borrow’ positive aspects from one another Current interest in interpersonal relationships/communication & interaction Stress on self-esteem and well-being of students/cooperation/group-work

Current thinking in the field Moving beyond rules, patterns, definitions, and other knowledge “about” language TO Communicating genuinely, spontaneously, and meaningfully in the FL

A Word of Advice (Brown, 1994) “The best method is one which you have derived through your very own careful process of formulation, try-out, revision, and refinement”. “..unless that principled basis is your own carefully and thoughtfully devised theory, you become a slave to one way of thinking, a puppet without self-control”.

A word of advice * Be informed!