1. Language, Learning, Teaching

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

3. 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

4. BE OPEN-MINDED

5. 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!

6. 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

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

8. 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?

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

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

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

12. 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)

13. 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)

14. 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

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

16. What is Teaching?
Teaching cannot be defined apart from learning

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

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

19. Link between Linguistics and Psychology
LINGUISTICS Structural Generative
PSYCHOLOGY Behaviouristic Cognitive

20. 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?

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

22. 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

23. 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

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

25. 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”.

26. A word of advice
* Be informed!