Week 2

Chapter 1:
Immediately, “linguistic competence” and “linguistic performance” are the two aspects that leap off of the page. As I continue to teach basic level Spanish in the target language (GA here at ISU), I am confronted by these distinctions day in and day out, especially since our students and professors are required to speak 90-95% in Spanish. At a beginning level, this can be overwhelming. The language learner has a wealth of underlying knowledge but struggles greatly with actual production. I don’t think I would have much empathy and understanding with my students if I would not have suffered from this distinction in my own linguistic endeavors years ago. Additionally, in my other TESOL courses, I don’t recall discussing the “library language” and “auxiliary language.” Those were new concepts for me.

Chapter 2:
I am never ceased to be amazed by how monolingual our country truly is, and as a linguistics teacher, this fact saddens my heart for numerous reasons. European citizens, on average, can speak up to five languages fluently! Furthermore, English is much more dominant in the L2 realm (9), which I could have guessed by traveling abroad but is useful to know formally. Although probably to be discussed in later chapters, I believe personally that English is so prominent internationally because it is very much the language of “business,” compared to Spanish for example which tends to be more relational in its features. Each language is so unique. Another concept that caught my attention – of which I had never learned the formal terminology – was that of simultaneous multilingualism. In my Spanish linguistics class last semester we learned that usually children that are raised with learning multiple languages simultaneously usually produce orally at later ages, around 3-5 years of age. Considering I would love to raise my children bilingual, this concept still astounds me.

“Early Theories in SLA” :
I have talked about my personal thoughts and experiences, but one issue that I consider crucial in teaching is maintaining the balance between the linguistic, psychological and social perspectives. Some pedagogical theories and methods obsessively focus on one, instead of acknowledging the benefits of promoting a more holistic approach to language learning. This article subtly hints at this.

I’ve learned quite a bit about “imitation” in my TESOL and other pedagogical courses, but I appreciate his following definition: “Imitation, however, is not understood as the mindless mimicking often associated with behaviorism in psychology and the audio-lingual method in language pedagogy.” Additionally, although I have learned about the zone of proximal development (ZPD), I would appreciate a further analysis and/or review over the concept.