Week 15

YET AGAIN! The blog hates me. I have no idea why it isn't letting me separate into my paragraphs. <<1>> The concepts of “languages are learned mainly through imitation” and “parents usually correct young children when they make grammatical errors” are both intertwined closely in my mind. For example, I remember as a child my mother, being an exceptional English speaker, would correct mistakes that I made explicitly, both in vocabulary and grammar. I’ll never forget last semester learning that this corrective feedback is not always effective or has long-term effects: “what [this study] tells us is that children cannot depend on consistent corrective feedback in order to learn the basic structure of their language” (184). What a surprise! However, even though it might not have solidified some correct grammatical forms, I do believe that my mother’s explicit correction helped in some semantic and syntactic forms, as well as motivate to speak more properly in the short- and long-term. <<2>> “Highly intelligent people are good language learners” (#3). -What is essential is finding ways to engage the different kinds of ability that students bring to the learning environment (185) - We have been discussing all semester the linguistic and academic competence involved in the language learning process, but this particular concept left out the part of “social ability” in the equation. I was considering about the students who are geniuses, those with the highest IQ imaginable, but what if they have no social skills? The contextual factors must be taken into account of the students’ personality: do they have social anxiety? do they not like speaking up? are they irritable with certain students? are they inclusive in group projects? If Vygotsky among other theorists become part of our teaching philosophy, we must keep in mind how to engage our students both academically and socially. <<3>> Point #10 causes a bit of a controversy in my mind. Having taught high school for a semester (which is a bit more difficult in regards to state and local standards), I just wonder if this idea of “presenting grammatical rules one at a time” is an idealistic statement or realistic statement? Does this apply more to some concepts than to others? Is this more relevant for one age group or a certain level over another? These were just a few questions that entered into my thoughts. <<4>> Maybe I am an oddball, but this particular sentence in the article really started me analyzing: “In communities where policy makers have encouraged English in deference to the economic and educational opportunities it may provide in the context of economic globalization, there is a near-chauvinistic resurgence of nationalism” (14). As they would say in Spanish, ¡Uy, qué fuerte! (What a strong statement!) I am taking a Spain culture course this semester, and we have discussed nationalism at an overwhelming level (trying to justify my train-of-thought here). I think about the States of California and Arizona, the two also mentioned in the article. I think we tend to be a very ethnocentric nation, for example our media coverage, geography knowledge and monolingual abilities. However, when you think about it, we do not have an OFFICIAL language. Yes, English is our main language, but it is not our official one. So on one hand, I think this fact allows for a diversity of cultures and languages to be appreciated in the United States. On the other hand, why do we sometimes discourage the use of other languages within our classroom? Why do we take that subtractive approach? Maybe we feel intimidated. Maybe we haven’t been properly equipped with the appropriate resources. Or maybe this statement is correct: we feel as if a part of our tradition and American standards would die if we did not constantly defer to the use of the English language. Then yes, that would be nationalism at its fullest.

More than what meets the eye.

I don't know why this is not letting me separate my paragraphs! I have numbered them to help! (1) Whenever the chapter was first outlining the main points, I had conceived another definition of “interpersonal competence” in my mind. Although, yes, this concept possesses the need for knowing “strategies for achieving clarification and negotiation of meaning,” I think there is more here than what meets the eye. “Interpersonal” to me flags how students interact and engage with each other in the language learning process. For example, teaching Spanish to Americans and teaching English to Latinos have been distinct experiences. Americans tend to appreciate more individual and competitive activities, only appreciating more group-based activities in a forum for discussion and debate. On the other hand, Latinos enjoy more “collective” activities, in other words more group-based activities. Pedagogical approaches feed directly into culture, and we must keep this aspect at the forefront as we consider interpersonal competence. (2) Until I started teaching English, I did not realize how rigid our syntactic system is. The more I talk with my Latino friends and my South Korea language partner, I realize that the formulas are difficult to learn, especially with questions. As mentioned in the textbook, “double negatives” do not exist in English and the way we indicate nominalizations (when whole sentence are transformed into fillers for noun phrase positions), make it especially hard for our native Romance LLs. [I apologize that sometimes in my blog I emit language outside the Romance realm, but I know the most about this population and have plans to teach abroad to this population in the future.] (3) I absolutely LOVED the explanation of acquiring knowledge, mentioned on page 154 (Saville-Troike). I am the ideal example of a total bottom-up process 100%! I had a friend that went abroad with minimal language ability, and he learned the language a very top-down process. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine going about it this way, but is that because I only have experience with the bottom-up method? Or could it actually play into more personality characteristics? I really do agree though that no matter the approach, learning a language must a social process in all the four areas – reading, writing, speaking, listening. (4) In Lightbrown & Spada, I must say that #2 (“Just listen… and read) was definitely an ideology promoted at my high school. Although I feel like there were certain areas I lacked when leaving (speaking and pragmatics), I honestly feel like I received a very solid foundation in Spanish before graduating, but unlike the example from our book, our teaching was a Spanish-speaking native from Colombia, South America! And right now our Foreign Language program here at ISU runs parallel with #3 (“Let’s Talk”), promoting tasked-based and communicative instructions. The “Two for one” was one of the more interesting concepts mentioned, at least in my opinion. I would enjoy further discussing this in class tonight, or maybe future research on my part.

Week 13!

CANAGARAJAH

It was stated in the article again about how English is the language used mainly in multilingual contexts as a second language and for communication between non-native speakers. I will never forget when this phenomenon happened while I was abroad. I was in a meeting where Japanese, Costa Ricans, Germans, and some Africans were present. I was the only American in the room. I will never forget how it felt to hear my native language being the common language in that room; it is such an odd feeling, almost like outside-of-body vibe. I understand that we do need a business language, though, similar to what the movie clip stated last week.

“In addition to grammatical competence, we have to give equal importance to: language awareness that enables speakers to make instantaneous inferences about the norms and conventions of their multilingual interlocutors; strategic competence to negotiate interpersonal relationships effectively; and pragmatic competence to adopt communicative conventions that are appropriate for the interlocutor, purpose, and situation.” Pragmatic and grammatical competence are always a big tiff, at least in my experiences in American pedagogy. Which one should be emphasized? Which one is more important? I don’t feel as though we can separate these two realms, and yet we do. If we don’t have the grammatical competence, we are unable to get our most simple point across sometimes, especially depending on our audience. And even if our grammar is perfect yet we lack the pragmatic background, we are unable to properly implement day-to-day speech acts that allows to build (or destroy) relationships. The hardest issue is knowing when and how to implement the two realms in a coherent manner.

I found the concept of “communities of imagination” interesting, especially since I have been studying Benedict Anderson and his concept of “imagined communities” quite a bit this semester. Could we possibly discuss this further tomorrow night?

WAGNER AND FIRTH

One thing I have appreciated about the theories we have learned is that they combine both the social and cognitive dimensions of TESOL, and this article really brought that conceptualization of SLA together. In my other TESOL courses, the main focus has been with more cognitive aspects, but according to our discussions and this article, the ultimate goal to have a more theoretically and methodologically balanced enterprise that “endeavors to attend to, explicate, and explore, in more equal measures and, where possible, in integrated ways, both the social and cognitive dimensions of S/FL use and acquisition.”

I enjoyed the section regarding “communication strategies.” The following quote is one that I have personal experience with and see my students also dealing with now: “Feelings of incompetence and difficulty when learning a FL are surely commonplace, and often psychologically salient.” This is especially true when our students are struggling with oral production. No matter what level of the foreign language the LL is at, he/she will always deal with vulnerability and inferiority in that language, but that’s all part of the adventure! I think having learned a foreign language gives me more empathy for my future ELLs and their obstacles they will face, both cognitively and socially.