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.