#tesl issues

Interlanguage | TESL Issues

Interlanguage

Interlanguage

Selinker (1969, 1972) coined the term ‘interlanguage’ to refer to the special mental grammars that learners construct during the course of their development. Interlanguage theory credited learners with playing an active role in constructing mental grammars.

Second language learners tend to go through a systematic or quasi-systematic developmental process as they…

Adaptive Control of Thought Model | TESL Issues

Adaptive Control of Thought Model

Adaptive Control of Thought Model or the ACT model puts emphasis on the role of practice in the transitional change of knowledge. Anderson assumes that conversion of declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge is crucial for learning complex skills including speech production (DeKeyser, 1997, 1998, 2001; Johnson, 1996; O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Schmidt, 1992;…

Competition Model

Competition Model is based on inductive approach to learning (empiricism).

MacWhinney (2007) outlined a development of the Competition Model, which he called the Unified Model because it sought to provide an account of both L1 and L2 learning. According to this model, forms are stored in associative maps for syllables, lexical items, constructions, and mental models. For…

Ethnographic approaches involve the kind of detailed descriptive work advocated by Johnson (1995). They emphasise the importance of obtaining multiple perspectives through triangulation. Watson-Gegeo (1997) distinguished four approaches to classroom ethnography:

Ethnography of communication

Micro-ethnography

Discourse analysis

Critical ethnography

The ethnography of…

Bruner

Bruner was an important advocate of Piaget’s ideas. Bruner was a professor of psychology and founder of the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University. To Bruner, the development of conceptual understanding and of cognitive skills and strategies is a central aim of education, rather than the acquisition of factual information. Bruner worked on the idea of ‘learning how to learn’,…

Child Language Acquisition

Child Language Acquisition

Cromer concludes that experience stimulates language organisational processes and that these affect other linguistic structures that are internally related. The children appeared to be building their own grammars in their own way, without direct positive or negative evidence as to what was right or wrong. Children are creative, selective and…

Skinner

Skinner (1953) attempted to extend a classical behaviorist model of learning to language in his famous ‘Verbal Behavior’. His goal was to provide a way to predict and control verbal behavior by observing and manipulating the physical environment of the speaker. In his review of this work, Chomsky (1959) showed that the Skinnerian concepts for learning (which included stimulus, conditioned…

Bilingualism

Bilingualism

Bilinguals, like monolinguals, demonstrate left hemisphere dominance for language knowledge.

The early work on hemispheric differentiation in bilinguals (Albert & Obler, 1978) suggested that L1 and L2 learning drew on different mechanisms. Studies of aphasia indicated that bilinguals were less hemisphere dominant than monolinguals. Albert and Obler claimed that language…