[Xmca-l] Re: L2

[Carol Macdonald]

Martin

You paint with a broad brush here: ELL is a fast growing field today,
because "Biligual Education" has a wide range of situations/niches which
other people have said here. (It nearly has encyclapedia status).  I do L1
and L2 work here in Southern Africa (Grades 1-7) and one of very few
privileged enough to be able to do it.  Even in such similar cultures as
Namibia and South Africa there are very different perceptions about English
as Second Language and ways of talking about it.

I think you must look at what you said - who is going to deliver their
bright new idea in an abstract? You have to surmise that they do, because
their concepts (small c) are in place. (We fail people here who only quote
abstracts...).  So head to the hardcopy, comrade brother.

Having delivered my sermon, I find the SCT of ESL very disappointing. It
seems like they are just pinning new labels on things they already knew.
But if we have a fellow practitioner among us, please do speak up. I
remember when I first started working on CHAT in language education in the
late eighties, I felt I was pinning labels.

Carol

On 3 November 2014 13:50, Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co>
wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> I have to teach a class on second language learning this week in my course
> in Psychology of Language, so I've turned to Lantolf. My university library
> webpage has been down for maintenance this weekend so I've had limited
> access to his writing, but what I have been able to read has confused me.
> In a couple of articles I find reasonable summaries of LSV's ideas, but
> then Lantolf doesn't get around to applying these ideas to L2! Looking at
> abstracts in Google Scholar it seems that he's proposing that (1) L2 is
> learned in the ZPD (what isn't?), (2) L2 is a mediator (what isn't?), and
> (3) private speech occurs in L2 (okay, that could be interesting). I was
> expecting him to attribute some role to L2 in the higher functions, or to
> suggest that L2 mediates in a specific way, or...
>
> What am I missing?
>
> Plus, I have a growing suspicion that most L2 research is conducted on
> people willingly studying a foreign language in the classroom. Not much, or
> nothing, on people who are forced to abandon their mother tongue because
> they live somewhere where school, and/or work, is available only if they
> speak a dominant language. I'm hoping you'll tell me I'm wrong about this!
>
> Martin
>
>
>


-- 
Carol A  Macdonald Ph D (Edin)
Developmental psycholinguist
Academic, Researcher,  and Editor
Honorary Research Fellow: Department of Linguistics, Unisa