[Xmca-l] Re: L2

[jose david herazo]

I side with Remi again on the rationale for explícit teaching of toools like concepts. In my case I followed Gal'Perin stage-by-stage model to teach learners concepts of how the L2-English Was used to shop and sell at a farmers market and to explain a recipe. I derived these concepts from systemic lunguistics: the idea that when we comunícate we follow some predictable Stages to achieve our purpose (concept of genre), that communication takes part in specific situations made up of the relationship of those who communicate, of the topic of communication, and of the mode or communication, oral or written (concept or register) and that our choice of specific L2 forms (e.g., ' cut the onions' vs. 'Let's cut the onions') will depend on the configuration or all those aspects in actual communicative events.
As for the pedagogy to teach these concepts, i used Gal'Perin, as I said. This means that I first explained these concepts to learners and we used them, for example, as a framework (a system) to compare how farmers market shopping in the states Was similar/different from shopping in small convience stores in my learners' Neighborhoods in Colombia. Then I introduced a graphic, holistic representation or those concepts (Gal'Perin's SCOBA), that learners used for various tasks. For example, the learners identified the stages of a shopping exchange that they saw in a video, or used the conceptual graph for planning a role play (which, by the way, Was something they were used to doing by writing a script!). And finally this graph Was withdrawn, so that learners relied only on their talk based in these concepts to plan their use of the new Language, assess their own production, analyze samples on Language in use, or monitor what they were saying as they were saying it. All this ocurred alongside Other common  activities from the Language classroom such as vocabulary games, songs, pronunciation practice activities, and so on.


JOSÉ DAVID HERAZO, PhD 

> On 3/11/2014, at 13:36, "Rémi A. van Compernolle" <compernolle@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Martin:
> 
> Yes, basically. The evidence in neurolinguistics shows that it’s really really hard (if at all possible) to proceduralize an L2 (in the sense of it becoming implicit knowledge, subserved by procedural memory, etc.). Paradis’s argument is that highly proficiency L2 users speed up access to declarative processes that end up being functionally equivalent (or close) to the way that implicit, procedural competence works for native speakers. So if you’re tired after working all day in an L2 (I’ve had this experience too, and continue to have it when I teach upper division French culture and sociolinguistics courses in French), it’s because it takes a lot of attentional resources to do these things, which isn’t the case if you’re using your L1, at least that’s the theory.
> 
> I use this basic argument as a rationale for doing explicit teaching. We don’t know how, if at all, we can impact upon implicit/procedural competencies in L2 development, but we do know that we can intervene to promote conscious control. So if we can give learners really good L2 tools (e.g., concepts, categories of meaning, etc.) that mediate their controlled L2 performance, we get really good performances, provided we include communicative tasks that link the metalinguistic to the communicative performance. And at some point, with lots of practice, says Paradis at least, some implicit/procedural competencies may develop in parallel.
> 
> Adam
> 
> 
> 
> Rémi A. van Compernolle
> Assistant Professor of Second Language Acquisition & French and Francophone Studies
> Department of Modern Languages
> Carnegie Mellon University
> Baker Hall A60M
> 412-268-1122
> 
> 
> 
>> On Nov 3, 2014, at 1:10 PM, Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co> wrote:
>> 
>> Adam,
>> 
>> Are you referring here to the way that until a L2 is automatized it requires deliberate control? I get home tired at the end of the say because when I'm speaking Spanish I do so with deliberate awareness - I have to will the utterances to emerge. I have the L2 resources available in some form, but I need to actively deploy them at all levels, whereas in L1 the lexicogrammar takes care of itself.
>> 
>> Martin
>> 
>>> On Nov 3, 2014, at 12:52 PM, Rémi A. van Compernolle <compernolle@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I’ve argued in my recent work that in a lot of cases it isn’t the L2 that’s internalized to function intrapsychologically but rather metacognitive strategies subserved by declarative memory systems that are deployed to regulate the deployment of L2 resources.
> 
>