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Month: December 2015

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) | TESL Issues

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Zone of Proximal Development

Zone of Proximal Development

  • The Actual Developmental Level: According to Vygotsky (1978, p. 85), it is the level of development of the child’s mental functions that has been established as a result of certain already completed developmental cycles.
  • The Potential Developmental Level: It is performed through problem solving activities undertaken with the assistance of an adult (an expert) or through collaboration with peers (novices). This second level of development is the main one in ZPD. As Vygotsky has stated, it is the ‘bud’ rather than the ‘fruit’ of development.
  • In the third level of development, the learner is unable to perform the task even if assistance is provided.

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Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics | TESL Issues

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Discourse Analysis Discourse analysis serves as a device for systematically describing the kinds of interactions that occur in language classrooms. Drawing on initial work on content classrooms by Bellack (1966) and by the Birmingham School of linguistis (Sinclair & Coulthard (1975) discourse analysts give attention not only to the function of individual utterances but also…

Cognitive Development | TESL Issues

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Cognitive Development Cognitive Development was proposed by Piaget (1896-1980), a Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget offered an essentially rationalist perspective, documenting the insufficiency of an empiricist interpretation of experience (Piaget, 1980, p. 23). Sensory Motor Stage: Piaget’s theory is based on learners passing through a series of stages. For the young infant, the most important way…

Noticing Hypothesis

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Schmidt (1990, 1994, 2001) claimed that attention to input is a conscious process. He viewed noticing (i.e. registering formal features in the input) and noticing the gap (i.e. identifying how the input to which the learner is expected differs from the output the learner is able to generate) as essential processes in L2 acquisition.

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Motivation

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Gardner’s Socio-Educational Model (with integrative motivation the key construct) was the dominant theory in early motivation research.

A social-psychological factor frequently used to account for differential success in learning a second language is motivation. This has an intuitive appeal. It makes sense that individuals who are motivated will learn another language faster and to a greater degree. And, quite clearly, some degree of motivation is involved in initial decisions to learn another language and to maintain learning (Gass & Selinker, 2008).

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Integrative Motivation in SLA | TESL Issues

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Integrative Motivation

Integrative Motivation

Dörnyei (2005) pointed out that the term ‘integrative motivation’ has often been misunderstood and suggested that this is because the term ‘integrative’ figures in three separate, distinct, but related constructs: ‘integrative orientation’, ‘integrativeness’, and ‘the integrative motive/motivation’. Integrative Motivation can be defined as involving three subcomponents:

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Instrumental Motivation in SLA | TESL Issues

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Instrumental Motivation Instrumental motivation is also a component of Gardner’s socio-educational model; it is important to recognize that it can work in conjunction with, rather than in opposition to, integrative motivation. It refers to the motivation that derives from a perception of the concrete benefits that learning the L2 might bring about. Whereas instrumental motivation…

Intrinsic Motivation | TESL Issues

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Intrinsic Motivation Intrinsic Motivation It was developed as an alternative to goal-directed theories of motivation that emphasized the role of extrinsic rewards and punishments. Keller (1984) identified ‘interest’ as one of the main elements of motivation, defining it as a positive response to stimuli based on existing cognitive structures in such a way that learners’…

Teacher Education in SLA | TESL Issues

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Teacher Education Teacher Education L2 teacher education is, at its core, about teachers as learners of teaching, understanding the cognitive and social processes that teachers go through as they learn to teach is fundational to informing what we do in L2 teacher education (Johnson, 2009, p. 3). Teacher education is closely related to SLA research…