Current TESL issues (Teaching English as a Second Language) in an interactive fashion enriched with distinctive keywords and tags and comment forms to discuss the issues
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:
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 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 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…
Construct in Psychology Construct is a term used in psychology to label underlying skills or attributes. A construct is an explanatory device, so-called because it is a theoretical construction about the nature of human behavior. In test development, the construct being assessed is defined before the test is developed; this is to make sure that…
Input Hypothesis Input Hypothesis Krashen’s Input Hypothesis explicitly rejects a role for consciousness, claiming that “acquisition” is a subconscious process. Krashen assumed a ‘language acquisition device’, that is, an innate mental structure capable of handling both first and second language acquisition. The input activates this innate structure. But only input of a very specific kind…
Pragmatics Pragmatics refers to the field of study where linguistic features are considered in relation to users of the language (Morris, 1938; Levinson, 1983). Researchers have investigated what speakers accomplish when they perform utterances in terms of (1) interactional acts, and (2) speech acts. Interactional acts give structure to the discourse by ensuring that one…
Dyslexia Dyslexia or (word blindness) is a general term sometimes used to describe any continuing problem in learning to read, such as difficulty in distinguishing letter shapes and words. Reading specialists do not agree on the nature or causes of such reading problems, however, and both medical and psychological explanations have been made. Because of…
Complexity Theory Complexity theory is closely linked to chaos theory. Complex systems are random, nonlinear, unpredictable, self-organising, and subject to ‘strange attractor’, (i.e. they home in on a pattern that determines the boundaries of the phenomenon). Larsen-Freeman (1997) proposed that language and L2 acquisition are best viewed as complex systems. She identified a number of…
Chaos Theory Chaos theory was developed from the 1960s work of the meteorologist, Edward Lorenz. Lorenz discovered that a very small difference (less than one part in one thousand) in the initial conditions led to large changes in the weather predicted by his model over time. A chaos is included in a larger phenomenon, that…