Humanistic Language Learning Humanistic Language Learning The best introduction to humanistic learning within language education is Stevick (1997, as cited in Nunan, 2003). He believes that particular classroom techniques matter less than establishing the right emotional climate for the learners. According to Stevick (1990), among different language methods and approaches, Community Language Learning (CLL) seems…
Communicative Language Testing Communicative Language Testing The advent of communicative language testing saw a growing preference for face-to-face interaction as the context in which the assessment of spoken language skills would occur. In communicative language testing, the target of test inferences is performance of a set of communicative tasks in various contexts of use. The…
Sociocultural Theory in Language Learning Sociocultural theory is based on work by the Russian psychologist, Vygotsky, and represents a fundamentally different way of looking at language and learning. Sociocultural theory is grounded in the ontology of the social individual. A sociocultural approach considers language and, by extension, second language acquisition as contextually situated and is…
Emergentism Emergentism is the name that has recently been given to a general approach to cognition that stresses the interaction between organism and environment and that denies the existence of pre-determined, domain specific faculties or capacities. Emergentism thus offers itself as an alternative to modular, ‘special nativist’ theories of the mind, such as theories of…
Lateralization Lateralization argues that the location of language functions is fixed in one of the brain’s two hemispheres, usually the left one. Cerebral lateralisation or cerebral dominance refers to the differential proficiency of the cerebral hemispheres for the acquisition, performance and control of certain specific neurological functions. Infants as young as four days show a…
Functionalist Theories of SLA Functionalist theories of L2 acquisition share a number of concerns with variability theories. For example, both are concerned not just with how linguistic knowledge is represented in the mind of the learner, but also with how this knowledge is used in discourse. Also, both types assume that syntax cannot be considered…
Test Specifications Test specifications – usually called ‘specs’ – are generative explanatory documents for the creation of test tasks. Specs tell us the nuts and bolts of how to phrase the test items, how to structure the test layout, how to locate the passage, and how to make a host of difficult choices as we…
Competence Competence corresponds to the I-language (Internal Language). Competency is the speaker/hearer’s knowledge of his language. It’s an abstract version of knowledge. Competency is independent of situation. It represent what the speaker knows in the abstract. The different types of competence are: grammatical competency, linguistic competency, communicative competency, pragmatic competency, Communicative Competency: Discourse Competency: The…
Speech Acts Speech acts are carried out over various turns and their exact shape takes into account interlocutor reactions. In other words, conversation is co-constructed by both interlocutors, which is something that can never be simulated with DCTs. Speech acts are certainly the most researched area of pragmatics, and they are arguably the most social,…
Infants’ Language Learning | TESL Issues Infants’ Language Learning | TESL Issues All normal children appear to contain within themselves the ability to create a language in spite of wide variations in experience. External auditory simulation is available to the fetus, although attenuated. Mother’s voice is a prominent sound in the amniotic environment, experience with…