tema 5(2)
INTERACTIONISM (SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM) (1990-ONWARDS):Social interaction leads to both lg acquisition & knowledge development, with no stages), as thought is mainly internalised speech.Social interaction pushes us into our ZPD as the basis for learning.Conversation is the scaffolding for acquiring new lg and knowledge. Emphasis on pragmatic and communicative aspects of lg. Group work and interaction are essential for SLA: INFORMATION PROCESSING (IP) (70s ONWARDS)Main idea: brain is the computer that represents the images. Get input of outside, manipulate the information…Representation (knowledge) + access (processing):*Representation: LTM *Access: WM. Area is the reception desk.LONG-TERM MEMORY:Unlimited capacity (intense how long you keep information).You never forget things.Declarative / Explicit: knowledge that we can verbalise: *Semantic memory (concepts, facts, words)*Episodic memory (events personally experienced)Procedural / Implicit: knowledge we are not ‘aware’ of (inferable from behaviour), or can execute automatically without conscious thought: *Skills and habits (walking, speaking, swimming, playing a guitar, feeling sad when someone cries…)WORKING MEMORYLimited capacity: 2 sec! 7 items at a time…Truly ‘working’!: Encodes info. Controls attention, hosts reasoning (induction, analogy…), decision-making, priorization.Handles two complementary processes:*Controlled processing: conscious, voluntary mental work by “central executive”. Take up most cognitive resources: serial.*Automatic processing: unconscious, involuntary. Fluent and parallel. It makes a difference among ss. factors that correlates with success.Smaller capacity in L2 than in L1, but increasingly similar as L2 develps.SKILL ACQUISITION THEORY (MCLAUGHLIN, 1986)SLA is the building p of a complex cognitive skill (or knowledge) that gradually moves from controlled to automatic performance, for both reception and production.Complex skills: lower-order skills + higher- order skills. Learning: from easier to more complex tasks)SKILL ACQUISITION THEORY:PerceptionFocal attention (controlled, conscious) – Peripheral attention Criticizes this distinction(automatic,unconscious). u only control knowledge (u’re not in control) Is peripheral attention necessarily unconscious? (McLaughlin, 1986) Learning.CONTROLLED PROCESSING:Lower-order skills demand much mental space and attention (effort): focal attention,(sometimes peripheral: e.g. FLA).Human attention is limited, so we only process small amounts of information at one time. PRACTICE. Automatic processing:- Little mental space (lower neural activation patterns) and mainly peripheral attention, freeing processing capacity for new information and higher-order skills (general ideas, pragmatics,…)-When tasks/information is automatised, it remains out of focal attention unless controlled processing is called upon (often disrupting performance): automatised skills are more difficult to change. TO EXPLAIN FOSSILIZATION: PREMATURE AUTOMATIZATION(you automatize things fluently).QS:1-How is automaticity of so many data accomplished?Chunking: lg is not processed word-by-word but in strings of pre-fabricated patterns or lexical units (Sinclair, 1991).Transfer-appropriate processing: information is best retrieved in situations similar to those where it was acquired.Restructuring: reorganization of mental representations making them more coordinated, integrated and efficient (i.e. fluent). It’d explain:Sudden steps forward (when no relevant change has occurred in instruction or exposure).Evidence of restructuring (Stauble, 1978): IMAGEN (Jorge’s development of English negations).Backsliding / U-shaped development (where the two correct utterances are of a different nature: moves from exemplar-based to rule-based representations).Production rules: if x, then y.: Generalisation/reduction: productions are broader/narrower in their application.Strengthening: some rules (mappings) are applied more often (shortcuts): automaticity. Declarative knowledge is generalisable, transferred to different tasks. Procedural knowledge is difficult to apply to different tasks (DeKeyser, 2006) (Trasfer-Appropriate Processing).When rules are proceduralised, i. e. applied automatically, they become rather inflexible: fossilization.INFORMATION PROCESSING MODEL: –From easier to more difficult, and from controlled (slow) to automatic (fluent) use. – We have control over our own acquisition rate (focal attention + practice).-Make prefabricated units part of declarative knowledge to ease cognitive effort and favour automaticity.-For automaticity and restructure: DPH (meaningful encodings / decodings of declarative knowledge +associations with production rules favouring generalization of application before automatization).MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODEL & PROCESSABILITY THEORY.Processing Strategies (Clahsen, 1984)Canonical order strategy:Basic word order (SVO: actor-action-acted upon), so focus on meaning and no grammar knowledge required. (This is not true for all languages, so it was criticised) Initialization/ Finalization strategy:Beginnings and ends of sentences are more salient, so discrepancies between input and own rule are noticed, and initial/final elements are moved around.- Subordinate clause strategy:Reordering in subordinates is avoided until later, as it entails identifying sub-strings and holding hierarchical material in memory. Moving elements out of sub-strings into other position is the most advanced processing.