It would be happy that you read my blog. My English is not good, but I did my best. Please give some comments to me.
I am confused about this journal article because I do not have much knowledge of TESOL and Linguistics. However, I think it is important to focus on equally both “cognitive and mentalistic orientation” and “social and contextual orientations to language” in SLA (p.285). What do you think about it? I agree with the idea that this journal article tries to dissolve an imbalance between them. I am not sure about the exact meaning of contextual orientations, but I imagine that contextual orientation is the influence that our backgrounds have on our language use. We, foreign language speakers, are eager to master English as our native language. We have many problems speaking or writing in English and cannot find effective ways to solve. As mentioned in this article, the author, Alan Firth, states that language is not only a “cognitive phenomenon in our brain”(p.296). Language is also a “social phenomenon”(p.296). We can learn and teach English more effectively by such an idea.
I would like to talk about more specific example. I am interested in Farch and Kasper’s “communication strategies”(p.288). This is a conversation between a Native Speaker of English (NSE) and a Danish learner (L). NS asked L what she read at home. She answered ‘historie’, meaning ‘stories’ in Danish. N was trying to understand what L said. Then it caused misunderstanding. Then, N misunderstood that L answered a school subject, history. After all, they negotiated and made effort to understand each other. We tend to regard this conversation as a problem, but it gives many clues to us in communication. Through communication, they can also understand what they really want to say and how necessary it is to keep talking each other. The misunderstanding is not a problem. We can also understand what cultural and language background we have. This process is very important for non-native speakers in their second language acquisition.
Is this example useful to our future class? In Japan, we mainly focus on grammatical exercises. Our methodologies have an imbalance between “cognitive and mentalistic orientation” and “social and contextual orientations to language”. If we take in more contextual and communicative activities, our language acquisition will enlarge and deepen more. I would like to learn the field of SLA and make it helpful to improve my English and to teach English to my future students.
Thank you for your reading.
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