Essentials of SLA for L2 Teachers

A Transdisciplinary Framework

Joan Kelly Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351721837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Essentials of SLA for L2 Teachers: A Transdisciplinary Framework presents an accessible and comprehensive account of current understandings of second language acquisition (SLA) geared towards those studying to become L2 teachers. Grounded in the pragmatic and problem-oriented transdisciplinary framework of SLA, this textbook draws connections between SLA research and practices for L2 teaching. It aims to build L2 teacher expertise by strengthening teachers' understandings of the many facets of L2 learning and their skills for designing transformative learning environments in their teaching contexts. The author includes pedagogical implications and inquiry-based activities in each chapter that engage readers in further explorations of the topics covered in the chapter. Short and straightforward, Essentials of SLA for L2 Teachers is the ideal main resource for SLA courses taught at undergraduate and graduate-level teaching programs.

Chapter 1

Introduction
A Transdisciplinary Framework of SLA

Overview

Almost everyone has experienced the learning of a language or languages in addition to their first or native language. For some, the experience may take place in the classroom, where the study of foreign languages is a common subject area offered by schools. Others’ first encounters with another language may come from living with caregivers such as grandparents or care providers who speak a language that is different from the dominant language of the community. In these contexts, individuals typically learn different words and phrases in the language of their caregivers to communicate with them about their home-life experiences.

Others may experience language learning by picking up certain words and phrases they encounter while watching television, listening to music, playing video games, or using the internet to find information or communicate with others about shared interests. Still others’ experiences with learning another language may happen as friendships are formed with individuals who speak different languages. Understanding how children, adolescents, and adults learn additional languages and the forces that shape the outcomes of their experiences, whether they occur in the classroom, on the internet, or in a myriad of social contexts, is the central concern of the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA).¹

The SLA field began as an interdisciplinary endeavor in the broader field of Applied Linguistics over half a century ago, with its early research efforts drawing on intellectual developments on language and learning from the fields of linguistics and psychology. The field’s strong ties to these disciplines directed SLA’s research efforts to concerns with uncovering and explaining the role of cognitive mechanisms in acquiring the structural components of another language. These concerns were mainly limited to language learning by monolinguals, i.e., speakers of only one language, who were learning a second language in addition to their first language. This explains the use of the term second in the field’s name.

As research interests expanded through the 1970s and 1980s, the field recognized that language learners often come to their varied contexts of learning already knowing more than one language. Thus, while the field retained the term second in its name, its scope was broadened to include the learning of any additional language, whether it be learners’ second, third, or fourth languages, and whether the language is considered a group or community language, a foreign or world language, or an indigenous, minority, or heritage language. The field also uses the term L2 as an alternative term for second language.

Over the last 25 years or so, and particularly since the turn into the twenty-first century, the scope of the field has undergone tremendous growth. The expansion has been fueled in large part by recognition of the need for alternative perspectives that more adequately explain the real-world experiences of L2 learners in modern day society in light of the profound changes brought about by the intersecting forces of globalization, technologization, and large-scale migration. For example, the proliferation of digital technologies such as computers, video games, smart phones, and the internet, has changed the ways in which L2 learners interpret and make meaning, with graphic, pictorial, audio, and spatial patterns of meaning integrated within or even supplanting traditional spoken and written texts.

Together these forces have given rise to communities that are increasingly linguistically, socially, and culturally diverse. Within and across these communities, new and more heterogeneous forms of social activity and options for participating in them that are more diverse, more multilingual, multimodal, and dynamic continue to emerge. In these environments, opportunities for learning additional languages have been expanded and transformed.

L2 learners come to these contexts with diverse social identities marked by varying degrees of access to the activities and their meaning-making resource. L2 learners’ varied access to, motivation, and investment in participating in the activities lead to varying developmental trajectories. In some contexts, learners may develop understandings of and skills to use comprehensive and elaborate multilingual resources. In other contexts, L2 learners may develop more specialized resources that are linked to those contexts or they may develop minimal, transitory bits of additional languages, such as isolated greeting patterns, e.g., hola from Spanish or sayonara from Japanese (Blommaert & Backus, 2011). In other contexts, despite ample access to varied social encounters marked by extensive use of multilingual resources, L2 learners may remain monolingual.

To make sense of the varying processes and outcomes of L2 learning, researchers have looked to other disciplines including anthropology, sociology, and education in addition to areas considered subfields of linguistics and psychology, such as functional linguistics, neurolinguistics, and cultural psychology for insights and research findings. These explorations have resulted in a proliferation of approaches to SLA in addition to the historically dominant cognitive approaches. These approaches range from those that focus on the very micro levels of L2 learning, i.e., the neurobiological and cognitive conditions and outcomes of L2 learning, to the more macro levels, i.e., the sociocultural and ideological structures that both shape and are shaped by L2 learning.

Each of the approaches is characterized by particular research agendas, which, for the most part, are defined by disciplinary concerns that are built on specific disciplinary theories and key concepts. These, in turn, define particular objects of investigation and particular research methods to advance study of the objects. They also specify terminologies to refer to the objects of study and value certain methods of investigation over others, the purpose of which is to advance new hypotheses about the formal properties of the theories and concepts. Their theories, concepts, and methods give shape both to the directions that research projects take and their outcomes.

Arguing for engagement across perspectives to advance the field, some SLA scholars from these different approaches have come together to explore concepts from different perspectives, such as the nature of language and learning. One well-known exploration is Dwight Atkinson’s (2011) volume entitled Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition, in which six complementary perspectives on L2 learning are presented. While these efforts have made great contributions to the advancement of theoretical and conceptual understandings about language and learning, for the most part, their intellectual energies have remained on disciplinary concerns. Their capacity for providing solutions to the real-world challenges of L2 learning in modern day society has been less effective. This is due in large part to the fact that the challenges of L2 learning are highly complex, varying across individuals, across groups and across communities. Practical, participant-relevant and sustainable responses to these challenges cannot be construed from only one or two disciplinary perspectives.

A Transdisciplinary Framework of SLA

To meet the challenges of addressing the real-world issues of L2 learning, a new intellectual framework for the field of SLA has emerged (Douglas Fir Group, 2016). Termed transdisciplinary, the framework was developed by a group of 15 scholars, each member of which identifies with a particular disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach to SLA, and whose extensive collaborations over an extended period of time resulted in the development of the framework. The approaches to SLA represented in the transdisciplinary framework include the biocultural perspective, complexity and dynamic systems theory, conversation analysis, language socialization, social identity theory, the sociocognitive approach, sociocultural theory, systemic functional linguistics, usage-based approaches, and variationist sociolinguistics. These are displayed in Figure 1.1 and each approach includes the names of SLA scholars comprising the Douglas Fir Group who represent it.

Figure 1.1 Approaches to SLA represented in the transdisciplinary framework.

At its center, the transdisciplinary framework is pragmatic and problem-oriented. While it acknowledges the value of the distinct disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, it recognizes that a broader, and at the same time, more grounded perspective of SLA is needed to capture the whole project of SLA in all its multifaceted complexity. It provides such a view by synthesizing findings on L2 learning arising from the various research efforts across disciplines and over many different levels of detail and time spans.

The framework presented in this text expands on the foundational work of the Douglas Fir Group (2016) and adds to their efforts by drawing connections between current understandings of the many dimensions of L2 learning and understandings of and practices for doing L2 teaching. Its goal is twofold. First, it aims to advance understandings of the ever-changing landscapes of L2 learners’ social worlds that are ecologically valid (Cicourel, 2007). Understandings that are ecologically valid are fair and credible representations of “the possibilities and constraints faced by L2 learners in their social worlds on all levels of activity and across time spans” (Douglas Fir Group, 2016, p. 39). The second goal is to create deeper, more nuanced understandings of L2 learning that can inform L2 teachers’ development of practical, innovative, and sustainable solutions for expanding L2 learners’ diverse multilingual repertoires of meaning- making resources across a range of social contexts and over their lifespan. In the next section, we summarize the multifaceted, dynamic nature of SLA.

Multifaceted Nature of SLA

Foundational to the transdisciplinary framework is the understanding that SLA is a complex, on-going, multidimensional phenomenon involving the dynamic and variable interplay among a range of individual internal cognitive capabilities on the one hand and, on the other, L2 learners’ diverse experiences in their multilingual worlds (Douglas Fir Group, 2016). From their experiences, L2 learners develop variable repertoires of multilingual semiotic resources (Hall, Cheng & Carlson, 2006; Blommaert & Backus, 2011). Semiotic resources are an open set of ever-evolving multilingual and multimodal means by which meanings are made in social contexts of action. They include a wide array of linguistic constructions in addition to nonverbal, visual, graphic, and auditory modes of meaning making. The dynamic multidimensional nature of SLA is illustrated in Figure 1.2. As shown, three mutually dependent layers of social activity shape L2 learning.

Micro Level

At the micro level of social activity, L2 learners draw on various internal mechanisms and capacities as they interact with others in a multiplicity of social contexts. The scope of these contexts can be wide-ranging, and may include everyday, informal contexts of interaction, such as personal conversations with family members and friends enacted in face-to-face encounters or via technological means such as cellphones and the internet. They can also include ad hoc social conversations with neighbors and work mates. Interactions may also include more formal contexts such as those found in educational or workplace settings where many interactions are undertaken for instructional or professional purposes.

Figure 1.2 The multifaceted nature of language learning and teaching.

Source: Douglas Fir Group (2016, p. 25).

These encounters can be highly routinized in that the goals of the interaction, the roles of participants, and the semiotic resources are very familiar to all involved. Other interactions may be less routine or familiar. Entering workplaces as new employees can present L2 learners with new, unfamiliar contexts of interaction. Likewise, traveling to different geographical regions may involve L2 learners in a diversity of contexts of interaction. In some cases, they may be familiar contexts, e.g., service encounters such as those that occur in stores and restaurants, but the expectations for how to take action and the resources used to make meaning in these actions will be new. In other cases, the contexts and goals and roles of participants may be entirely new.

In their interactions with others in their varied contexts of social action, L2 learners draw on a set of neurobiological and cognitive and emotional capacities with which all human beings are endowed. These include social cognitive skills that drive individuals to seek cooperative interaction with others and general cognitive capabilities that make possible the processing of information. These capabilities guide learners in selecting and attending to particular meaning-making semiotic resources and their patterns of use and in forming schemas based on the recurrences of the resources in their encounters. They also guide learners in creating mappings across resources based on functional similarities, and to hypothesize about and continually test their understandings of and abilities to use the resources in context-sensitive ways.

Supporting L2 learners’ cognitive processes are cues used b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: A Transdisciplinary Framework of SLA
• 2 L2 Knowledge Is Complex and Dynamic
• 3 L2 Knowledge Is a Repertoire of Diverse Semiotic Resources
• 4 L2 Learning Is Situated, and Attentionally and Socially Gated
• 5 L2 Learning Is Mediated and Embodied
• 6 L2 Learning Is Mediated by Learners’ Social Identities
• 7 L2 Learning Is Mediated by Motivation, Investment, and Agency
• 8 L2 Learning Is Mediated by Literacy and Instructional Practices
• 9 L2 Learning Is Mediated by Language Ideologies