class notes

• Not only studying input and exposure, but the whole experience = environment

• Vygotsky: psychological development emerges through interpersonal connections with the social environment

• Experts (adults, more advanced peers)

• instructional settings

• Mediation (learning relies on the transmitted experiences of others)

• Zone of proximal development a state of cognition “in which the role

• ZPD the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers - Vygotsky

The process of learning (de Bot et al.)

• A repeated perception will be noticed and will become established into the system by linking it to already existing information

• Repeated perception – frequency, salience, transparency

• Frequency is key determinant of acquisition because the rules of the languages are structural regularities that emerge from learner’s lifetime analysis of the distributional characteristics (Ellis)

• Noticing hypothesis (Schmidt) – we have to notice the language features to apply them (it can be influenced by social distance, prior knowledge, attention)

• Conclustions: All learning requires attention, not all learning is delibierate or intentional, higher level of attention required? he does not know

• Assimilation (Piaget) – the integration of external elements into evolving or completed structures of an organism

• A conservative force, keep the system as it is by incorporating the new input

• Automatization – the process become faster and faster by using it often (DeKeyser – explicit learning results in declarative knowledge which can provide a basis for repeated practise, and if sufficient, practise leads to proceduralized and eventually automatized knowledge.) – not everyone believes that this is true – Paradise: declarative and procedural knowledge are two different kinds of mental representation – explicit cannot be converted into procedural!

• Intake (x input) = process (Quarter)

• Accommodation = assimilation of the new material actually leads to reanalysis and changes of the existing knowledge (saying the essay is writable)

• Restructuring

Paradis’s version of “non-interface” hypothesis

• Draws a line between learning and acquisition

• In post-childhood language, we stop relying on metalinguistic knowledge and we start using implicit knowledge

6. AGE, APTITUDE, MOTIVATION

What varies between learners (and affects SLA)

1. Learner’s linguistic experience at the start of learning a new language

2. L1 experience

3. Experience with any additional languages (length of learning, input quality and quantity)

4. Socio-psychological factors (motivation, attitude)

5. Cognitive factors (intelligence, aptitude)

6. Biological factors (sex, age, brain plasticity, hearing)

The learner’s age

• We are usually not interested in their chronological age (the age we are testing them) but in the age when they started learning (age of onset of learning)