Social-Interactionist approach to SLA

M. Aljohani (pp. 280 - 285)

• Language is not an isolated phenomenon that can be understood out of its social context.

• Learning is not situated in an individual’s cognition.

• It is adaptive to an emergent set of resources, resources that are embodied in social interaction.

• Linguistic utterances are sensitive to and reliant upon their interactional context.

Conversation Analysis• Evidence for learning is embedded in the changes

in accomplishment of social activities, not necessarily in the linguistic code used to express those activities.

• Learning the linguistic code of a language is situated in social context.

• A conversational analysis considers only what is observable, although this excerpt suggests that this is not always easy to avoid.

Socio-cultural theory• By the Russian psychologist Vygotsky

• Sociocultural theory is grounded in the ontology of the social individual.

• Important Concepts:

• Mediation & Regulation

• Internalization

• Zone of Proximal Development

Mediation• The sociocultural theory rests on the assumption that human

activity (including cognitive activity) is mediated by what are known as symbolic artifacts (higher-level cultural tools) such as language and literacy and by material artifacts. These artifacts mediate the relationship between humans and the social and material world around us.

• Within sociocultural theory, humans use symbols as tools to mediate psychological activity and to control our psychological processes.

• The primary tool that humans have available is language and it is a tool that allows us to connect to our environment (both physical and social).

Regulation• A form of mediation

• As children learn language, they also learn to regulate their activities linguistically. There are 3 stages of development to self-regulation:

1. The first stage involves the use of objects as a way of thinking (object-regulation).

2. A second stage is known as other-regulation whereby learning is regulated by others rather than objects.

3. The third stage is self-regulation when activities can be performed with little or no external support.

Internalization

• It is the process that allows us to move the relationship between an individual and his or her environment to later performance.

• It can happen through ‘imitation’: e.g. private speech

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

• Vygotsky: “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.”

• Learning results from interpersonal activity

• Human cognition results from the full context (historical, social, material, cultural) in which experiences take place.

• Thus, the experiences we have, and the interactions we engage in, are crucial in the development of cognition. Language is a tool (a symbolic ar t i fact) that mediates between individuals and their environment.

Summary

بحمداهلل إنتهينا ،،

Final Exam• On Wednesday, 20/5/2015 (8:00 - 11:00 A.M.)

• Final Exam material:

• First Language Acquisition, by O’Grady (handout)

• Second Language Acquisition (textbook)

• Ch1 (1.1, 1.2, 1.4)

• Ch2 (2.1, 2.2., 2.3, 2.4 )

• Ch4 (ALL!)

• Ch5 (5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.5 (only the introduction without 5.5.1 to 5.5.6)

• Ch6 (6.1, 6.2.1, 6.2.2, 6.2.3) + presentation titled ‘nativist approaches to SLA (additional information is in the presentation)

• Ch8 (8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4)

• Ch9 (9.4)