Part 3: What Everyone Should Know about Second Language Acquisition.

Part 3 of 6 of Professor Bill VanPatten's MiWLA 2013 presentation: What Everyone Should Know about Second Language Acquisition.

[@cylt5113]

He's absolutely right about the constraints about the classroom in language teaching. It's somewhere to start, though.

[@kevinwalkingPH]

I want to know what he means when he said laguage practice?

[@RogerWazup007]

Probably "practice this structure or concept by writing five sentences or filling in these blanks."

[@cathalmeenagh3898]

I'm sorry, but the way you said "no buts" and glibly stated "change your assessments" reflects an academic's disconnect with the day-to-day constraints that ordinary educators are faced with. Those of us that have to fight tooth-and-nail to get the means of assessment changed are merely allowed (by the institutions that we work for, that parents pay extortionate fees for) to swap one means of inappropriate assessment for a lesser evil -are very aware of the gap between an idealised goal of SLA and the realities of what we can achieve within those constraints -which oftentimes is actually phenomenal (our methods of success are not solely based on pure SLA approaches), so to be caught up in the luxury of 'implicit versus explicit' SLA teaching approaches is interesting but ultimately theoretical, and not reflecting the language teaching and acquisition that occurs at the coalface.

[@WozWozWozniacki]

Exactly. He didn't even offer a solution. He just said your method is bad. Bye. It appears the video was cut, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, though.

[@uchuuseijin]

I mean as a TEFL teacher in Japan with a background in linguistics, I understand that there's a disconnect between the ideal and the day-to-day of SLA, but it is what it is. If you're teaching a swimming class on the floor, you can go on and on about the parents and the administrators and how you've been able to get results, this, that, whatever- you're not going to get around the fact that you're doing swimming practice on the floor. As a fellow floor-swimming teacher, I sympathize. There's a lot of fighting to get people to acknowledge even basic stuff. But from a scientific perspective, the solution to the problems of teaching floor-swimming are indeed as simple and glib as "get a pool", and people need to know that, whether you can get a pool or not.

[@sniya]

Is the job to teach a second language or to pass tests? If medical students were learning the 4 bodily humours just because it was still on the test it wouldn't be defensible. Secondly, it's very possible that an input method is so much more effective that students will still perform well on these tests.

[@clone256]

I feel the purpose of the conference is to give educators the ideal, and it's up to them how they can negotiate between reality and the ideal. As you said, he doesn't know the reality, so he can't tell them what they should do. But it's better for them to understand the idea.

[@boozm]

The video is edited. The answer should be that grammar tests are a huge part of the problem. Yes, instructing a student on how to do gap fills might give the student a higher score on gap fills but it will do very little for the student's actual ability to communicate first effectively and secondly accurately in the L2. No tests are perfect. But skills based reading, writing, listening and speaking tests provide far more useful data than grammar tests, which should not exist and have no purpose for existing. If your method of assessment is wrong, your teaching will also be wrong. It was a good answer, but should've been given more depth. I can relate to his frustration on being challenged on input based methods, it's extremely frustrating. He's an expert in the field and here's a lay man saying 'but...' it's an arrogant 'but' and and arrogant 'there's no buts' BUT! I can relate to his impulse.

[@backpackingwithlidia3559]

For secondary school language learning, I disagree that repetition does not work. I have started to have good results with students at secondary level through repetition after a clear understanding of what they were expressing was given and checked. As a language learner myself in Spanish and Portuguese, I have gained from meaningful repetition and practice.

[@TheCompleteGuitarist]

You are making an assumption. Is repetition ALL you do? Because how do you know it isn't something else? Krashen states that grammar only works as a language learning tool when it is delivered in the target language and thus student learn from the delivery of the subject, not the subject (in this case grammar) itself.

[@darrenseinfeld]

first to comment

[@RogerWazup007]

lol