Comments: Discovery of Competence

There was a lot in Chapter 2 that I did not agree with, though I agree with the authors’ general point that explicit grammar teaching is not enough to learn a language.  I also agree that students need to use the language they are learning to really communicate with someone in order to learn.  Needing to communicate and being immersed in the language is not enough, though, in my opinion as a language learner and a language teacher.  We all have met that person who has lived in a foreign country for years but does not speak the language well or fluently.  They can interact in society on a basic level, but their abilities and thus their potential in that society, are limited.  I think this is what happens when an adult is thrown into a new culture and language and just “acquires” the language.

Children, and specifically babies, learn in a totally different way than adults.  I think that acquisition is an important part of how adults learn a language, but not to the same extent as for children—our minds are just not as plastic as they were when we were kids.  Adults, though, have a secret weapon that children do not have: they can learn.  Any language teaching pedagogy that does not capitalize on this ability is missing some very important teaching techniques.

I think that most of what I disagree with in Chapter 2 is just based on the fact that the book was written in the 80’s when this idea of acquisition vs. learning was just starting to be discussed; I think more modern models of language pedagogy are a little more balanced in with respect to acquisition and learning.

Any problems that I had with the authors’ point of view in Chapter 2 were made unimportant when I read Chapters 3 and 4.  I really appreciated their discussion of the two Boston girls’ papers and what aspects made one writer have so much more potential than the other.  Alison’s ability to step back and think about how she perceived the situation, and her ability to interpret the Anne Frank text were really good examples of deeper, more analytical and more academic thinking.  As an ESL teacher, I am often more focused on surface features of a text.  I would have graded Jean’s paper (the one that was grammatically more correct but showed less dialectical thinking) higher than Alison’s.  This distinction, along with the great examples in the form of student texts, was really helpful for me as I re-evaluate the way that I assess, comment on, and grade student papers.