What is the Role of SLA in Day-to-Day Classroom Teaching?
University of Texas's Charles Nelson Looks at Theory vs. Practice
Charles Nelson's recent remarks on the TESL-L listserv
sparked a lively debate over the relevance of second language
acquisition research. He revised his original post and submitted
this provocative article for ESL MiniConference Online. You
can read a response by Central Missouri State's Bob Yates
here
I've had many good teachers in many fields who obviously knew how to
teach (theory of pedagogy) and knew their content matter (sociology,
biology, etc.). However, content matter is not the same as a theory
of content matter. These teachers did not teach a theory of their
field, and I don't teach second language acquisition or linguistics
to L2 learners: I teach the content of the language, English in my
case. I also don't teach pedagogical theory to my students; however,
unlike SLA theories, pedagogical theory does guide my teaching
practices. For those who are in an MA or PhD TEFL program, naturally
you would want to teach how people learn second languages, but what
do we really know about this topic? There's an input hypothesis,
input-output, communicative approach, etc. It's kind of hard to
imagine learning a language without input and without practicing
output. These theories can give teachers a stance, and an important
one, that language is considerably more than reciting grammar rules.
But what do they say about teaching or learning a language? Only that
what you practice is what you learn - whether it's reading, speaking,
writing, listening, reciting grammar rules, or playing basketball.
I happened to have enjoyed my linguistics classes and found them
fascinating, but I have seen little relevance to teaching a foreign
language unlike theories of motivation and general learning. This is
not to denigrate linguistic or SLA theories. The field of SLA is
young, and theorists have to start somewhere. At this time, however,
we simply know too little about SLA for these theories to be of use
in teaching foreign languages. I'm still open, however, to learn of
the relevance.
Comment by Charles Nelson, Instructor, Computer Research & Writing Laboratory, Division of Rhetoric & Composition, The University of Texas at Austin
2002 ESL MiniConference Online
Theory is important, but I have rarely seen linguistics or second
language acquisition theories to be helpful in teaching ESL.
Linguistics does not tell us how language is acquired, unless one
subscribes to a UG in which case it's black-boxed and has no
application to the classroom. Linguistics provides formal theories
that have nothing to do with teaching. Using these theories to teach
a second language is like trying to determine what software was used
in printing out a document by looking at the document instead of the
code. Even SLA theories have not added to our understanding of how
people learn a language. They DESCRIBE different strategies or stages
of language learners, but they do not EXPLAIN how people LEARN and go
from one stage to another. This is a crucial distinction for teaching
languages.
www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~nelson