SLT: Sociocognitive Approaches to SLA

Week 13

Tonight

• Misc. news (journal & RA)• Warm-up• Intro to Sociocognitive Theory • Discussion Lead 1: Reinhardt (2008)• Discussion Lead 2: Cekaite (2008)• Ecological linguistics (van Lier, 2004)• Final guidelines• HW

Warm-up

• What are the social aspects of a CA approach to SLA?

Intro to Sociocognitive Theory

• Mind, body, and world function together in SLA.

Theoretical principles

• 1. Human cognition is adaptive intelligence.

• What is important about this claim? How is it different than traditional views of cognition?

Top-down, rule governed

• Schema theory

Thinking WITH the environment• Consider, for example, cognition-for-driving. When

traveling by car, we typically follow the preexisting road grid rather than striking out on our roadless country. In this sense, the road grid does much of the direction finding for us—it encodes a map or plan that it is therefore unnecessary to have in our heads (Gee, 1992). Getting from point A to point B thus requires no detailed mental representation of the land traversed; rather, one needs to know just a few environmental cues and responses to them; for example, to get to work, I turn right at the apartment entrance, left at Walmart, bear right onto Northwestern, and soon the campus appears straight ahead. In short, the cognition needed for driving is quite modest when roads think for you!

• How can we relate this idea to language learning?

2. The body is involved.

• What is the importance of mirror neurons?

• In order to synchronize their behaviors, then, individuals must share understandings and expectations about what they are doing. Yet cognition-for joint-action goes beyond separate cognitive apparatuses exchanging discrete signals: Individuals align as sociocognitive units.

• How?

3. Worldly environments provide semiotic resources

through which meaning is made.• What are semiotic resources?• How does these figure into learning?

• Goodwin unraveled the intricate webs of social meaning woven from grammar, intonation, gaze, gesture, head movement, bodily orientation, and additional semiotic resources.

• nonverbal activity as contributing crucially to conversation– Participants in a conversation generate a host of nonverbal

anticipatory elements ([facial] expressions, gestures, postures) that foreshadow how the interaction is likely to proceed.

– These structures enable participants to anticipate each other’s actions and meanings. Anticipating, in turn, allows smooth transitions in turn taking, and also enables each participant to continuously confirm emerging interpretations of meanings.

– We have seen this idea before…

4. we learn by experience• A key sociocognitive claim is that we learn as we live—

that learning and being are integrated processes. As we continuously adapt to our environments, something of that adaptation is retained—that is, we learn by experience.

• If this point seems too obvious to mention, then why does mainstream learning theory, including in SLA studies, insist on separating acquisition from use?

• The answer is rooted in cognitivism’s internalist assumptions: If real-world performance is excluded a priori, only abstract, decontextualized, virtually other-worldly knowledge/competence remains.

Alternatives

• Connectionism– Criticisms

– Anthropology… p. 150

• The novice hunter learns by accompanying more experienced hands in the woods. As he goes about, he is instructed in what to look out for, and his attention is drawn to subtle clues that he might otherwise fail to notice: in other words, he is led to develop a sophisticated perceptual awareness of the properties of his surroundings and of the possibilities they afford for action. . . What is involved . . . is not a transmission of representations . . . but an education of attention.

• Connect to:– What is cultural about this?– Explain to me how this fits with a sociocognitive approach?

5. Learning is (partly) publicly viewable

• A crucial point here is that learning/teaching/understanding takes place in the world: It is publicly enacted and publicly available.

• Far from being locked away in cognitive space, learning is effected in the hybrid, partly public forum of sociocognition.

Research Methods

• Think of the foundations of the idea (see below), and then think about ways to collect data related to those.

• 1. Human cognition is adaptive intelligence.• 2. The body is involved.• 3. Worldly environments provide semiotic

resources through which meaning is made.• 4. we learn by experience.• 5. Learning is (partly) publicly viewable

p. 161

• That is, cognitive processes are partly visible and partly invisible—they reach across the traditional boundaries of skin and skull. If cognition is primarily adaptive—if its raison d’être is to help us to respond to/align with the environment, including other human beings, this is as it must be.

• Cognition’s environmentally distributed nature is described throughout this chapter, but one of its (distributed) locations is certainly the head.

Multimodal interaction analysis• this approach focuses on the use of complementary

semiotic resources in performing sociocognitive action-via-interaction, including learning and teaching: (1) language; (2) nonlinguistic vocal behavior; (3) gaze; (4) facial expression; (5) gesture; (6) head and body movement and orientation; (7) tools (e.g., computers, grammar exercises); (8) settings (e.g., coffee shops, religious ceremonies); (9) roles and relations (e.g., expert-novice and family roles and relations, which are also power relations); and (10) arrangements and practices (e.g., participation frameworks, situated activity systems).

Discussion Lead 1: Reinhardt (2008)

• Does this study address these points:– 1. Human cognition is adaptive intelligence.– 2. The body is involved.– 3. Worldly environments provide semiotic

resources through which meaning is made.– 4. We learn by experience.– 5. Learning is (partly) publicly viewable

• We will discuss your observations after the presentation.

Discussion Lead 2: Cekaite (2008)

• Mind, body, and world in SLA. – Listen for examples of each.

– We will discuss your observations after the presentation.

Van Lier (2004), The ecology and semiotics of language learning: A sociocultural perspective(van Lier, 2004)

• What are the aims of the book?• What main ideas serve as its foundation?

• Your questions?• Notes that I took.

My study

• Previous literature • Aim• Data

Final guidelines

• http://levimcneil.webs.com/sociolinguistics.htm

HW• Van Lier (2004), The ecology and semitoics of

language learning: A sociocultural perspective: Chapter 6 & Chapter 3

• Atkinson (2011) Ch 7, SLA after cognitivism (save for week 15)

• Discussion Lead van Lier, Ch. 7: Andrew• Discussion Lead van Lier Ch 4:Hyun Joo• Discussion Lead van Lier Ch 5:Grace• Reader response