October 6 post

Intuitive heuristics was something that I completely agree with. Based on my own experiences learning another language, instruction is not nearly as effective as speaking and actually discovering the language on your own. The things that I remember most about Spanish are those that I learned on my own, whether it be from a native Spanish speaker I heard speaking or a word that I looked up out of curiosity. I agree with the book that inductive teaching is better than deductive teaching (although it does not explicity say this). Looking back, I think that my foreign language classes were set up with a more deductive approach, likely because this is easier for the teacher. However, I also agree with the book when it says that many adults want this deductive structure because it is more explicit, more concrete, and easy to refer back to this type of instruction when mistakes are made. My experiences at the ELI have proven this to be true—adults want something they can refer back to, not something that they have to discover. I will often ask students “what do you think?” and they give me this look like, “Just tell us so we can start studying.” The question then becomes what should you do as a teacher. I personally feel that research has shown that if you look at the big picture, intuitive heuristics should be the goal to learning a language and therefore I think teachers should use this research and put it to practice, instead of listening to the students who think they know what they want.

I enjoyed the Skehan article and I felt like it touched on a lot of subjects, but the section “individual variables” stuck out to me. At first I thought this was going to be a section of common sense and give the over-taught lesson that “everyone is different,” but there were some points that I found extremely interesting. For example, the text said that “high task attitude students seem more affected by task manipulations than do low task attitude students” (7).  First of all, I feel like the word “manipulation” is selling some students short and has a terrible connotation. I also do not like how we are constantly putting students into these groups and on these different tracks and classifying them and as this and that. It says that group-based differences in task performance can disguise differences among students, but I think it is unrealistic to believe that we can walk into a classroom, classify every student as either having a high or low task attitude, and then putting them into groups accordingly. This also eliminates the importance of different types of students working together.