SLAT 7852 Portfolio Name: ziqian Zhu

References:

Larsen-Freeman, D. (2017). Chapter 1. Complexity theory. Language Learning & Language Teaching, 11-50.

Macalister, J and Nation, I.S.P. (2020). Language Curriculum Design. Chapter 7: Monitoring and assessment

Swain, M. and Lapkin, S. (2001) Focus on form through collaborative dialogue: exploring task effects. In M. Bygate, P. Skehan and M. and Swain (eds) Researching Pedagogic Tasks: Second Language Learning, Teaching and Testing (pp. 99–118). London: Longman.

About me

Hi, my name is Ziqian (Hugo) Zhu, currently enrolled in the Master program of applied linguistics in the University of Queensland (UQ). I have gained a bachelor’s degree of Arts majoring in Chinese-English translation and Interpreting from UQ as well. After graduation from my bachelor’s degree, I returned to my home country, China, to work for two years. The working experience can be segmented into two parts. In the former one, I was an IELTS instructor hired by Beijing Foreign Studies University. In latter part, I was hired by CGTN (China Global Television Network) as a global English news editor. As a bilingual person, I have significant interests in language study, international relationships, China’s literature study and interpreting practices. Thus, I can say that I have distinguished understanding in both Chinese and European-backgrounded culture. These experiences have forged me into a qualified interpreter, language teacher, and international news editor.

Linked-in Profile: https://au.linkedin.com/in/ziqian-zhu-116183282

SLAT 7805 Ripple Reflection Assessment

SLAT 7805 (The second language acquisition) is an introductory course of the master program of applied linguistics. The course constructed bedding settlement for the program as its name and the code has indicated. It has provided an overview of basic structure of linguistic theories regarding changes from formal to functional, cognitive to constructive and individual to social levels. The course has stressed the different understanding of second language acquisition from the learning of the mother tongue.

The ripple reflection makes one of the major assessments through the learning term. Ripple, as a crowd resourcing platform, allows students to share their knowledge creations regarding certain topics and review, comment, and adjust others’ pieces. The assessment is an ongoing one on a weekly basis requiring the students to create notes regarding the week’s topic. In addition, they need to reflect on three fellow students’ materials each week and post their evaluations. In the final stage, students are required to write a reflective essay to mark their learning process and outcomes via the creating and commenting attempts. The students need to reflect on their highest ranked creation and two other students’ work they give the most positive evaluations to.

Before the narration of difficulties encountered while involving the ongoing assignment, it’s worth of noting that the multifaceted identities of the students in the class. They accomplish the assessment both as current second language (L2) learner, and future L2 teachers. Thus, the inconsistency between theoretical understanding and theory application can lead to deficit identity construction (both mentioned identities). In the weekly basis creation and commenting, I have found it frustrated in rephrasing the theoretical knowledge and checking others’ understanding. First, it is hard to keep the information “short and precise”. When creating my own note clips, it is hard to elaborate the week’s topic via comprehensible language without excessive appealing to the original content of slides. For example, in the narration about functional approaches, though being the highest ranked clip, I only focused on the “function-to-form” (Bardovi-Harlig, 2020) mapping process yet ignored the departure of learning as “basic variety” (Klein & Perdue, 1992), and the ending point as “fossilization” (Han, 2004). I also neglected the account’s pedagogical implication in actual teaching practice. Thus, the note can hardly make a neither highly effective summary nor clarified pedagogical hint. Based on my self-reflection, this focus ex parte could be explained as a lack of holistic understanding and such insufficient understanding can cause over appealing to authority while attempting to construct a persuasive note. Thus, in the commenting process, how to give “useful” feedback becomes another concern. The language proficiency, sufficiency in understanding, illustration persuasiveness shall all be taken into consideration when giving feedback. The comments should be critical, clarified, and helpful. In this stage, the commentators are playing their identity as “future teachers”, while the creators are the L2 and linguistic theory learners. Bearing Larsen-Freeman’s (2015) complexity theory in mind, the language itself and the language learning system are adaptable, dynamic, and open to change in almost every segments. Thus, defining the creator’s flaws becomes another issue in providing feedback.

The latter part of the assessment encourages the students to reflect on and address the abovementioned issues of both knowledge creation and evaluation. In this stage, I have initiated a comprehensive retrospect of both my creation and evaluations. The functional approach, as my focus, was re-illustrated from its view on the language learners’ identity, the establishment of L2 acquisition, the function-to-form mapping process, and the destination as “fossilization”. In order to construct clearer image of the account and its hint on pedagogical methods, I have constructed a comparable model between it and the Universal Grammar theory (UG account). Communicative language teaching (CLT), as a derivation of the functional approach, is also provided for the readers to foresee what path the account is paving forward. In the evaluation part, all three factors mentioned (language proficiency, sufficiency in understanding, and illustration persuasiveness) was re-considered. In my evaluation upon Li Bingru’s material on interaction’s position in SLAT, the major focus is on the reasoning process supporting her argument while the flawed grammatical patterns are only mentioned when comprehensibility got hindered. For example, she mentioned Celce-Murcia’s (2008) four components of communicative competence, yet not develop on how interaction has helped strengthen the mentioned competences.

To conclude my gaining in the term-long assessment, it is the comprehensive ability improvement as both language and linguistics students, and future teachers. According to Matthews’ (2017) research, the ripple platform has helped raised the students’ cognition to get involved in the learning process. The commenting and evaluating is also a process of scaffolding. The experience has also hinted me a flexible teaching style in the future practice. The scaffolding can be embedded on different activities, assessments, and adaptive learning systems. The feedback giving should have a clear focus regarding certain part of communicative competence.

SLAT 7805 TAKE HOME SUMMARY QUESTIONS

This assessment is composition of six questions regarding certain issues in linguistic theories, second language acquisition, and the relevant pedagogical practices. It requires the students to mark their change of understanding about certain common issues after the learning through the term.

It is worthy of mentioning that none of the questions targets on single theories or approaches. They are more real-world like, and the solutions or answers to them should be composite as well. Thus, the questions challenged the students’ holistic understanding of the learnt theories. For example, one of the questions requires the students to explain why second language acquisition is different from the first language learning. In explaining this issue, many approaches (behaviourism account, UG account, functional account, etc) are at hands, and it should be born in mind that there is no “correct answer” but different angles in problems solving. I chose functional account as a scope to analyse the learning establishment, learning process, and the ultimate status of learning. Similarly, in explaining SLA at a social level, the students need to provide answers under the sociolinguistic framework. In explaining the issue, complexity theory (Coughlan & Duff, 1994) was introduced to redefine “grammar” not as pre-constructed sets of rules, but consolidated contingency patterns after rounds of negotiations in social interaction. Furthermore, I introduced the theory of ZPD (Zones of Proximal Development) (Wertsch, 1984) to illustrate a shift of teacher’s identity from an instructor to a more knowledgeable facilitator.

As the test’s name has indicated, the questions have provided space for students to integrate the learnt theories in establishment of their own teaching philosophy. One important notice is, though knowing the language system is open to change from almost every segment, and a provocation of paradigm shift is also frequently seen, I should not forget to implement my learnt teaching theories into real pedagogical practices. The questions of the assessment have provided joint nodes between theories and reality issues. As a teacher, I should bear in mind that the second language acquisition is a dynamic process, and “emergence” (Larsen-Freeman, 2015) is SLA’s intrinsic feature. Therefore, the teaching practices should be hinted by the learnt theories, but not fully constrained by them. Always be open to change!

References

Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2020). One functional approach to L2 acquisition. Theories

In second language acquisition, 4062. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429503986-3.

Celce-Murcia, M. (2008). Rethinking the role of communicative competence in language teaching. Intercultural Language Use and Language Learning, 41-57. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5639-0_3

Coughlan, P. & Duff, P. (1994). Same task, different activities: Analysis of a SLA. task from an Activity Theory perspective. In J. Lantolf & G. Appel (Eds.) Vygotskian Approaches to Second Language Research (pp.157-172). NJ: Ablex

Han, Z. (2004). Fossilization: Five central issues. International Journal of Applied. Linguistics, 14(2), 212-242. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1473-4192.2004.00060.x

Klein, W. (1992). The contribution of second language acquisition research. Language Learning, 48(4), 527-549. https://doi.org/10.1111/0023-8333.00057

Larsen-Freeman, D. (2017). Chapter 1. Complexity theory. Language Learning & Language Teaching, 11-50. https://doi.org/10.1075/lllt.48.02lar

Bibliography (Part 3)

Functional approach and the possible change of paradigm in TESOL:

In my teaching philosophy as a TESOL (Teaching English as Other Language) instructor, “freedom” has always been a, or maybe, the keyword.

I, as a teacher, am a strong advocator of functionalist approach.

In the second language acquisition theory, a functionalist account has settled a “liberal” background of language learning. L2 learners are no longer treated as deficit L2 users, but as more competent multi-linguals. The learning process is reshaped as “mapping process” between L1 function and L2 form. Students start their learning with the L1 function that already gained in their life and seek a corresponding form to define such function in the other languages. Thus, when L1 and L2 varies, the mapping process will be dynamic as well. This means freedom, a freedom admitting the hard-to-predict, but fully dynamic process of function-to-form mapping. In Larsen-Freeman’s (2014) words, this is a process being intrinsically complex. In my word, that there is only “change” that will never change in the SLAT process.

Freedom is reflected in the shaping and reshaping of teaching theories and paradigm. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is derived from the mentioned functional approach, and linguists start their journey trying to define what makes a major part of the “communicative competence”. We have firstly the triangle-shape model (Celce-Murcia, 1995), and its revised version of five-component one (see the picture) (Celce-Murcia, 2000). Canagarajah (2014) has put up his challenges against the basic structure of the communicative competence by a claim that the competences are in fact another face of “propositional knowledge” as they are only “product-oriented”. Thus, it will be easy to understand of his ideology of transform from “propositional knowledge” to “procedural knowledge”, which in my opinion, is more equivalent with the “mapping” process. In his redefinition of “linguistic procedural language”, language awareness stands for the humans’ intrinsic and inextricable deem to master the language function. Rhetoric sensitivity, on another hand, stresses the ability to “speak rightfully in a rightful context”. Though you can find the traces of such sensitivity in the definition as “sociolinguistic competence, strategic competence, and discourse competence”, it is being unique because of its dynamic nature. In this understanding, the teacher’s job will be to trigger the students’ sensitivity rather than help them “cumulate” certain knowledge. To take of my teaching experience in vocabulary teaching for example, I tried to trigger students’ language awareness by telling them humans language come into shape to satisfy the communication needs human society, thus it will be easy to understand the simple word made up with only a few letters may indicate something frequent to come across in daily life. They may come into shape in a very early stage of this culture’s development. The first-person pronoun “I” should be in its shape quite early. Then I ask the students to tell me if it is the mobile vehicle was invented first or its symbolic word “car” appears earlier. In this procedure, the original meaning of “car” as “goods carriers”, words with similar shape and pronunciation, such as “kart”, “karting”, “cargo” and even “wagon” will come subsequently. The explaining process can be conducted in L1, L2 or a mixture of both to promote the three components mentioned by Canagarajah (2014) as language awareness, rhetoric sensitivity, and negotiation strategies. In such way, the functional mapping process can be consciously initiated in every context of daily life, from a decoration of home to a piece of specific political news. The ultimate status as “fossilization” (Bardovi-Harlig, 2020) can be delayed as well, because the students actively search for different angels in understanding specific event, expressions, and collocations.

To end with the remark by Buddha, “all hinted instructions are like dreams, illusions, bubbles and shadows; Like a drop of water; Like a thread of thunder."