On Discourse, Communication, and Fundamental Concepts in SLA Research

Before I finally finished reading the whole article, I couldn’t imagine what I regarded simply and direct way of teaching and learning containing several theories, ideologies and thoughts concerning psychology. I was really surprised and excited about the process of purchases so many significant concepts and methods of the field I researching in. Just like the author says SLA research broadening the traditional SLA data base. In fact, it did the same thing to me; the article helps me exploring the field of SLA.

For me, this long article is a really hard target to achieve. But it is true that I gain a lot from it. First of all, from the very beginning of the passage, I have a crystal clear impression of the two views of SLA, cognitive and mechanistic orientations and social and contextual orientation. It is true that as foreign speakers, we have to struggle for the meaning of words and sentences. I think the speakers are naturally becoming the defective speakers during the learning journey, but I want to claim that these have no relationship with the capability of the communicative competence. Since the leading status of the view of cognitive and mentalistic, the article has sought to argue for a reconceptualization of SLA that would significantly enlarge the ontological and empirical parameters of the field and dissolve the imbalance of them.

Reading the article, just like a revision of the linguistic history. In the “DISCOURSE AND COMMUNICATION” part, there comes so many linguists and their predominant views, assumptions show up while I was trying really hard to recognize and remember them all. The linguist tycoon, Chomsky shows up first, which gives me some hope of understanding the article, because I met somebody I knew before. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Later on, after I read several lines of his assumptions, I come across with formalistic, context free, grammatical competence. I was really confused about all these concepts. But by Hymes’s concept of communicative competence, a more social and contextual view of language rooted in my mind. According to Gregg’s views, more concepts added to my mind: acquisition is an individual phenomenon which rooted in humans mind and brain.

In the part COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES, the exact example of a CS occurs. It illustrates how the interlanguage communication happens. It is an example between one native speaker and one nonnative speaker. And two factors I understand from it are (a) when FS have the difficulties to express by using the foreign language they will choose some familiar words which they regard as the same meaning with their native language and (b) the misunderstanding of the key words may not be the problem of the communication between the two speakers.

I think people born with capability of communicative competence no matter what language they obtain. We Chinese students put too much effort on the grammar and exercise and the test! We lost the truth of the learning and missed the joy of acquisition another culture. So it seems the imbalance is everywhere, I really hope the study of TESOL will help solving the problem and do contribution to my further teaching.