Atkinson Theory SLA (2002)

7/31/2019 Atkinson Theory SLA (2002)

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Socio Cognitive Theory of Second Language Acquisition (SLA)(Dwight Atkinson, 2002)

“People use language to act in and on their social worlds: to convey, construct, and perform,among other things, ideas, feelings, actions, identities, and simple (but crucial) passing

acknowledgments of the existence of other human beings”.

Language is a social practice, a social accomplishment, a social tool . All language is language in

use, to the degree that we are cognitively predisposed to learn and use language, it is because as asocial tool it allowed those who originally took advantage of it (in however rudimentary a form) an

edge in survival over those who did not. And language as a species-wide capability continues to

yield multiple advantages to human beings. Several Linguistics investigators had reduced language

to something just purely grammatical or semantical, ignoring the social part of it.

Beyond grammar, a brief sampling of phenomena which socially-oriented linguists have attempted

to account for

1. Politeness, identity, and presentation of self. A major use of language is to negotiate and

maintain relationships between people. This includes its central role in presenting and

performing identities , or socially expressive versions of the self

2. Perspective taking and contextualization cueing. All language in use incorporates markers

of how it is to be interpreted3. Turn-taking, participation structures, and opportunity structures. The mechanisms and

ideologies by which participation in language activity is socially apportioned are central to the

notion of language as a social phenomenon

New- borns are actively inducted into “languaging” (Becker, 1988) from day one, or almostcertainly before (Foster, 1990; Locke, 1993, 1995). This is not to suggest that infants are not

cognitively predisposed to language-related phenomena — to human voices and faces, such

cognitive potentials are realized in (and such dynamic actors supported by) extremely rich,

nurturing social activities and contexts.

Cognitive predispositions toward learning and using language are clearly also present at the

beginning of life — infants truly do seem to come equipped with either linguistic protoknowledgealready built in, or cognitive systems primed to learn an amazing amount linguistically in a short

time.

While social interaction may give the learner the “best” data work with, the brain in turn

must work out a fitting and relevant model of the input.

Methodological implications

The insertion principle: Efficacious learning of a new complex system is a process involving

socially supported and scaffolded insertion into an activity that one does not yet understand.

The routine principle: Early insertion into an activity one does not yet understand requires that the

activity be to a certain extent repeated and routinized

The public principle: The meanings of the parts of new systems, whether words, visual symbols,

actions, or objects must initially be rendered public and overt, so that the learner can see the

connection between the signs and their interpretations.

The context-variability principle: In learning the parts of a new system, the learner will initially tie

meanings to specific contexts or experiences. Appreciating wider meaning is a matter of having

multiple experiences, not (just) learning “general rules.”














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Documents

Atkinson Theory SLA (2002)