VanPatten, Introduction - p. 55
Introduction: VanPatten's introduction to From Input to Output discusses the history of SLA research while posing the question, "How does acquisition of a second language occur?" He introduces the reader to early theories of SLA, including behaviorism, popular in the 1950s and 60s, and the Audiolingual Method (ALM), which was adopted from the Army. Finally, researchers decided that making mistakes while learning a second language is ok, and that input and output are vital to learning a second language. I was totally unfamiliar with all of this background, so I was glad that VanPatten decided to include it. His presentation of the background of SLA research backed up his decision to use a psycholinguistic approach in writing his book (focusing on the "internal processes of acquisition and their relationships to the products of acquisition"). I also liked that he began his introduction by noting that this book is not going to answer questions about exactly how one should teach a second language, since I think a lot of teachers who may not have had specific SLA training would look to the book for just that.
Chapter 1: This chapter begins with a discussion of foreign language context vs. second language context, which I found very interesting. I considered how my SLA changed from a foreign language context to a second language context when I switched from studying Spanish in classrooms for 9 years to living in Valencia for 5 months. VanPatten's statement that "a second language context may also be differentiated by whether there is instruction or not." While in Spain, I never had any rigid grammar or composition or even conversation instruction; instead, just learning to fully function and communicate at home with my host madre seemed to be the best language acquisition tool I'd ever been introduced to. It's unfortunate that in most secondary schools, students won't have an opportunity to be as immersed in a language as we were while abroad.
Van Patten discusses implicit linguistic systems, and offers several example sentences and words to test the reader's implicit system in English. He is right: while I was able to identify the sentences that were incorrect, I couldn't explain why they were wrong most times. I also was very impressed that students with a relatively small amound of classroom instruction in a second language demonstrated an implicit lingusitic system as well. Van Patten discusses the processes of input, accomodation, restructuring, and output. I wish that someone had pointed out to one of my high school Spanish teachers that SLA is dynamic but SLOW: it's wise of VanPatten to remind teachers of that. It's also encouraging that he notes that most students never reach native-like competence.
Chapter 2: In the second chapter, VanPatten thoroughly discusses the process of input: the "language that a learner hears (or reads) that has some kind of communicative intent." Input must be comprehensible if students are to benefit from it. This seems pretty self-explanatory--who could learn something they can't comprehend at all?--but I'm sure that somewhere, some foreign language teacher needs to be reminded of it. Input can be conversational or non conversational; I'd never considered formal lectures as nonconversational before, but VanPatten does make a valid point that there are rarely conversations occuring in huge lectures (at least not that the professor is involved with or aware of). I really liked the author's assertation that learning ABOUT a language is NOT language learning; that's something else that I think a lot of teachers need to be reminded of at the secondary level. VanPatten also discusses various processes involved with input, including working memory and prefabricated patterns. His use of the Spanish, French, German, and Japanese example sentences was a creative way to demonstrate a learner's instince to look for recognizable words when being exposed to an unfamiliar language. VanPatten asserts that foreigner talk can contribute to the way that L2 learners speak, which is very interesting--usually an L1 speaker considers themselves to be helpful when speaking differently to foreigners, but it seems to maybe not be the best way to expose L2 learners to proper grammar. I did think that after 2 pages of discussing redundancy, VanPatten's thoughts on the subject became redundant.
Chapter 3: This chapter discusses the developing system: the ever-changing linguistic system in the mind of an L2 learner.The developing system is compared to an airline company to demonstrate its extreme complexity. VanPatten uses lots of diagrams to demonstrate networks of forms and lexical items; while he does offer good explanations for these charts, I found them a little bit confusing at first. They definitely took a little bit of time to understand and fully comprehend. I was glad he included the hierarchical sentence structure explanation; I still feel like I learned more about English grammar from learning a second language, and things like adjectival phrases sometimes aren't at the top of my memory. I had never considered pragmatic competence; it is certainly L1 learners take for granted, and it is rarely used in SLA settings, where teachers seem more intent on getting a direct answer to their questions most of the time. Implicational hierarchy and restructuring were also concepts that I never learned in an English class, and had never been formally been introduced to until reading VanPatten. The author's assertation that "restructuring happens outside of awareness" is interesting: he's absolutely correct that our brains never really stop to consider how learned L2 patterns change until we realize that we're used to saying something differently than before. That was something a lot of us noticed in Spain: suddenly, we were using different phrases regularly that we'd never been introduced to before we got to Valencia, and nobody really remembered specifically learning them.
Richard-Amato, p. 155-167
Chapter 8 begins Part II of the Richard-Amato book, and focuses on methods and activities that L2 teachers can utilize help their students acquire a second language. In the introduction to Part II (p. 155-6), the author notes that methods are strategies and techniques that accompany a theory, and that while teachers always want to know about useful methods to teach languages, they shouldn't always stick to the same methods every single year. I like that she notes that not all methods or activities are appropriate for all students or classes, and that a teacher should know his or her students and try to best match a teaching method to their learning style.
In chapter 8, Richard-Amato discusses the Total Physical Response method: getting students actively and physically involved in learning a language. TPR was first recommended as a teaching method in the 1960s by James Asher, who believed that "the cognitive process of language acquisition is synchronized with and partially facilitated by the movements of the body." In TPR, students can make mistakes and really only have to speak a lot after roughly 10 hours of instruction--or whenever THEY are comfortable being vocal in a classroom. This, I think, would help a lot of students learn a language better--it always seemed like, in high school, there were 1 or 2 kids that were so terrified of being called on to speak that they just cowered in their seats and didn't absorb any of the lesson. TPRs begin fairly simply and grow in complexity. Studies have demonstrated that students who learned through TPR lessons learned languages as well as, if not better than, students who learned through rigid traditional classroom instruction. Richard-Amato then offers several example TPRs. I thought that bouncing the ball, working with shapes, and following recipes all sound like fun ways to teach a language, and are the kind of lessons many students seem to enjoy. Personally, I would have LOVED the dress the paper doll lesson, and I'd like to teach it, since I'd get to make a giant paper doll and lots of paper doll clothes. However, I'm not sure that many male high schoolers would enjoy that activity as much as I would. In fact, the girls might not have as much fun as I would, either. I was more drawn to the TPR method than the audio-motor unit method, because I always got a little bit bored as a student when we had to listen to disembodied voices on tapes giving arbitrary commands. Also, Kalivoda, Morain, and Elkins suggest that audio-motor units should supplement a larger program "which, unfortunately, they do not describe." It would have been helpful if they'd elaborated on that thought more. I also don't like that audio-motor units are dependant on technology, which frequently breaks, and which I am not particularly good at.
