The Art of Teaching Spanish: Second Language Acquisition from Research to Praxis

3 Spanish SLA Research, Classroom Practice, and Curriculum Design

3 Spanish SLA Research, Classroom Practice, and Curriculum Design Joseph Collentine Northern Arizona University T he study of second language acquisition (SLA) and its pedagogical practices for fosteringlearner development are underscored by theoretical premises that reflect both general learning theory and SLA-specific theories. While there is overlap in terms of the basic premises of the theories and their implications for Spanish educators (e.g., constructivism and sociocultural theory), each has uniquely contributed to investigative and instructional practices. In considering the lines of theoretical and applied research that prevail in SLA(and related fields), three general strands impact how we design both our curriculum from the beginning to more advanced levels and individual sequences/tasks. The consideration of curriculum design issues along with (particular) task design issues necessitates an understanding of not only how Spanish educators establish the linguistic and sociolinguistic foundations of communicative competence but also how we promote advanced communicative abilities. The lines of research are (1) the generallearning theory of constructivism , (2) psycholinguistics and cognition, and (3) social and sociocultural cognition. 1.0 Constructivism Up until the late 1970s, the traditional learning theory that informed curricular and classroom practices was objectivism, which assumes that the essential elements of instruction are communication and deduction. The objectivist approach to education supposes that new knowledge is delivered to learners. Once a construct has been (properly) explained to learners,they are to infer its application to both concrete and abstract phenomena. In many educational settings this approach to instruction is termed teacher-centered education (cf. Shane 1986). The cognitive code method is one of the best examples of the manifestation of objectivist principles of learning in the second and foreign languageclassroom. This method normallyencourages teachers to present grammar rules to students in the clearest fashion and allow for ample, controlled practice; the premise is that once this information becomes catalogued in learners' minds, they—helped by their powerful, innate language-processingabilities (Boey 1975)—will be able to extrapolate the applications of those rules (Chastain 1969). Textbooks contained exhaustive descriptions of, say,the uses of par and para, which were followed by largely decontextualized practice items in which students were to infer which preposition was most appropriate. In the 1980s constructivism—the theoretical antithesis of objectivism—became increasingly important in dialogues on educational practice, as researchers brought 39 40 Collentine forth studies showing the benefits of taking into account a learner's background knowledge (Ausubel 1968) and the importance of linguistic negotiations (be it with peers in group activities or instructors in Socratic discussions/lessons; Bruner 1996) on knowledge development. This paradigm shift proposed that learners must be active agents in the knowledge acquisition processing, building new stores on top of and in relationship to their linguistic, encyclopedic, and experiential knowledge stores to acquire new knowledge (McGroarty 1998; Spivey 1997).As agents they must explore new concepts from multiple perspectives to increase the likelihood that their previous knowledge stores interface with how they uncover new concepts.Reading tasks began to incorporate advanced organizers to maximize comprehension and facilitate the acquisition of vocabulary.Problem-solving tasks began to emerge inlesson plans, in which, for instance, learnerswere to design and present a synthesis of the week's important news items in Spanish. If one broadly interprets the constructivist movement as a shift to viewing the learner as an agent rather than a recipient of knowledge, we see the context in which Krashen essentially translates a constructivist model of reading to the PL classroom, postulating that acquisition will result from listening-comprehension and reading activities that are interesting to learners (i.e., for which they have background knowledge ) and are a bit beyond their current level of development (i.e., i + 1 input with which the learner can add to what he or she alreadyknows). Additionally,proficiencybased approaches to instruction (stemming from the assessment role of the Oral Proficiency Interview,or OPI) stressed the importance of interpersonal communication . It became less important that a student could describe a grammatical construct; rather, the recognition that acquisition stems from agency coincided with the widespread incorporation of assessment measures (such as the OPI and the popularity of role-play "oral exams") that gauged whether a learner could employ that (or like) constructs (Kramsch 1986). At this time, role-play activities began to replace oral tasks that only entailed a question-answer format. Constructivist tenets of knowledge development probably continue to be so pervasive in second language education because, even in general learning theory, language skills (i.e., syntactic...