Hi Whizzes!

So, this blog begins the blog series on the SIX PRINCIPLES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Any and all language educators should base their practices on these six principles! 

PRINCIPLE ONE

As you might already know, I am grateful to a man named Bill VanPatten. He distills all the research on language acquisition and feeds it to humans in digestible and also fun little bites🍢 🍡🍬. His book, While We're On the Topic: BVP on Language, Acquisition, and Classroom Practice, is seminal. Highly recommend. In it, he expounds on the Six Principles of Language Acquisition, which any educator wanting to facilitate language acquisition should be intimately familiar with. Starting with this Memo, I am going to go over the six, starting with number One (phew, not backwards, this time).

Each principle is informed by decades of research, yet they are all accessible and understandable. The first principle deals with the nature of communication. In his long career, VanPatten ran across many teachers who claimed to teach communicatively, but when he asked them what their definition of communication was, they were stumped.🫒 He also ran into teachers who claimed to use “the Communicative Method” (there is no such thing).🧄

Teaching Communicatively Implies a Definition of Communication.

Communication is the expression, interpretation, and sometimes negotiation of meaning in a given context. What is more, communication is also purposeful.

Unless learners and facilitators are constantly engaged in the above, that learning environment cannot be called communicative. Memorization is not communicative. Role plays are not communicative. Grammar drills are not communicative. Grammar explanations are not communicative. 

Context is a powerful dimension of any communicative event. Context constrains (limits, affects, restricts) how people communicate.

Learning this specific definition of communication (not that I had one before learning this one), has actually helped not just re: language acquisition but re: life. I cannot mention how many times it comes to mind, because indeed for two or more humans to communicate and actually understand each other requires:

🥝 constant negotiation of meaning

Sometimes this is too exhausting and people end up:

🍅 giving up

Goodness knows how, being an INFJ introvert, I often like to skip human contact altogether, avoiding the EXHAUSTING constant negotiation of meaning that communicating requires. Argh!!! 

Constanza Ontaneda

your own personal Language Acquisition Witch

My question today is: 

❤️‍🔥What is your experience of COMMUNICATION, re: language acquisition, but also re: life?