Notable quotes:
“Total commitment, total involvement, a total physical, intellectual, and emotional response are necessary” to successfully send a receive messages in a second language. It’s a gargantuan task that requires powerful dedication on the part of the student. Some of that a student may bring to class, but it’s largely up to the teacher to keep that alive.
“Few if any people achieve fluency in a foreign language solely within the confines of the classroom.” That’s important knowledge for a teacher, because, though the classroom is their domain, there are ways of reaching beyond the classroom, or bringing the outside world into the classroom.
The teaching process is essentially “the facilitation of learning.” Though I’ve read that a thousand times before, it’s important for me to remind myself. We’re not trying to be gods and heroes, and we don’t know everything, but we can give students tools (and hopefully inspiration) to acquire English.
Another quotation I really liked was from another Brown: Roger, in 1966:
“Psychologists find it exciting when a complex mental phenomenon — something intelligent and slippery — seems about to be captures by a mechanical model. We yearn to see the model succeed. But when, at the last minute, the phenomenon proves too much for the model and darts off on some uncapturable tangent, there is something in us that rejoices at the defeat.”
To which H. Douglas Brown adds, “We can rejoice in our defeats because we know that it is the very elusiveness of the phenomenon of SLA that makes the quest for answers so exciting. Our field of inquiry is no simple, unidimensional reality. It is ‘slippery’ in every way.”
I find those remarks inspiring, because I love the idea of doing something for which there is no one right way, something that is difficult and challenging yet allows windows for success (often through imagination) and something that is ever-changing.
A few other things I found interesting. He says a definition is really just a condensed form of a theory, and a theory is just an expanded definition. I don’t know why that jumped out at me. I like little semantic games like that, I guess.
Along the same path where “teacher as facilitator” stands is the educational psychologist’s defintion of “learning”: a change in an individual caused by experience.” The idea that one isn’t just stuffing another’s head full of rote material, but instead is simply empowering them to figure things out, makes teaching seem like a good thing to do. And at this point, I still have no idea if I ever do want to teach, or if I’d be good at it. As an extension of this concept, he describes the interrelationship between teaching and learning as “teaching is… learning stood on its head.” I confess I don’t exactly know what that means, but it’s a useful concept: looking at the same thing from top or bottom.
The chapter continues with summaries of the main SLA theories over time, and is a good resource should I need a quick review.
One last quote that Brown cites, from Mitchell and Vidal (2001). Rather than looking at SLA theories over the past century as a pendulum that swings between opposites (accuracy v. fluency, separation v. integration of skills, teacher- v. learner-centered approaches…), it is useful to think of theoretical evolution as “that of a major river, constantly flowing, fe by many sources of water — rivers, streams, springs in remote territories, all fed by rain on wide expanses of land.”