Although the Firth and Wagner article was both difficult to read and understand, I can gather that it divides native speakers from non-native speakers, learner from user, and target language from interlanguage. They pose very interesting questions about other dichotomies that need to be further researched.
I found this one to be the most interesting.
4. Purity versus hybridity: Are languages separated
from each other, even at the most abstract level of
grammatical form? And how do they associate with
other symbol systems and modalities of communication?
(Khubchandani, 1997; Makoni, 2002).
I related this back to the question of which language do you think in? When you read in your L2 does it transfer back to your L1 as you read, or does it stay in the L2 the whole time? Same goes for writing.
It is to my understanding that Canadarajah was asking if we can raise our students' awareness of their communication strategies, attitudes and linguistic identities. Researchers are aware that English is one of the fastest growing languages and is a main source of communication in multilingual contexts. This article talks about English Lingua Franca, which is exactly what I just said. It is a process of accommodation, and defined as any language that is widely used as a means of communication among speakers of other languages.
LFE is based on interaction. On page 925 of Canadarajah (speaking about ELF) it says, "Speakers are able to monitor each other's language proficiency to determine the mutually appropriate grammar, phonology, lexical range, and pragmatic conventions that would insure intelligibility."
Everything that we have read about is coming together, especially the importance of dynamic and interactive learning. SLA speakers need interaction in order to communicate efficiently, accommodate, and learn about the culture they want to assimilate into.
Katie,
ReplyDeleteI would have to agree that the articles were a bit difficult to read. I like how you aid that SLA speakers need interaction in order to communicate efficiently, accommodate and learn about the culture they want to assimilate to. It seems as if we are being taught about all these theories and what we should use in our classroom, depending on each student, but technically, we are assimilating them into the Lingua Franca. I believe we should definitely let SLA speakers communicate with others and learn about other cultures while they are learning English. We have to give them some choice in the matter...
I "third" (can I make that a verb?) that these articles were hard to read! I really like the questions at the beginning of the article also -- the one the peaked my interest was the relevance of pragmatic vs. gramatical competence! Furthermore, I would agree that even though this article was intense, it did wrap up some of the concepts that we have been studying.
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