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Research on second and foreign language acquisition has been conducted during the past
thirty years from various theoretical perspectives, focussing on multiple factors, cognitive and
social. Lately, several attempts have been made to describe developmental routes and stages in
the L2 acquisition process. They mainly consist of lists of morphosyntactic means pertaining to
the noun phrase, to the verb phrase, and to the clause, that are mastered by learners at given
stages for a specific L1. SLA research has also been devoted to classroom discourse and teaching
activities during the past years. Yet, the relevance of SLA research for second or foreign language
teaching is regularly questioned. This conference aims at a dialogue between researchers in
language acquisition and language pedagogy over grammar, the lexicon, pragmatics, and
discourse.
This conference invites SLA researchers and those involved in research on second language
pedagogy to examine their findings in terms of its relevance for language teaching.
Proposals that include specific interest for language teaching are expected. They will focus on the
learning of L2 (or L3, L4 or Lx) grammar, lexicon, pragmatics, and discourse in classroom or
guided settings. The mode of implication of teachers and learners during the SLA research
process shall also be discussed from the angle of the impact of the research design on teaching
activity and, conversely, from the angle of the intricate relation between teaching and researching.
Proposals are expected to fit in one of the following sections :
A. Discourse practices and grammatical marking: teaching and learning
In this section, shall be discussed the relations between grammatical markers, lexicon and the
learners' discourse practices. The learnability of discourse, of macrosyntactic patterns and of the
grammatical markers of the target language shall be examined as well as the order of acquisition
of different L2 forms and of different functions for a given form. The teachability of
macrosyntactic structures and of grammatical markers in their specific context shall also be
discussed.
B. L2 development, curriculum design, pedagogical grammars and testing
Contributions which bear on the use of research findings in SLA to design teaching and testing
materials will be selected for this section. The focus will be on the analysis of curriculum design
and of teaching activities that are organized to enhance and facilitate the input-intake process.
Theoretical constructs involved in course and class design shall be discussed.
C. Research design and teaching tasks and activities in L2 learning
The design of data collection for SLA research may foster or develop L2 classroom
learning. This workshop is devoted to methodological and theoretical issues related to the
organization of data gathering and other experimental tasks of SLA research in relation to
learners and teachers, and teaching activities in institutional settings.
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