What is SLA research good for, anyway?

This opening plenary with Lourdes Ortega looks at the benefits of second language acquisition research.

Date
Duration
1 hour

About the talk

In my nearly 20 years of being a second language acquisition (SLA) researcher, I have met many language teachers who told me learning about SLA really shifted their thinking about their teaching practice and their approach to teaching.

I have, however, also spotted many baffled or dismayed faces of language teachers, who just couldn’t believe what SLA had to say (or how little it had to say) about some of their most urgent classroom questions. Many professional development efforts focus on familiarizing teachers with the latest trends in SLA research. But why should language teachers care?

In this talk, I want to show new ways of seeing the relationship between research and teaching, from the perspective of a down-to-earth SLA researcher.

First and foremost, research is about generating useful information for some community, of which the most important one is language teachers. A good example is motivation, an area where SLA researchers have sought, and mostly succeeded, to turn empirical evidence into knowledge that can make the lives of language teachers better.

Often, findings from SLA need a large amount of contextualization and critical professional translation before they can be of use in actual local classroom contexts. A good case in point is research on error correction, which has yielded contradictory and fragmentary findings thus far. But the best research is about generating knowledge without which we would see the world of language teaching differently. Like discovering that the earth is round, not flat. Here, age and multilingualism are two areas in which SLA has a lot to offer to teachers.

My goal is to provide tools for thinking about research and teaching as imperfectly and not always obviously compatible perspectives that can enrich the professional lives of language teachers and researchers alike – but only when a delicate balance between idealism and pragmatism is struck.

About the speaker

Lourdes Ortega is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her main area of expertise is in second language acquisition, and she is committed to investigating what it means to become a bilingual or multilingual language user later in life in ways that can encourage connections between research and teaching and promote social justice. Before moving to the USA in 1993, she taught Spanish as a foreign language at the Cervantes Institute in Athens, Greece, and English as a second language in Hawaii and Georgia, USA. She has published widely and her books include Understanding Second Language Acquisition (2009, translated into Mandarin in 2016), and Technology-mediated TBLT (with Marta Gonzalez-Lloret, John Benjamins, 2014). She is currently busy finishing The Handbook of Bilingualism for Cambridge University Press (with Annick De Houwer).

Comments

Submitted by Jason Jixun M… on Thu, 04/26/2018 - 11:56

Lourdes Ortega has given us a very world-wide scope of researches-report in terms of the relationship between SLA researchers and SLA Pedagogic teachers, the factors they can benefit each other, the role's interaction & transformation between each other, and some existing problems. She concluded them into three categories - motivation, error correction and the diversity of languages (multilingualism). In a brief sentence, researchers usually told the procedure of knowledge-forming from root reasonably; but teachers would like to teach knowledge as facts to the students. Nowadays, the boundary between each other, depending on the demands of educational practices, has been continuously fuzzy and easily crossing. It was all serving for students' individual developments and the inheritance of subject's knowledge generations after generations, through the language, such as English, bilingualism and multilingualism... 'Working well' in classrooms and life would be a basic standard to test. Further discussions have also been addressed for future.

Submitted by Tamer Osman on Wed, 04/11/2018 - 14:50

1- To recap the content of the plenary, I conclude that teaching languages is a complex process. That is absolutely negative attitude. Teachers have to approach all the teaching methodologies that could make the teaching process successful. Many teachers, especially new teachers, can easily surrender to such an attitude, and accordingly, they will never gain any desirable results out of their teaching process. Teachers of languages should always put basics for their teaching plan while considering vital elements: tracing the cultural background of their students, targeting their academic needs, address their mentalities. If these basics are fulfilled , teachers can make the teaching process uncomplicated. 2- There is a misspelt word in one of the PPT slides: ' Thruth of Matter' . It should have been ' Truth of Matter'.

Submitted by lirui on Tue, 04/10/2018 - 23:01

Hi, I can't find any live streaming function available on this site. It seems it only record video session.

Hello Lirui If you want to watch the talks live you can find them here: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/events/IATEFL-Online/2018 - you can find which talks are being streamed on that page too. You will need to click on the play button. You will be able to watch recordings of the talks after they have finished, as on this page. Hope that helps and that you are enjoying the conference. Best wishes, Cath TE Team

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