Practice or Practise

3 Key excerpts on "Practice or Practise"

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  eBook - PDF

  Teaching Languages to Adolescent Learners

  From Theory to Practice

  • Rosemary Erlam, Jenefer Philp, Diana Feick(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The challenge for the language teacher, then, is how, in the classroom, to compensate for this lack of opportunities. Why Practise? To answer our first question as to why practice might be useful in the language classroom, we need to understand something of skill acquisition Why practise? How to practise? How much practice? theory (Carlson, 2003), first used within the area of cognitive psychology to explain general learning processes. Skill Acquisition Theory Skill acquisition theory explains how learners might proceed from basic to more advanced proficiency in a given skill. DeKeyser (1998, 2007) has found this theory useful to explain how language learners, over time and with practice, become more proficient until eventually they may be able to produce language without thinking explicitly about the language they are using. This theory helps us under- stand why repetitive practice of a skill helps develop mas- tery. It is fundamental to many of the abilities we develop, from learning to eat, tying a shoelace, learning to read and write, playing an instrument, learning to play a sport, riding a bicycle, and driving a car. Our early attempts are clumsy and full of errors, but we can achieve a measure of mastery through trying over and over again. The same applies to language learning. Classroom language learners often first depend on ‘declarative knowledge’ when something is new to them (see Figure 6.1 for a summary of the processes of skill acquisition theory). That is, they depend on information but are unable to make use of that knowl- edge yet. For example, they might have information about, and even be able to explain, how past action is expressed in a particular language, but they are not able to use this knowledge to communicate about past action.

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  (Re)defining Success in Language Learning

  Positioning, Participation and Young Emergent Bilinguals at School

  • Katie A. Bernstein(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  is. In a theory of human activity as practice, ways of speaking are just as much a part of the habitus as ways of walking or believing. A person’s primary linguistic habitus develops through participation in the field of the family and continues to form through participation in other fields, such as school. Just as a match between habitus and social field produces practices perfectly adapted to that field, a match between linguistic habitus and social field produces language practices to the same effect, giving speakers a feeling of ease and fluency. This phenomenon was shown in the work of Shirley Brice Heath (1983) and Sarah Michaels (1981), who contrasted the easy experiences of White middle-class children starting school, having language that ‘matched’ that of the classroom, with the confusing and frustrating experience of starting school as a Black working-class student, whose language practices were mismatched with what Bourdieu called the ‘legitimate language’ of the market. According to Bourdieu, when a speaker finds herself with language unsuited for the market, she must either exert immense effort to either control her language or simply be silenced, like some of the Black children that Michaels (1981) studied.

  Viewing language as social practice has three implications in this project:

  (1) Because linguistic practice emerges as an interaction between habitus and field, a given utterance might work perfectly well to accomplish a social action for one person in one context, but it might be ignored in a different context, or even in the same context but in the mouth of another speaker.

  (2) Because practice emerges as an interaction between habitus and field, people with a multilingual habitus interacting in a multilingual field will produce multilingual practices. (3) Because the habitus is embodied, so too are a person’s practices, including language practices. I address each in turn.

  Linguistic Practice is Social Action

  In a theory of practice, ‘the all-purpose word of the dictionary, a product of the neutralization of the practical relations within which it functions, has no social existence’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 34). Speakers and listeners bring with them the whole social structure in which they participate, so that while anyone can technically say anything – a student can command his teacher to sit down, a teacher can say, ‘We only speak English here!’ – whether those words are obeyed or laughed at or even heard is another question. Thus, in this work, I am interested in both what students learn of the stable, codified system of English, as well as what they can do with it, in real time.

  In order to study language as social practice, that is, to understand what Kritika, Padma, Rashmi and Hande learned to do with English, I draw on the notion of speech acts. In his 1975 book, How to Do Things With Words, philosopher of language, John Austin, proposed that utterances like, ‘I pronounce you man and wife’ or ‘I apologize,’ create change in the world, rather than simply conveying information about it. Austin called these utterances performatives, because they perform an action. He wrote that each performative could, for the purposes of analysis, be broken into three parts. First, the performative’s locutionary form1 consists of the words themselves (for example, a preschool student pronounces the words, ‘More milk’). Second, the performative’s illocutionary force is what is being carried out in saying the words (i.e. the student is making a request). Finally, the performative’s perlocutionary effect is the result, or what happens by saying the words (perhaps that the teacher brings milk to the student). Austin argued that performative utterances, such as commands, pronouncements, requests or promises, cannot be true or false but are, instead, felicitous (they work) or infelicitous

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  Handbook of Foreign Language Communication and Learning

  • Karlfried Knapp, Barbara Seidlhofer, Karlfried Knapp, Barbara Seidlhofer(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  1. Introduction Developing foreign language communication: Principles and practices Karlfried Knapp, Barbara Seidlhofer and Henry Widdowson Although other volumes in this series make it abundantly clear that the scope of applied linguistics ranges widely over many kinds of language experience, it is a matter of historical fact that its name first became established as an area of en-quiry concerned with the acquisition and use of foreign languages, particularly of English. Indeed, in the minds of many people applied linguistics is still pre-dominantly associated with issues in foreign language pedagogy, and especially with the teaching of English as a foreign or other language. Over recent years, as the scope of applied linguistics has extended, and its socio-political significance been more fully recognised, this narrower definition of applied linguistics is no longer seen as appropriate, and has at times been deplored. But just as it would be a mistake to confine applied linguistics to its traditional concerns, so it would be a mistake to disregard or undervalue the extensive theory and research into foreign language education and pedagogy that has been carried out in its name. Issues relating to the learning and use of languages other than one’s own have become of increasing importance in this present era of globalisation and inter-national communication and so although this is only one area of applied lin-guistic activity, with no claim to priority over any other, it remains an area of crucial significance, with its relevance to everyday life undiminished, and if anything increased. The purpose of this volume is to represent how thinking and research have developed in this area of foreign language communication and learning.

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