A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

328 ❘
Teaching in the disciplines
election based on some aspect of a political party’s programme) provide learners with an
explicit, content-based learning purpose in which the focus is on the message and the
achievement of the task. While not sufficient in themselves, such tasks do encourage
implicit learning of syntactical, morphological and lexical features of the target language.
The above suggests that L2 acquisition resembles L1 acquisition in a number of
important ways. However, most L2 learners clearly approach the target language with a
degree of proficiency and literacy in their L1. This means that they can use reading and
writing to help promote their L2 learning. Furthermore, they bring to the L2 learning
process a capacity for exploring grammatical forms in a conscious and explicit manner,
and are able to talk about language. These facts make L2 learning in a formal educational
setting a much more deliberate and intentional process.
The difficulty is that knowing formal rules does not by itself guarantee the ability to
formulate language which obeys these rules. This is a real problem for many learners,
especially those combining languages with other disciplines in HE: in language learning,
inductive learning processes are just as important as the more cognitive, deductive
approaches typical of many other academic disciplines, in which it often is possible to
learn things solely as a result of explicit rule teaching and error correction. Language
learning, however, is not always a conscious activity dependent on the availability of
explicit knowledge about the language and the way it functions; rather, it is the product
of a complex process of both conscious learning and the gradual, unconscious
development of an internal ability to use language naturally and spontaneously without
reference to the conscious mind.
It is the challenge of the language classroom to develop learners’ internalised linguistic
competence; that is, their implicit knowledge of and capacity for appropriate language
use, in tandem and interactively with explicit knowledge of grammatical and phonological
rules. This requires the development of an expanding body of interlocking skills through
imitation, repetition, drilling and frequent practice in extended contexts to the point
where these skills become automatic and unconscious. Little and Ushioda’s analogy with
piano playing seems most apposite in this context:
Just as the novice pianist must consciously learn finger placements and pedalling, so
the language learner must consciously learn bits of language – words and phrases,
pronunciation and patterns of intonation – that become embedded in memory and
can be accessed spontaneously.
(Little and Ushioda, 1998: 15)
Interrogating practice
• Does your current departmental practice take account of evidence from
research into second language acquisition?
• How might the department address this issue in its language curriculum?