Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): A Methodology of Bilingual Teaching. Bernd Klewitz

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СКАЧАТЬ and integrative approach towards learning processes in general is presently gaining considerable influence as the concept of Visible Learning based on the meta-analyses conducted by New Zealand’s educational researcher John Hattie.

One of the central issues remains, however, whether there are basic differences between acquiring your mother tongue (L1) and learning your second and/or foreign language (L2) and if so, how decisive these are. Apparently, L1 acquisition entails the parallel development of cultural and world knowledge and always happens successfully and effortlessly, if not automatically. Learning a foreign language, on the other hand, is perceived as being more difficult, can only be completed to a certain level, e.g. as described in the global scales of the CEF (see 4.2 and 7.2), and a nativelike competence is rarely, if at all, achieved. The language level arrived at depends, moreover, on vast individual differences, such as motivation, attitudes and types of learners and the respective contexts of societal expectations, school provisions and cultural environments. At the same type, there are certain parallels between L1 and L2 acquisition: similar mistakes occur in child- and adult-learning, for instance to-do-negations in English, syntax errors in German, fossilization in the development of the so-called interlanguage as a phase in the acquisition process that curbs learning progress or standstill as in the third-person-singular-“s” and other grammatical phenomena that deviate from the target language and seem difficult to “repair”. The answer to the question if learning L2 follows conscious (“learning”) or unconscious (“acquisition”) patterns5 depends on the learning theories operating in the background (cf. for details: Riemer 2010: 278 ff).

2.2 Behaviorism and a Black Box

      Prevalent between the 1940s and 1970s in Anglophone as well as European countries, one of the early learning theories was dominated by behaviorism claiming that learning as part of behavior occurred through interaction with the environment in a process called conditioning. New behavior/learning was simply a response to environmental stimuli. Stimuli-response behaviors were to be studied in a systematic and observable manner as opposed to internal events like thinking or emotions, expectations and motivation. In this theory the nature-versus-nurture dilemma (chapter 3) was resolved in favor of nurture with the near exclusion of innate or inherited factors. Extended to language learning, the stimulus-response system plus positive and/or negative feedback was realized by so-called pattern-drills that allowed repetition and correction but very few situational or conscious operations, never mind language awareness. Since the learner’s brain was thought of as a black box operating between stimulus and response, results of learning activities were in the focus of instruction, they were measurable and comparable. This is probably why audiolingual and audiovisual methods, the direct application of the behavioral learning theory, are still being used to gain insights into learning and language development although the theory itself has since been refuted in many details, albeit keeping some relevance—in textbooks, exercise sequences and audiolingual practice.

      The behaviorist approach maintained that all complex behavior, including language learning, was acquired from the environment, apart from a few innate reflexes and the capacity for learning, an assumption that was questioned by early Gestalt psychologists as well as later theories of cognitive development. It was the idea of machine-like human behavior that attracted much criticism and consequently a new psychology of learning and language acquisition came to the fore, including the Dutch psychologist Carel van Parreren with his theory of a dual track system (van Parreren 1960). The related Gestalt theory had already supported a concept of insight learning, meaning that people would learn most effectively by problem solving and recognizing a gestalt or organizing principle. Van Parreren, in turn, focused on the importance of perceptions and affect for the understanding of human learning. In their cognitive development learning would always be based on actions accomplished by students with the help of teachers or more knowledgeable peers. In this, van Parreren followed Vygotsky’s ideas of an educational concept, summarized in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD; cf. chapter 6 in detail). Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist active in the 1960s, had proposed his theory about the relationship between speech and thinking (Vygotsky: 1962—Thought and Language), but the study of cultural historical psychology by that time—during the Cold War—was suspect for political reasons and only later taken on by mainstream scientists like Jerome Bruner and his concept of Scaffolding (see chapter 6.9).

2.3 The Universal Grammar and Noam Chomsky

      As part of cognitive psychology, van Parreren focused on the problem of interference in learning processes, especially the relationship between two languages (L1 and L2) in language acquisition. Contrary to recent research results, where more complex distinctions are discussed, such as positive and negative interferences as well as inferences, his assumption of the mental dual track system posited that the linkage of two systems, in this case of two languages, would cause detrimental effects. Especially if languages were characterized by similarities in structure and lexis, there would be negative effects: one linguistic element (from L1) would influence another one (from L 2), because students would tend to create a cognitive linkage between related elements. Foreign language teaching, as a follow-through, needed to aim at preventing connections between mother tongue and foreign language(s), which would support convergence processes rather than facilitating correct and sustainable learning results. Mental tracks of the foreign language system would assimilate with the mother tongue elements and the “clumping factor” of similar elements would connect otherwise disjoined tracks of L1 and L2. Van Parreren explains this process of homogenizing when originally separated mental tracks are merged into one system (clumping factor). This is why the explicit separation of L1 and L2 should be encouraged and even safeguarded by avoiding tangency between the two linguistic systems to limit the interlingual transfer, predominantly seen as negative by the Dutch researcher and his school of cultural historical psychology.

      Despite the differences in learning and language theories, language acquisition as a mere act of imitation appeared less and less convincing and the abandonment of behaviorism in the teaching community—or the greater majority—was encouraged by competing explanations of the role of innate or native dispositions in L2 learning. The paradigm of generative SLA, based on the concept of a Universal Grammar (UG) was already developed by Noam Chomsky and his school in the 1950s to 1960s. Following the Poverty of Stimulus (POS) the existence of a UG was deemed to explain why children—despite a limited input of language models—were able to develop linguistic structures that they could not have experienced in their own surroundings. This is what Chomsky analyzed as the logic L1 problem with the conclusion that there was every reason to argue in favor of an innate UG—meaning a cognitively language-specific endowment (“endowment” as a figure of speech will reappear in dealing with the LMC and its meaning for childhood bilingualism).

      UG, believed to be an innate or native mechanism, would be described as the product of a specialized language organ in the human brains, a faculty dedicated to the mastering of language. The plausibility of linguistic nativism was not only supported by the above-mentioned POS but also by the everyday observation that infants and children develop their language almost effortlessly and successfully even in the absence of a caretaker’s formal instruction and active attempts to correct their children’s grammar. According to Chomsky, UG as a mental module would thus solve the problem of how children—and language learners in general for that matter—could acquire and/or learn the complex syntactic and semantic rules necessary to put together sentences and communicate just by sole exposure to the language(s) spoken around them. This faculty or mental module would also constitute your linguistic competence, but a lot more additional knowledge would be needed to enable language performance, in other words actual language use with all its limitations like the previously mentioned TOT as a case in point. As a nativist mechanism, it would be triggered off at contact with the mother tongue and develop its own dynamics; whether the same or a similar process is working or at least influential in L2 acquisition has been СКАЧАТЬ