Good news about our nascent Comenius link with the Institution Saint Louis (our exchange school), plus schools from Romania and Spain. Our initial planning meeting is in France on January 14th and 15th. This is a second Comenius link for Ripon Grammar School following a previous project with schools from Norway, Germany and Poland. The British Council seem to award their funds at the last moment, but we are up and running. An art teacher, Fiona Henson, is doing the paperwork, whilst members of the MFL department and maybe others will be doing the travelling. Should be semi-chaotic fun.
For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought. ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).
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