Pendant les vacances de février nous avons l'habitude d'aller à Puyravault, mais cette année ça va changer. Elspeth doit assister à un congrès à Washington DC, alors on va passer une semaine ensemble à Washington et New York. Je n'ai pas eu le temps d'y penser sérieusement, mais je ne suis jamais allé aux Etats-Unis et tout le monde me dit que New York est fabuleux et qu'il y a des choses très bien à Washington aussi. Une chose m'inquiète: je ne connais pas très bien la langue. Mais il faut absolument que je résiste à la tentation de sortir mon accent américain. Il vaudrait mieux que je garde mon accent british. Apparemment on trouve ça intellectuel et très sexy là-bas. On verra.
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).
ya all have a real cool time there now!
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