Last Sunday evening I was the guest on Etienne Langlois’s webinar show Shop Talk. Etienne is a Canadian teacher and DJ who runs the French Playground site which organises live, online French activities and events including interviews, French class meet and greets, games of "Devinez le dessin", "Triva", and Kahoot. Etienne nad I talked for an hour about my work and about language teaching in general. I am grateful to Etienne for setting up the interview.
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 langua...
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