Language World 2019 presentation

Below is my presentation from the Language World conference (the annual event of the Association for Language Learning), held at Loughborough University on 24th March 2019. My topic for this interactive session was interpersonal and task-based listening.

Listening is an area of concern for language teachers, so after putting the issue into context and making some reference to research, I went on to present some classroom ideas with a focus on interpersonal and task-based listening. A few of the slides require some expanding upon, but many are self-explanatory.

They should be useful for all teachers, but especially those learning their craft.

Language World 2019 from Steve Smith

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What is skill acquisition theory?

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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