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Oleo de José Tola
From: donna
Date: 2/2/99
Time: 1:29:02 PM
Remote Name: 151.198.178.10
First of all, I'm not sure what is meant by the term "emic." Åny ideas? As for the skewed perception, I think that overall the author is saying that we've lost sight of what really matters in language learing. Language is to be used to "communicate" When we lose this perspective as teachers, our methodology is very different. The authors also remind us that in discourse and in language learning, there are other factors involved such as the psychological motivators and as well as social and contextual phenomenon. These authors point out that in language teaching, we often tend to look at the learner in terms of errors, forgetting everything else involved. I particularly enjoyed the example of "historie" and how the author informs us that this is not necessarily a difficiency on the part of the learner, but as the learner using all of his resources - in this case what he hoped to be a cognate. However, this is not simply a learning error, but also an error in processing on both participants - an error that is understandably made. In fact, misunderstandings similar to this are often made in discourse between native speakers. I also liked the argument that false starts and fillers ARE not only indicators of non-native speech, but that this also happens with fluent native speakers.