Embodied Ecological Multilingual Language Learning and Teaching
Colloquium Title: Embodied Ecological Multilingual Language Learning and Teaching
Abstract: Traditionally, language learning has been viewed as a cognitive activity--as occurring in the mind/brain. Since the beginning of "the social turn" in second language acquisition studies (Block, 2003), however, this view has come into question. In this talk, I present an "alternative" approach to multilingual language learning and teaching that views them primarily not as the extraction and internalization/inculcation of linguistic knowledge, but as the progressive integration of organism and environment. The key idea is that we learn as we live, not in order primarily to think, but in order to productively act in our ecosocial environments, including classrooms.
Concepts underlying this general idea include: alignment (how humans, among other organisms, attune to their environments; embodiment/multimodality (how learning and teaching involve the whole body and all the senses, not just the brain); we-processes (that learners and teachers can act as a single ecological unit in the classroom) and natural pedagogy (how teaching based-learning is likely a biological endowment of the human species).
These fairly radical ideas will be concretely explored and illustrated using videos from a single ESL classroom in Australia. Like its topic, this presentation will be multimodal and multisensory--it will be the opposite of a formal "talking-head" type presentation.
