Topics related to language teaching that we are aligned with at Amigos
Cognition
New input of the second language is stored in the mind and is accessed and retrieved every time it is needed to be used for comprehension or production…there are two kinds of processing, automatic (unconscious) and controlled (voluntary), which requires a lot more effort
Cognition refers to how the human mind processes and apprehends information. From several statements about the cognitive process, the following concepts have been embraced for second language acquisition researchers. One is that the human cognitive architecture is composed of representation (knowledge) and access (process). The representation of a language is made up of grammatical, lexical and schematic contents. New input of the second language is stored in the mind and is accessed and retrieved every time it is needed to be used for comprehension or production. Two, there are two kinds of processing, automatic (unconscious) and controlled (voluntary), which requires a lot more effort than the automatic. Three, cognitive resources such as attention and memory are limited. (Ortega L. 2013 pp. 83,84) .
The power of practice
At our school, we provide a program that systematically progresses your proficiency skills toward the goals we elaborate after the Needs Analysis. This systematic practice with relevant practice will expose you to the target language in order to progress you gradually, to transform your production from controlled to automatic (Ortega L. 2013 p. 84)
Vocabulary in long term memory
How do we define to know or to remember a word?
Ortega L. (2013) advocates that a word is established in long-term memory when the connection between form and meaning exists and is strong. However, there is more to say about remembering a word such as the strength, the size and the depth within vocabulary knowledge. Strength refers to the high or low degree when retrieving a word. Generally, students know more words receptively (hearing and reading comprehension) than productively (speaking and writing production), especially if those words are infrequently used (p. 88). Size refers to the amount of words the student of a second language (L2) knows in a long term-memory. Students of an L2 will need about 3,000 new words to follow minimally a conversation in the target language. (Nation 2006 as cited in Ortega) Depth entails the sound, spelling, and different meanings of a word, among other features (p. 88).
Generally, students know more words receptively (hearing and reading comprehension) than productively (speaking and writing production), especially if those words are infrequently used
Motivation
"Why do people want to adopt another culture? Because there’s something in their own they don't like, that doesn’t have a name in their culture".
(Kaplan A. 1993 as cited in Ortega 2013 p.171)
Motivation in the language learning field is referred to as a desire to initiate a language learning process with the effort to maintain it. Gardner (1985) presents a model instrument based on three variants; effort, enjoyment and investment. These three variants can be either high or low. Effort refers to the student’s intensity of trying to manifest through different ways of practicing. Enjoyment refers to the pleasure and thrill of it. In other words, loving the engaging activities in and outside the classroom. Investment refers to time, energy and other forms of participation in the acquisition of a language (as cited in Ortega 2013 p. 169-170).
Organizing Content and Planning in Language Instruction
‘Organizing Content and Planning for Integrated Language Instruction’ Shurm & Glisan (2010) presents a clear outline of the most recent paradigms for teachers to use in their daily planning lessons to be used in class. This new paradigm embraces more practical and meaningful content as its components are related to daily situations of real life inside a cultural context rather than a book’s table of contents. Below are some examples:
Integrating authentic oral and written material in the classroom (Magazines, poems, video tapes, radio programs, etc.) to encourage students to identify real content as the brain searches for patterns to identify meaning.
Changing the way we assess the students in our daily practice of teaching. For example, it is more effective and engaging when the teachers are not evaluating all the time but giving meaningful feedback instead to initiate a genuine open conversation.
Selecting pertinent content and interesting topics to use in the target language.
Creating a long-term plan for instruction in which it could start with the final goals “backwards design”. By revising the final goals, teachers will find evidence that confirm the achievement of those goals.
Bloom’s taxonomy is an indispensable tool to use in the class to identify what level of thinking could be required in the classroom.
Books are no longer the central reference for objectives in the curriculum.
In the daily lesson planning the chapter strongly suggested that teachers should use meaningful tasks based on the students’ (immediate) needs, long-term goals, and short-term goals. Showing that they really care about their students (Scott-Simmons, Barker and Cherry, 2003 as cited in Shurm & Glisan, 2010)
Identifying desired results is also important as this will allow us to know what students will learn the end of the lessons.
Key themes:
The core of a curricular plan is no longer the table of contents of the book. Instead, it is the interdisciplinary elements and culture.
Planning is an interactive process that normally does not happen in a linear form. Teachers can begin planning their lessons from different angles. For example, checking what materials they have.
Questions to think about:
1. What could a teacher do in class when the institution is asking them to follow the old teaching paradigm which includes an old curriculum based on achieving the book’s objectives and not the students’?
2. What do we do when our adult students wish to be taught in the old paradigm such as focusing only on grammatical knowledge, practicing separated individual skills and having a textbook as a primary material
The marginalization of Quechua in Peru
Quechua speakers talk in Spanish and show a different phonology sound in vowels and consonants. This is unfairly called Motoseo. When someone speaks with ‘motoseo’, it is a sign that they speak Quechua, and as Quechua is associated with illiteracy, rurality, uneducated, and being a peasant, people who speaks Quechua feel they are carrying misfortune in their mouth, ‘el motoseo’. In urban areas, such as universities, Quechua speaker’s students are victims of marginalization and being mocked and segregated because of their accent
In many societies that share more than one language, the relations between these same languages generally obey a power dynamic. In other words, the dominant culture is imposed and prevails from different social artifacts such as the market economy, educational, legal and labor institutions, among others. All this through the language. It could be said that the entity that reflects the most intimate identity of the individual and of society is language. However, in Peru, one of the most perverse forms of coexistence is manifested between Spanish and Quechua. In urban areas of Peru, phonological discrimination is displayed towards bilingual speakers whose first language is Quechua. According to the Ministry of Culture of Peru (2018), in Peru there are almost four million people whose first language is Quechua. However, to date, there are no public institutions that can offer services in this language. At our school we are aware of this and for this reason we not only offer Quechua classes, but we also promote Andean culture in our cultural activities. On the other hand, we also give work facilities to Quechua-speaking people.
Below is a summary of the article written by a Peruvian sociolinguist whose research was done in Cusco.
‘Racialization of the bilingual student in higher education: A case from the Peruvian Andes’
Virginia Zavala is the author of ‘Racialization of the bilingual student in higher education: A case from the Peruvian Andes’ which is an article written in 2011. The author argues there is an unequal social order in Peru and takes the example of a university classroom when bilingual students who speak Quechua and Spanish mix the vowels from Quechua to Spanish (motoseo) and are mocked for this phonological practice. The purpose of the article is to analyze and critique the hierarchy of social power that still tries to perpetuate its dominant roots through prejudice against indigenous people via their languages, in this case the phonology of Quechua.
The article sharply demonstrates how the same racism from centuries ago has been acquiring a different name and a different practice in our society called ‘Language Standard’. Through interviews conducted over a two-year period, the author has collected a considerable amount of information to demonstrate the language discrimination that many Peruvians have witnessed, and indirectly or directly contributed towards. People who speak Quechua have been humiliated by their most legitimate tool for survival, their own language. At the beginning of the interviews for this study, the author did not intend to bring up racialization, however interviewees’ naturally spoke on this topic. Therefore, the author chose to focus this research on racialization of bilingual students in Peru. The author believes that intentional interviews do not necessarily reflect the information the author is seeking. Instead, the author believes that a social relationship between the interviewer and interviewee will allow for both genuine and broader topics to be discussed. For this specific research the author searched for personal interpretations from students from the universities of Cusco and Ayacucho in Peru (using their own lexical repertoires) to address topics of a social matter. In section three, the author remarks that linguistic usage consists of a public act and within this, when there is a debate about ways of speaking, one party may express social control above others sub-supported by morals, racial and political terms (Cameron, 1995 as cited in Zavala, 2011). One of the consequences of this is that people feel free to make comments about other people and themselves when there is an ‘incorrect’ way of speaking. Therefore, it is clearly seen that the notion of racism has acquired a different shape but still keeps the same essence of superiority of one group above others such as ‘different culture’, ‘different geography’, ‘different language’. In this way racism has evolved a new face constructed by geography, ethnicity, race, and culture (Zavala, 2011). Being bilingual is one privilege that allows those in possession of two languages to communicate in many contexts and develop different linguistic areas such as syntax, lexicon and phonology among others.
This is especially clear when Quechua speakers talk in Spanish and show a different phonology sound in vowels and consonants. This is unfairly called Motoseo. When someone speaks with ‘motoseo’, it is a sign that they speak Quechua, and as Quechua is associated with illiteracy, rurality, uneducated, and being a peasant, people who speaks Quechua feel they are carrying misfortune in their mouth, el ‘motoseo’. In urban areas, such as universities, Quechua speaker’s students are victims of marginalization and being mocked and segregated because of their accent. This segregation is so rooted in the students who speaks Quechua that they have two sides of the discourse. One side feels it is their fault to have an accent, while the other side values their origins. Adding to this, as it is not common to read in general for most of everyone, the students who speaks Quechua believes that because of their lack of reading they do not have an advanced vocabulary, so self-blame is another feature in them. That is one of the misconceptions, seeing the ‘motosos’ as lazy because of the lack of practice and reading is why they keep that strong accent. In general, the feeling of seeing monolingualism as the ideal way of communication (Silverstein, 1996; Wiley & Lukes, 1996 as cited in Zavala 2011) is detrimental to the bilingual Quechua speakers. Most of the teachers of universities in Peru contribute to the spread of this prejudice and these teachers even gives mouth exercises so students with ‘motoseo’ accent can get rid of it like placing a pen in the mouth and reading aloud among other unnecessary exercises. By doing these exercises, the Quechua speaking students internalize this as a problem and think of their accent as a problem. Class presentations are another important example remarked in the article. As during presentations, Quechua speaking students feel nervous and exposed with their ‘obvious’ accent, so they do not participate much and give the impression of being shy, introverts and reserved people. Therefore, many people in the country believe rural people are quiet and need to take a course of public speaking to improve their ‘social abilities’ (Zavala 2011, p. 399). The article shows another testimony in which when one Quechua speaking student makes a ‘mistake’ in the pronunciation, the other students laugh, and instead of correcting those who laugh, the teacher corrected the student by suggesting better ways to say that word. Another teacher remarked on the difference between ‘educated speech’ and ‘vulgar speech’. In the universities where the interviews took place, teachers misused the word bilingual, referring in a condescending way to students that come from rural areas. It appeared that teachers needed to reaffirm their own positions as ‘the ones that is here to correct and form students’, and so they always pursue a chance to correct grammar or pronunciation among other stigmas.
All in all, the author exposed that the hidden agenda of ‘verbal hygienization’, a term for all the normative metalinguistic practices through which people attempt to improve language or regulate it according to particular values (Cameron, 1995), has been taking different forms but is still not far from the nineteenth century. Speaking Quechua is, for many in Peru, related to rurality, poverty, lack of education, dirtiness among other unfair adjectives, Quechua speaking people feel the desire to stop using it. Hakuta (1986) and other scholars have built an argument based on similar cases that the Quechua speaking people rejecting their mother tongue will prevent the development of the second language. Finally, Zavala (2011) also shows that this system that oppresses others is well intricated and well established in the social power within all parts of Peru, as well as the contradictory discourse of many Cusquenian who on one hand are proud of their Andean cultural practice, but on the other hand want to be distanced from anything that stops them from becoming ‘successful’ in this society.
