Although there is no one theoretical approach that works perfectly in the classroom, as an educator and lifelong, second-language (L2) learner, I am certainly most convinced by the efficacy and results of task-based, communicative teaching approaches. In my own classroom, I concentrate student work around activities and encourage them to work in pairs or small groups so that they can increase the amount of time they spend attempting to use the language.
Task-based, communicative exercises provide students with ample opportunities to use language as they do their first language (L1): for negotiating opinions and communicating to others their thoughts and views about the world around them. As an instructor of a living language spoken around the world, it is my opinion that the students’ comprehension and production of the oral language are paramount to their written precision because the spoken language varies greatly across the Spanish-speaking world. A learner of Spanish will need to adeptly address the diverse regionalisms, accents, intonations, and registers that are often obscured in written language in order to comprehend and be understood by native speakers.
In order to concentrate on oral proficiency, I employ a lot of small group and partner exercises to provide students ample opportunities to reflect on their own speech and that of their peers through exposure to a variety of distinct input sources. Additionally, dialogue with the instructor provides the student with the challenge of more advanced input, the “i + 1” suggested by Krashen, and as instructors we can even create i + 1 partnerships by assigning stronger students to work with lower level students.
This is one way I think SLA theory has informed my teaching. I think SLA theory has most informed my teaching by changing how I view errors. SLA theory has also helped me be more sympathetic toward students, informing me that some errors will only be corrected with time. The idea that errors (more so than mistakes) provide important data about the stage of a student’s progress was not an entirely new concept to me. However, reading more about how the L2 learner develops an interlanguage, understanding that it does not develop unidirectionally and may be unaffected by explicit negative feedback, has reshaped my view of how to handle errors in the classroom.
In learning about SLA theory, I have reflected on the respective efficacy of positive and negative evidence and the role that the noticing hypothesis (Schmidt) plays in a languae feedback loop. I had never questioned whether or not the corrections or suggestions I made in class actually achieved their goal of raising students’ awareness of their errors. As regards my teaching this year, I feel it will be interesting reduce the explicit correction of errors and negative evidence proffered during oral exercises. Interestingly, I think that negative evidence could be very useful in written or reading exercises. Corrections of this kind could productively inform a student’s meta-linguistic knowledge and inform the monitoring agent that Krashen proposes.