The Relevance of Recent Psychological Studies to TESOL

Abstract

This paper considers the relevance of recent psychological studies to the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. It discusses questions of fostering positive transfer; of displaying aspects of language via enactive, iconic, and symbolic representation, and of focusing on language from the standpoint of its essential functions. The views of language proposed by linguists are formalizations of a linguistic structure which can be taught most effectively through experiencegrounded and goal-directed learning tasks consistent with the learner's developmental level. The student must not only acquire an understanding, either tacit or explicit, of the ways in which English sentences are constructed, but more importantly, he must actualize this knowledge into functional patterns of behavior. Development along these lines can be assisted by means of instructional tasks which are productive and informative, and which are anchored in concrete experiences. The problem of language acquisition has been the subject of increasing aflmrination by linguists and psychologists alike. The task of assnssing the relevance of recent psycholinguistic studies to the teaching of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) is not an easy one in view of the necessarily restricted nature of experimental work and the vastly more complex problems confronting the classroom teacher. Nevertheless, it is important to reflect upon the growing body of psychological studies in order to come to a better understanding of what is entailed in a theory of secondlanguage instruction. This paper considers three recurring themes in psychological theory and research which bear on the pressing problems of classroom instruction. The relevance of these themes to TESOL is discussed, and concrete examples are offered. The paper concludes with suggestions for the teaching of a given aspect of grammatical structure in the form of a schema in which there is a convergence of the multiple factors considered earlier in the discussion. The first theme concerns the classic problem of transfer-the manner in which knowledge gained in one context is transferred to others. The student's exposure to formal language training is necessarily limited. The problem of making this limited exposure productive in situations encountered outside the classroom is critically important. The matter can be put in somewhat different terms. The language user is required to produce sentences