Cardonism wreaks havoc in Wikipedia by Diego Cardona

Cardonism (Taken from Wikipedia)

(This theory does not exist yet. It seeks to give a clear perspective of the author’s point of view towards language learning and teaching)
Cardonism is a second language acquisition theory and an approach to education that lays emphasis on the ways that people successfully acquire  foreign languages, achieving high levels of proficiency. This method was first designed by professor Diego Cardona by studying arduously first and second language acquisition theories and psychology principals. Professor Cardona then selected reliable and valid features of the most important theories as to create an approach that can take advantage of the power and capacity of  the human brain. Cardonism is usually divided into three stages by most of the current researchers: pupils’ early production, pupils’ interaction period, and pupils’ language maintenance.

Pupils’ Early Production

Cardona apparently supported Chomsky’s principle in the sense that every human comes to birth with a universal grammar prepackaged in the brain. Accordingly, Cardona states “Every human being that is born with no pathological conditions, is able to acquire any language in the world; any.”Apart from this, Diego’s theory suggests to first reinforce learners’ first language literacy skills before instructing them in a foreign language, as the Linguistic Cording Differences Hypothesis already claimed.

Cardona is recognized as well for being a current promoter of the natural order  and input hypothesis, stated by the American linguist Stephen Krashen. Cardonism strongly asserts that students learn a language in a predictable order and such order must be known by language tutors as to foster learning in the classroom.

Pupils’ Interaction Period

Cardona also picked some features from Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology. His particular approach points that pupils can only reach high levels of proficiency by interacting through language. For such purpose, teachers may include within their instruction real life interaction tasks, as well as activities that demand the same skills people use in their native language. For instance, listening to the radio, watching TV, reading a book, writing a letter, answering a phone call, etc.  It is believed that Cardona also encourages the communicative approach, but in an interview with the magazine Science he replied “There is no research work that indicates there is a better approach than other, it would be a huge mistake to just believe such bias”.
The belief that innatism and social interaction make language possible in a human being is attributed to Cardona as well. He has also expressed his agreement with Jerome Bruner proposal that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition in general and language in particular.



Pupils’ language maintenance


Professor Cardona has pointed that achieving a competent level in a foreign language is not enough to maintain a language learning process alive. Instead, Cardonism theory proposes that there is always a step forward to reach. Indeed, he tenaciously suggests that the best way to keep improving one’s competence in any language (including the native one) is by carrying out tasks that demand a greater cognitive and linguistic skills different from the ones already acquired. In other words, after a language learner can write easily an e-mail in the target language, then he should go further and write an essay or a column stating his point of view towards something. In case that this learner  does not attempt to make even more difficult tasks, his foreign language would not progress and will be located into a zone that is called “comfort zone”. This zone consists of the section in which students feel comfortable with what they know about the language, and do not hesitate to learn more as they do not find it necessary. According to Diego, the language users that are located in this zone “lose” progressively their language skills such as vocabulary repertoire, and fluency.

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About research

Last class some colleagues shared very interesting research questions that could lead to fabulous research studies. However, a word of caution here might be worth adding! beware:

Once an advisor has been assigned to your research study, you will experiment what desperation is. Change this, change that, include this, exclude that, emphasis on this, do not repeat that and so on. The only solution you will find to end up your thesis will be following every single instruction and feedback your instructor gives to you. Research advisors kill researchers’ creativity and innovation.
It should not be that way.