MY (E)MERGING THEORY: RUBIK-CUBE SHAPED TESOL “TEACHERESE”
Professional teaching is nurtured by both experience (craftsmanship
being its product) and study (professional knowledge being its
product). To begin, let me straightly state my very first principle for
teaching:
Teaching is shaped by one’s views of the subject matter, its learning, and the teaching itself.
Accordingly, language teaching, in general, including particularly the
teaching of L2 and TESOL, is rooted on the teacher’s view on language,
language learning, and (language) teaching.
My view of
the language is that it is a
bio-psycho-social-historical thinking and communication device product
of evolution and rooted deeply into animal cognition and the
communication of living beings. It is a human universal innate faculty
that is realized in a particular
communication code –
a
language-, which is developed and learned within a particular cultural
group. A language is in turn real-ized in speech or tongue, which
real-izes itself in geographic and social varieties (dialects and
accents, acro-, meso-, and basi-lects). A language is a system of
systems that cover formal (phonetic, phonologic, morphologic, syntactic,
and semantic structures) and functional aspects (sociolinguistic, and
pragmatic functioning of the language). Speech varieties are actualized,
according to individual ways of expression or idiolect, in the form of
register in particular communicative situations. It should be apparent
that my view is not just juxtaposition of linguistic views that have
developed historically, but an attempt of reconciling them in a unitary
conceptual body.
Furthermore, my view of learning has followed the same aggregationist-synthetic procedure. Learning starts
with perception, goes to sensation, to attention, to linking to prior
schemata, to reflection, to consciousness, to abstraction. It begins as
something purely biological in the individual, a matter of paced
maturation and development, triggered and fueled by social interaction
and individual activity. That is to say, learning has biological and
social roots and –like language- despite being an individual reality it
is also a social and cultural fact. Behaviorism, innatism,
interactionism and a social-cultural perspective do not oppose so much
in my view; rather, they complement each other, each underlining a
particular aspect the other views do not probably highlight that much.
Learning takes all what those theories have stated about it. It takes an
individual with all his cognition, emotions, and personality; it also
takes a context that situates the matter for learning and provides
meaning and sense to it, and it takes a process of action and
interaction, to construct it too. Language learning, as any other
learning, follows those patterns.
Language learning is a mainly practical process. It is like learning
how to walk, or how to drive a bicycle, a motorcycle or a car; it is
like learning how to swim; you can be instructed but all you really need
is practice; instruction, in practical learning, will never be enough.
Simple imitation will never lead to real learning; only real practice
will make real, understanding and enduring learning. However, in the
case of F/SL, learning can also be theoretically grounded, i.e. in this
case formal instruction is central, especially in the case of foreign
languages. As language is

made
for thinking and communication, a second or foreign language will only
be learnt from comprehension and use. Practical, in “practical
learning”, means individual and social
action: comprehension and communication. “Practical” implies knowledge, skill, ability, competence, too.
Finally, my view of teaching. Teachers can be born, but they have to
be made; teaching has evolved –like the rest of human knowledge- from an
intuitive and empiricist practice into a professional knowledgeable and
reflective expertise. Teaching requires pedagogy (a sense of principles
and goals, foundations and teleology of
education), didactics (as know-how of
teaching) and methodology/methods (as skill in classroom communication and conduction).
To conclude, my view of
language teaching. It is grounded on the aforementioned

views about language, language learning, and teaching. It is a
principled or professional practice that does not claim universal
validity, for languages, individuals, situations, and classrooms vary.
There is only one language, THE language, but many realizations of it,
languages; there is only one Human Being, but innumerable persons. I
don’t teach what cannot be taught because it is innate,
the language; I teach
a
language. Language teaching must be practical, i.e., communicative, as
languages are practical devices for thinking and communication. My
students at school are not linguistics students, they are language
learners; I do not teach the description of the language; I teach
through and for communication. Language teaching is meaning-centered,
for you cannot learn anything you don’t understand. It means rote
repetition and drilling are out of question. Comprehensive reading and
listening, lots of meaningful i+1 input, lots of ZDP interactive
practice, lots of productive effort, lots of self-, peer-, and
teacher-corrective feedback. The secret, if any, to language learning is
lots of sustained willing (conscious or not) effort, which is
attainable if adequate motivation is present. In the (language)
classroom, it means that motivating topics, activities, materials and
classroom arrangements draw students’ interest, which begets their
willing and engaged action that leads to learning, while reducing
disruptive behaviors due to boredom or lack of interest or
comprehension.

To
close, I wished to say that I have come up with a more or less
consolidated personal theory of S/FL teaching, for which I am indebted
to so many authors from so many schools of thought through history that
it would take really long to list here. Mine is just an amalgamated
remake of concepts I have been inherited. I have given this emerging
personal perspective the form of a Rubik cube. First a cube has six
sides. You can think of each side as one facet of learning (individual
and social cognitive, affective, personality, intelligence factors).
Each side can in turn be seen as made up of various constituents:
cognition embeds reflection, analysis, synthesis, perception… The
emotional side can include a variety of feelings and emotions from
negative to positive ones like anxiety, inhibition, risk-taking, It
means each of the six sides of the cube are composite, complex. From a
different perspective, the three axes can represent the basic
dimensions involved in language and learning: let’s make the vertical
axis the biological bases, while the horizontal left-to-right or across
axis represents society (including culture and history in it) and the
horizontal bottom-to-front or depth axis represents the individual, the
learner. Other aspects can be considered in the cube: corner points,
edges, diagonal lines, respectively representing the confluence of
adjacent aspects and cross-sectional aspects within and across the sides
and side components. The complexity of a cube like the one representing
this perspective can be illustrated by means of the illustrations
accompanying the text here (taken from Google images, all of them). It
is noteworthy to say that I like the Rubik cube this perspective implies
a number of combinations present simultaneously at different moments.
My idea is not to “solve” the puzzle by means of a solution in which
each side is of a uniform color. Instead, I want to emphasize the
complexity that having any given combination on each side implies when
referring it to language learning and teaching.
To learn more, please visit http://fsltheoriesmaucaldasb2012.wordpress.com/


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