Studying Language Acquisition to Teach Language

I visited my friend last week at her school to talk about teaching and share stories. I always enjoy our meetings because of her classroom tales but also for the lively brainstorm sessions we inevitably get into. In exploration possible classroom collaborations this year, we hit upon an interesting idea to teach academic language. In one of her ESL classes, she is concerned about the amount of slights that students direct at one other in regards to their language output, often in the form of snickering at other kids' accents when speaking or reading.

Setting classroom norms and reminding students of them seems to have worked to a degree but my friend is hoping to be more proactive. We began to talk about a unit devoted to second language learning, with emphasis on psychological and social contexts of learning. She immediately jumped on this, harking back to a unit she taught years ago to a particularly rambunctious and emotionally-charged group of middle schoolers. Together they delved into the subject of adolescent development, discussing and debating psychology research in light of their own experiences. The unit became a way to make the students' social and emotional lives a locus of study by placing them in conversation with the field of adolescent psychology. This dialogue anchored the discussion within personal experiences while elevating it beyond a unique emphasis on the personal. Students were introduced to academic constructs that they could use to make sense of and challenge their perceptions of the world.

Taking this idea and mapping it onto a landscape of high school students learning English as a second (or third) language, we've started to think about teaching a unit on language pedagogy as a way to explore some of their experiences learning English, unpack assumptions about English and language learning, and hopefully address the students' cajoling in a way that doesn't feel like punishment---a way in which the group can come to an understanding about how and why the emotional climate affects motivation and anxiety and, in turn, everyone's readiness to learn. It is also an avenue to teach the group academic constructs around language, or 'language about language.'

This might be a relatively short unit of study, or it could unfold into something else. We'll see. We talked about introducing the topic with a frontloading activity, like an opinionnaire (Smith & Wilhelm, 2002), where students respond to a series of statements about language learning and state whether they agree/disagree, and why. They then interview 2 or more people (e.g students in the class, teachers, principal...) about their responses, and report back to the group. It's a way to privilege students' thoughts and experiences and quickly expose them to other viewpoints. This also serves as a basis to loop in readings and build understandings from each learner's starting point.