The field of Second Language Acquisition is still a quite young field. It really only dates back to perhaps the late 1960s and work done by Pit Corder and Evelyn Hatch. So we are looking at a field that is still only 40 or 50 years old.
In order to find out how to improve language teaching especially in the Philipppine setting, early researches try to incorporate Second Language Acquisition inside the classroom. For the past years, however, Second Language Acquisition has become more theoretical, more academic and many issues of which are now addressed to in Second Language Acquisition are not clearly of directly relevance to language teaching.
Many theoretical developments have been discussed for over 20 years how language has been acquired. There are developments that language really not consist of rules but rather a labyrinth of network of neural connections.
But there is also a development stated that acquisition does not necessary take place inside the head, but rather in the social interactions that learners participate in.
According to Ellis (2009), SLA looks into the relationship between instruction and language learning. He defined language instruction as involving both direct intervention in language learning and indirect intervention in language learning. By direct intervention, it attempts to actually teach learners specific linguistic properties such as the grammar of the language. By indirect intervention, the instruction that seeks to create the conditions likely to foster and facilitate the process of SLA.
The Task-Based Teaching constitute a task of indirect intervention. It aims to create a conditions where acquisition can takes place naturally around the classroom.
One simply sets up opportunities through tasks for learners to ‘experience’ language and leave it to them what they actually learn from the performance of the tasks. Later on, however, when learners get to intermediate or more advanced stages, there is much more clearly a need for direct intervention, because we know that even though learners have plenty of opportunities for interaction—plenty of comprehensible input—they will continue to experience problems with grammar.
However, even at the early stages of language learning, there probably is a case for corrective feedback. So, if one sees corrective feedback as a kind of direct intervention there might be a case for direct intervention even in the early stages of acquisition. While learners are performing the communicative tasks, teachers can correct them, for example by means of recasts or requests for clarification. In other words, correction can be built into Task-Based Teaching.
The best way to look at classrooms is not as places where we teach people language. The best way to look at the classroom is as a place where we as teachers can foster interactions that can facilitate acquisition. Most of language acquisition is not intentional. Most of language acquisition is incidental. If you think that you’re going to be able to teach your students all the language they need to become efficient users of the language, you are mistaken. We should think more about ‘facilitating acquisition’ than ‘teaching the language’.
By: Irene Miranda Dasigan | T-II | Bonifacio Camacho National Highschool
