Course Description In this course, we will explore the question of the actual and potential connections between democracy and education. Our focus of attention will be placed on a critical examination of democratic theory and its implications for the civic education roles and contributions of teachers, adult educators, community development practitioners, and community organizers. We will survey and deal critically with a range of competing conceptions of democracy, variously described as classical, republican, liberal, radical, marxist, neomarxist, pragmatist, feminist, populist, pluralist, postmodern, and/or participatory. Using narrative inquiry as a means for illuminating and interpreting contemporary practice, we will analyze the implications of different conceptions of democracy for the practical work of civic education.

Democracy and education.

The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition

(1998). Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor analytic studies. Gifted and Talented International: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 97-98.

Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor analytic studies

The cultural origins of human cognition

Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

Chapter 1. Attention. Richard Schmidt Chapter 2. Memory for Language. Nick C. Ellis Chapter 3. The Competition Model: The Input, the Context and the Brain. Brian MacWhinney Chapter 4. Sentence Processing. Michael Harrington Chapter 5. Automaticity and Automatization. Robert M. DeKeyser Chapter 6. Learnability and Second Language Acquisition Theory. Kevin R. Gregg Chapter 7. Cognition and Tasks. Peter Skehan and Pauline Foster Chapter 8. Cognitive Underpinnings of Focus on Form. Catherine Doughty Chapter 9. Intentional and Incidental Second Language Learning: A Reappraisal of Elaboration, Rehearsal and Automaticity. Jan H. Hulstijn Chapter 10. Task Complexity, Cognitive Resources and Second Language Syllabus Design: A Triadic Framework for Examining Task Influences on SLA. Peter Robinson Chapter 11. Aptitude, Individual Differences, and Instructional Design. Mark Sawyer and Leila Ranta Chapter 12. Cognition, Instruction and Protocol Analysis

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Cognition and second language instruction

This paper describes a framework for examining the effects of the cognitive complexity of tasks on language production and learner perceptions of task difficulty, and for motivating sequencing decisions in task-based syllabuses. Results of a study of the relationship between task complexity, difficulty, and production show that increasing the cognitive complexity of a direction-giving map task significantly affects speaker-information-giver production (more lexical variety on a complex version and greater fluency on a simple version) and hearer-information-receiver interaction (more confirmation checks on a complex version). Cognitive complexity also significantly affects learner perceptions of difficulty (e.g. a complex version is rated significantly more stressful than a simple version). Task role significantly affects ratings of difficulty, though task sequencing (simple to complex versus the reverse sequence) does not. However, sequencing does affect the accuracy and fluency of speaker production. Implications of the findings for task-based syllabus design and further research into task complexity, difficulty, and production interactions are discussed.

Task complexity, task difficulty, and task production : Exploring interactions in a componential framework

Schmidt (1990) claimed that consciousness, in the sense of awareness of the form of input at the level of “noticing”, is necessary to subsequent second language acquisition (SLA). This claim runs counter to Krashen's (1981) dualsystem hypothesis that SLA largely results from an unconscious “acquisition” system, the contribution of the conscious “learning” system to SLA being limited and peripheral. Important to a theory of SLA that allows a central role to the act of noticing is a specification of the nature of the attentional mechanisms involved, and of their relationship to current models of the organization of memory. With this in mind the present paper reviews current research into the nature of attention and memory and proposes a model of the relationship between them during SLA that, it is argued, is complementary to Schmidt's noticing hypothesis and oppositional to the dual-system hypothesis of Krashen. In light of this model, I argue that differential performance on implicit and explicit learning and memory experiments is caused by differences in the consciously regulated processing demands of training tasks and not by the activation of consciously and unconsciously accessed systems. I also argue that the attentional demands of pedagogical tasks and individual differences in memory and attentional capacity both affect the extent of noticing, thereby directly influencing SLA.

Attention, Memory, and the “Noticing” Hypothesis

N.C. Ellis, P. Robinson, An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Language Instruction. Section I: Cognitive Linguistics and Cognition. L. Talmy, Aspects of Attention in Language. J.R. Taylor, Prototypes in Cognitive Linguistics. R.W. Langacker, Cognitive Grammar as a Basis for Language Instruction. R. Hudson, Word Grammar, Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Learning and Teaching. K.R. Coventry, M. Guijarro-Fuentes, Spatial Language Learning and the Functional Geometric Framework. W. O'Grady, Language without Grammar. E. Lieven, M. Tomasello, Children's First Language Acquistion from a Usage-based Perspective. A.E. Goldberg, D. Casenhiser, Construction Learning and SLA. J. Bybee, Usage-based Grammar and SLA. Section II: Cognitive Linguistics, SLA and L2 Instruction. T. Cadierno, Learning to Talk about Motion in a Foreign Language. M. Gullberg, Gestures and SLA. T. Odlin, Conceptual Transfer and Meaning Extensions. B. MacWhinney, A Unified Model. N.C. Ellis, Usage-based and Form-focussed SLA: The Associative Learning of Constructions, Learned-attention and the Limited L2 Endstate. S.Th. Gries, Corpus-based Methods in Analyses of SLA Data. M. Achard, Teaching Construal: Cognitive Pedagogical Grammar. A. Tyler, Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Instruction. P. Robinson, N.C. Ellis, Conclusions: Cognitive Linguistics, SLA and L2 Instruction - Issues for Research.

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Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition

This paper describes a framework for researching the Cognition Hypothesis which claims that pedagogic tasks be sequenced for learners on the basis of increases in their cognitive complexity. It distinguishes dimensions of complexity which increase the conceptual and linguistic demands tasks make on communication, so creating the conditions for L2 development, from dimensions which increase demands made on accessing a current interlanguage repertoire during real-time performance. Studies providing some support for three predictions of the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2001a) are then reviewed. Increasing the cognitive demands of tasks along developmental dimensions; a) encourages grammaticization, and so greater accuracy and complexity of L2 production; b) promotes interaction and heightened attention to form, and memory for input, therefore increasing incorporation of forms made salient in the input; and c) individual differences contributing to perceptions of task difficulty progressively differentiate performance and learning as tasks increase in complexity.

Peter Robinson

Papers

Cognition and second language instruction

Task complexity, task difficulty, and task production : Exploring interactions in a componential framework

Attention, Memory, and the “Noticing” Hypothesis

Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition

Cognitive Complexity and Task Sequencing: Studies in a Componential Framework for Second Language Task Design