Teaching+and+Learning+Principles

Principle 1: Automaticity Efficient second language learning involves a timely movement of the control of a few language forms into the automatic, fluent processing of a relatively unlimited number of language forms. Overanalyzing language, thinking too much about its forms, and consciously lingering on rules of language all tend to impede this graduation to automaticity.

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Principle 2: Meaningful Learning The process of making meaningful associations between existing knowledge/experience and new material will lead toward better long-term retention than rote learning of material in isolated pieces.

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Principle 3: The Anticipation of Reward Human beings are universally driven to act, or "behave," by the anticipation of some sort of reward - tangible or intangible, shoert-term or long-term - that will ensue as a result of the bahavior.

In our words: Humans are driven by their intrinsic nature to act in a way that results in a reward.

Principle 4: Intrinsic Motivation The most powerful rewards are those that are intrinsically motivated within the learner. Because the behavior stems from needs, wants, or desires within oneself, the behavior itself is self-rewarding; therefore, no externally administered reward is necessary.

In our words: People learn the best when they are intrinsically motivated to learn something, rather than learning for the sake of a reward.

Principle 5: Strategic Investment Successful mastery of the second language will be due to a large extent to a learner's own personal "investment" of time, effort, and attention to the second language in the form of an individualized battery of strategies for comprehending and producing the language.

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Principle 6: Autonomy Successful mastery of a foreign language will depend to a great extent on learner's autonomous ability both to take initiative in the classroom and to continuie their journey to success beyond the classroom and the teacher.

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Principle 7: Language Ego As human beings learn to use a second language, they also develop a new mode of thinking, feeling, and acting - a second identity. The new "language ego," intertwined with the second language can easily create within the laerner a sense of fragility, a defensiveness, and a raising of inhibitions.

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Principle 8: Willingness to Communicate Successful language learners generally believe in themselves and in their capacity to accomplish communicative tasks, and are therefore willing risk takers in their attempts to produce and to interpret language that is a bit beyond their absolute certainty. Their willingness to communicate results in the generation of both output (from the learner) and input (to the learner).

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Principle 9: The Language Culture Connection Whenever you teach a language, you also teach a complex system of cultural customs, values, and ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Especially in //second// (as opposed to //foreign//) language-learning contexts, the success with which learners adapt to a new cultural milieu will affect their language acquisition success, and vice versa, in some possibly significant ways.

In our words: Language and culture go hand in hand: while teaching language (which ever one it might be), you need to teach both as culture affects language and language affects culture.

Principle 10: The Native Language Effect The native language of learners exerts a strong influence on the acquisition of the target language system. While that native system will exercise both facilitating and interfering effects on the production and comprehension of the new language, the interfering effects are likely to be the most salient.

In our words: Students apply what they know in their first language to the second language they are learning (sometimes this works and helps, other times, it does not). Most misunderstandings and mistakes spring from first language interference and so it is important to recognize this fact as a teacher. (Thinking in the "target" language reduses interference errors.

Principle 11: Interlanguage Second language learners tend to go through a systematic or quasi-systematic developmental process as the progress to full competence in the target language. Successful interlanguage development is partially a result of utilizing feedback from others.

In our words: Utilizing feedback from others to develop language skills.

Principle 12: Communicative Competence Given that communicative competence is the goal of a language classroom, instruction needs to point toward all its components: organizational, pragmatic, strategic, and psychomotor. Communicative goals are best achieved by giving due attention to language use and not just usage, to fluency and not just accuracy, to authentic language and contexts, and to students' eventual need to apply classroom learning to previously unrehearsed contexts in the real world.

In our words: Instruction points to all components of learning a language so that students are able to use the language in real-life contexts outside of just the classroom.