Social Learning Theories:
Complexity Theory
Week 7
Tonight
• Warm up
• Discussion lead 1 (Dornyei, 2009)
• Intro to Complexity Theory (Larsen-Freeman,
2011)
• Discussion lead 2 (Port, 2010)
• Announcement
• Midterm info
• HW
Warm-up
• How does activity theory explain learning as a
social phenomenon? What is social about it?
Discussion lead 1: Dornyei (2009)
Dornyei (2009)
• What is his point about individual differences?
How does this work?
• How does that model account for the
environment?
Dornyei (2009, p. 234)
• The question, then, is whether in this light there is any
justification for proposing any macrostructuring
principles to individual variation in human mental
functions (such as “cognitive” or “motivational”
functions)?
• I believe that there is one perspective according to
which the main types of mental functions can be
separated: the phenomenological (i.e., experiential)
view: People can phenomenally distinguish three areas
of mental functioning—cognition, motivation, and
affect (or emotions)
Funder (2006, p. 22, as cited in
Dornyei, 2009)
• Nowadays, everybody is an interactionist.
2 broad ways to investigate
•
Individualistic perspective—best represented by the “social cognition” paradigm—
considers the social or cultural context through the individual’s eyes. Accordingly,
the complexity of the social environment is only important inasmuch as it is
reflected in the individual’s mental processes and the resulting attitudes, beliefs
and values; that is, the focus is on how people process social information and
make sense of social situations. This perspective, therefore, offers a cognitive
representation of the social world.
•
In contrast, the societal perspective—best represented by “social identity” theory—
focuses on broad social processes and macro-contextual factors, such as
sociocultural norms, intergroup relations, acculturation/assimilation processes,
and cross-cultural or interethnic conflicts. From this perspective, the individual’s
behavior is seen to be largely determined by the more powerful forces at large;
that is, social identity is often seen to override personal identity as exhibited, for
example, by the individual’s submission to normative pressures imposed by
specific reference groups of cultural expectation
Complexity theory: Larsen-Freeman
(2011)
• The need for complexity theory:
– What are the differences between these:
Simplicity, disorganized complexity, organized
complexity?
Complexity theory
• …seeks to explain complex, dynamic, open,
adaptive, self-organizing, nonlinear systems. It
focuses on the close interplay between the
emergence of structure on one hand and process
or change on the other. … It sees complex
behavior as arising from interactions among
many components—a bottom-up process based
on the contributions of each, which are subject
to change over time.
• Larsen-Freeman (2011, p. 52)
• What is the difference between open and
closed systems?
– Figure
• What do open systems mean for SLA?
• language development, a term I prefer these
days to acquisition because open systems are
never fully acquired (Larsen-Freeman, 2010).
• From this perspective, how do we learn
language?
• As with speech communities, interlanguage
emerges bottom-up through use. As such, no
innate language faculty is posited, though, as
indicated earlier, innate domain-general
cognitive abilities and social drives may exist.
Instead, learners’ language resources are
thought to develop from interactions they
experience.
Co-adaptation and soft-assembly
• context contributes significantly to language
development by affording possibilities for coadaptation between interlocutors. As a
learner interacts with another individual, their
language resources are dynamically altered, as
each adapts to the other—a mimetic process.
• With each visit, learners soft-assemble their
language resources. Thelen and Smith (1994)
coined the term “soft-assembly” to refer to
processes involving articulation of multiple
components of a system, where “each action is a
response to the variable features of the particular
task” (p. 64). In other words, the assembly is said
to be “soft” because the elements being
assembled, as well as the specific ways they are
assembled, can change at any point during the
task or from one task to another.
• From repeated soft-assemblies in co-adapted
interactions, stable language-using patterns
emerge.
From this perspective, what would
teaching involve?
• Corpus linguistics?
• humans are sensitive to frequency of
perceptually salient and semantically
transparent linguistic features in the language
to which they are exposed. Thus, language
development is a probabilistic process, with
learners extracting probabilities of particular
forms occurring in particular contexts with
particular frequencies.
• The data learners are exposed to are thus
skewed (perhaps intentionally in coadaptation), making language easier to learn.
• acquisition is thus optimized by introducing an
initial, low-variance sample centered upon
prototypical exemplars
• Frequency of forms, items important. But
frequency alone not enough. Why?
• To assist L2 learners who wish to achieve
target proficiency, their consciousness must
be recruited and their attention directed
through explicit instruction, which needs to be
complemented by opportunities for these
learners to use their language resources in
psychologically authentic activities (LarsenFreeman, 2003).
Critique this hypothesis
Larsen-Freeman (2011, p. 48)
• Instructional syllabi could be aligned with the
built-in syllabus, and second language(L2)
instruction could follow natural acquisition
processes.
Larsen-Freeman (2011, p. 49)
• This view of language had implications for
understanding SLA. There is no built in
syllabus and, while general, innate cognitive
processes and social drives may exist, it is
more accurate to say that interlanguage
systems emerge from use.
• Below is a statement from Larsen-Freeman.
Using your knowledge of theories we already
discussed in this class, explain HOW resources
change with time, place, etc.
– Learners’ language resources are always dynamic
ensembles, expanding and contracting with time,
place, and circumstance.
Research
• P. 60 pretest/posttest. What’s the problem?
• Importance of qualitative inquiry
Discussion lead 2:Port (2010)
• In what ways is complexity theory
demonstrated?
Links to Port (2010)
• I came to understand language as a complex
adaptive system, which emerges bottom-up
from interactions of multiple agents in speech
communities (Larsen-Freeman, 1997; Ellis
with Larsen-Freeman, 2009), rather than a
static system composed of top-down
grammatical rules or principles.
• Over time, those that frequently, saliently, and
reliably occur become emergent stabilities in a
complex system… sedimented out of discourse,
with grammar seen not as the source of
understanding and communication, but rather a
by-product of communication (Hopper, 1998).
• The patterns or routines themselves are
variegated in form—not necessarily linguists’
units, which may not have psychological reality
for speakers.
Announcement
• Material for Week 9 will be moved to Week 10
• Week 10 will now include material for Weeks
9 and 10.
• Atkinson (2011) Ch 3, An identity approach to
second language acquisition
• Discussion lead: Block (2007):
• Discussion lead: Norton & Toohey (2001):
Midterm Guidelines
• Option 1. Mini Research Project
• Apply a theory from our course to create a
plan for intervention. In this option, you
describe your intervention, what theory
guided it, and how you will measure the
effectiveness of it.
• The paper should be 6 pages (1.5 spacing) and
include the following sections:
•
•
•
•
•
•
1. Introduction (1 page)- Describe what skill/learning goal you will target (e.g., Ss
reading, writing, group dynamics) and why it’s important to you (either
theoretically important or important for your teaching situation).
2. The theory and intervention (3 pages)-First, introduce the main ideas of
the theory and discuss how it explains
learning and why it’s important.
Then, review two articles that used the particular theory and describe: who
was studied; what the focus of the study was; why the authors used the
theory; the data collected; and the results.
Next, use the ideas from the articles and theory to create your own
intervention (you can adapt ideas but show clear links to the two articles as to
why you adapted). Describe the intervention and be sure to discuss the
theoretical reasons for teaching the skill the way you plan.
3. Measuring progress (2 pages). How do the data collected in the two
studies reflect the main theory and how
did they measure it? How do your
data reflect the main theory (can use same as two articles or adapt)?
How
will you measure it (interviews, observations, test scores, surveys)? Feel free
to use same methods as presented in the two articles or create your own.
4. References (1 page). Follow APA style. See the Online Writing Lab Purdue
page for information.
You will be graded on: the degree to which you addressed each of the points
above; writing clarity; and APA/organization.
Option 2. Literature Review
• The literature review option includes two main
components. First, you will draw from a theory or
theories in our class to develop a critical
analytical lens. Then, you will use this lens to
review research and utilize your analytic lens to
identify potential weaknesses in the studies and
how these weakness challenge the results.
• The paper should be 6 pages (1.5 spacing) and
include the following sections:
•
•
•
•
•
1. Introduction (1 page)- Describe what skill will examine in the literature (e.g.,
vocabulary, reading, writing,
group dynamics) and why it’s important to you
(either theoretically important or important for your teaching
situation).
2. The analytical lens (2 pages)- Select one or two theories discussed in our
course (can be topics before or after
midterm). Then, discuss the main
components of each theory. When discussing these components, create
questions or main points that you can later use to critique and analyze other
studies. For example, if I was
drawing from the Interaction Hypothesis, and
one of the main components of this theory is communication
breakdown, then
I would might create a question that asks: Were their opportunities for students to
engage in
conversation that would lead to communication breakdown?
These main points or questions are critical to your
paper. So think about what
is learning is from your theoretical perspectives and then use these to examine
learning situations in other studies.
3. Review and analyze (3 pages)- For this section, first select 2 studies for a
particular skill. Then, describe who was studied, what they did, what the results
were. Next, after reviewing each study, apply your analytical lens
and
critique the study and its results. Did the study account for social aspects? If not,
how might this affect
the results? Etc.
4. References (1 page). Follow APA style. See the Online Writing Lab Purdue
page for information.
You will be graded on: the degree to which you addressed each of the points
above; writing clarity; and APA/organization.
Option 3. Building Theoretical
Knowledge
• This option is comprised of three main parts.
First, an introduction is presented that discusses
your current knowledge of a particular theory
and desire to clarify specific points or gain
general knowledge of the theory. Then, in the
second section, you will read and review 3
articles related to your theory. In the last part,
you discuss what you learned and what remains
to be learned.
• The paper should be 6 pages (1.5 spacing) and
include the following sections:
• 1. Introduction (1 page)- Discuss what theory you will explore. What
you already know about it. Why you need
to read/learn about it.
•
2. Review (2 pages)- Find three articles that discuss or apply
this theory. Then describe the information about
theory
presented by each author. If the theory was applied, why did they
apply it; what was the goal of using this theory; how did they use
the theory to analyze data. If the article is purely descriptive, review
the main
points: what are they, why are they important; what
are some examples.
•
3. What you learned (3pages)- Restate what you wanted to
learn before you read the articles. Tell the things
that you
learned, or didn’t learn, why they are important for you personally,
and why they are important for
language learning.
Discuss what other things within the theory you wish to know or
are confused about and how you will answer these concerns in the
future.
•
4. References (1 page). Follow APA style. See the Online
Writing Lab Purdue page for information.
• You will be graded on: the degree to which you addressed each of
the points above; writing clarity; and APA/organization.
HW
• Write and proofread midterm
• 10 pages maximum.