122224 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper (2014S)

Recent theoretical approaches to second language acquisition have tended to foreground the quality of language as a social resource over its quality as a knowledge system. In institutional learning contexts learners interact with each other and with their teachers (often over extended periods of time) as well as with written texts. Thus, in instructed foreign/second language learning its very context (classroom, school, society) as well as the participants and their roles have to be taken into account when seeking explanations for how learner language develops. This course will consider learning theories that underwrite such a social-constructivist view of language learning and will introduce participants to a range of analytic approaches to educational discourse. Participants will apply selected approaches in their own small-scale research projects (Seminararbeit, BA-Arbeit).