View Content #26470

By Christopher Daradics, CASLS Language Technician

Language teachers know as well as anyone that the process of becoming a competent, engaged target language participant is often a slow and tedious process. Teachers can help students stay motivated and engaged throughout their journey by orienting learners to the dynamic, co-constructed (collaborative and co-created) nature of communication and the related fact that learners have the ability to guide and shape their own (language) experience.

By raising learners’ awareness to the fact that social coordination and collaboration are the bedrock of communication and that shared understanding is co-constructed, learners can adapt their approach to communication as more empowered participants in the collaborative sense-making process.

Regardless of ability level, learners can identify and enhance their pragmatic consciousness by learning how to read and adapt to their given context with whatever means they have on hand (linguistic or otherwise). This perspective encourages learners to identify themselves as bona fide communicators, increasingly capable of manifesting their own language encounters, outcomes, and identity.

This kind of pragmatic, person-centered approach can be integrated into any lesson to demonstrate the value and trust we as educators place in learners’ ability to shape their own experience, even at the most basic level. This week’s lesson, designed for the first day of language class, presumes no prior knowledge and still empowers students to be active co-creators in the communicative process.

Throughout the lesson, from the initial question “[What’s] your name?” to students choosing which person to throw the ball to, learners are invited to participate in the subtle and complex miracle of sense making. They are taking in new information and enacting new patterns of interaction. 

Through explicit narration by the instructor, students’ attention can be explicitly drawn to the pragmatic elements as the interactions unfold (e.g. the rising intonation in the question, the instructor’s body position and gesture as each student is asked their name, and students’ ability to choose their volume, intonation, affect, and who to engage). Going further, learners’ attention can be directed to their own sense of agency as playful (or not) collaborators in the communicative process, even in a lesson designed for the very first day of class. Through meta-discourse (the explicit narration mentioned above), playful engagement, and iterative development of the topic the salience, dynamism, and active nature of co-constructed communication will become more apparent.

At any point in our work as language educators we can address these and similar topics encouraging our students to notice their own behavior and assess the quality of their engagement, not as a manipulative tool to get students to behave how we want them to behave, but rather to inspire them to stay motivated and engaged as they shape their own (target language) experience with a sense of empowerment, trust, and validation in their ability to orient themselves in whatever communicative environments they may encounter.