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Date Posted: 14:09:38 06/06/03 Fri
Author: José Miguel Teixeira Carvalho
Subject: Task # 5: Fractal, Krashen and Autopoiesis in Language Learning Acquisition

Your task is to compare the two texts and give your own opinion about how language is acquired.


In "Fractal Model of Language Acquisition", the author develops the following theme: the learning process of a human being is somehow build up upon the grounds of total freedom, that is, in order for it to blossom, a teacher should not encapsulates it within any theory of any kind in particular. (We do not have reasons to believe that this applies exclusively upon the field of Foreign Language Acquisition, since the logic underlying the whole text is based on such a conclusion: freedom and adaptation is a must in a learning process.)

As for Krashen's theoretical propositions they are, like Popeye, what they are: theorems or problems to be demonstrated or performed in language; signs of something that can be believed, doubted, or denied or is either true or false. (Cf. Merriam-Webster On-Line Dictionary).
Krashen points out, for instance, that in order to make communication occurs in a pretty succeeding way, learners of a FL should develop, among others, the method of scaffolding environmental clues. (However, it's hard to believe that, no matter how scaffolded a message gets, its going to be grasped by someone, anyone.) This is one of the many points Krashen states. One counterpoint is given by Swain, arguing that learners need the opportunity to use the L2 meaningfully, because when they are faced with communication failure, they are forced to make their output more precise, coherent and appropriate. (It's exactly here, at this point, that one listens the classical question: what the heck are you talking about, boooy? And, as we can remember, in my last three-time posted huge message in this Forum, [sorry about that!], there are evidences that Brazilian average students from nowadays cannot use their own mother-language in a plainly-easy-coherent way, not to mention L2).

Anyhow, both Paiva's and Krashen's theories claim that teachers of FL should be aware of the complexity that involves the process of acquisition. And both suggest that self-production plays an important role in language learning.

Well, as for me, I have to mention that: if teachers should look at themselves as facilitators of the process of language acquisition, they should know that a facilitator makes things easy for people, solves problems, builds new structures when necessary, takes the temperature of a community and helps it along on an even course so it can develop as a creative organism on its own. But in order for it to happen, speakers ought to spoke the same language in a sense that they ought to know what they are talking about. The problem is that, according to Maturana's theory, "language does not transmit information and its functional role is the creation of a cooperative domain of interactions between speakers through the development of a common frame of reference, although each speaker acts exclusively within his cognitive domain where all ultimate truth is contingent to personal experience. (Since Brazilians cannot SPEAK the same language at all, whether it's their mother or a foreign language, it becomes much more difficult to create such common frame of reference beween them.) Since a frame of reference is defined by the classes of choices which it specifies, linguistic behavior cannot but be rational, that is, determined by relations of necessity within the frame of reference within which it develops. Consequently, no one can ever be rationally convinced of a truth which he did not have already implicitly in his ultimate body of beliefs.
However, when it is recognized that language is connotative and not dennotative, and that its function is to orient the orientee within his cognitive domain without regard for the cognitive domain of the orienter, it becomes apparent that there is no transmition of information through language. It takes the orientee, as a result of an independent internal operation upon his own state, to choose where to lead his cognitive domain; the choice is caused by the "message", but the orientation thus produced is independent of what the "message" represents for the orienter. In a strict sense then, there is no transfer of thought from the speaker to his interlocutor; the listener creates information by reducing his uncertainty through his interactions in his cognitive domain." In other words, it's impossible to teach anything because in order for the learner to actually learn something, he/she must want to do so.

As complicated as it sounds, once you get accostumed to Maturana's writing style, his insights are pretty interesting. So people, what the Chilean biologist is talking about is that "language" is a "creative organism": it is dynamic. And to quote Erich Jantsch: "The characteristic of living systems to continuously renew themselves and to regulate this process in such a way that the integrity of their structure is maintained", can be used as another theme of Paiva's text.

"Order out of Chaos", by Ilya Prigogines, and the notion of "auto-poiesis", or self-production, as expounded by the Santiago Theory of Maturana and Varella ("Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living") are but a few of the works describing how natural systems operate.

My opinion, thus, of how language is acquired, can be considered as a matter of faith: to believe in it is the same thing to have the illogical belief in the occurance of the improbable, that is, to have faith.

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