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Centre for Human Interactivity

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Usage-Based and Interactivity-Based Approaches to Second Language Development

Thursday 28 February 2013, 13.00-16.45 at SDU (Odense Campus), Room U143.

A symposium organized by Second Language Research Center (SELC) and Centre for Human Interactivity (CHI)

The area of Second Language Development (SLD) – i.e. how children and adults learn, acquire, develop, and use foreign languages in different contexts and settings – has always been a site for intense theoretical discussion. On the one hand, the intricacies of SLD pose an exciting empirical challenge to both theoretical and applied linguistics. On the other societal changes such as globalisation and mass-migration have forced SLD practitioners to reconsider the theoretical underpinning of the discipline.

This symposium opens up inter-theoretical discussion between usage-based and interactivity-based approaches to SLD. Both emerging paradigms have achieved growing academic attention in recent years. While a usage-based approach, combining cognitive linguistics with studies of language usage, promotes an empirically-based view of second language learning as usage-driven and usage-formed, an interactivity-based approach combines ecological and dialogical methods with distributed and systemic approaches from cognitive science.

At the symposium, leading proponents of both approaches meet in an engaged, investigative discussion of similarities and differences. Focusing on second language development, they will discuss theoretical assumptions, methodological procedures, and practical implications of their views.

Speakers:

  • Teresa Cadierno, Søren W. Eskildsen and Johannes Wagner (SELC, SDU): Changing perspectives on L2 construction learning
  • Stephen Cowley and Sune Vork Steffensen (CHI, SDU): Between interactivity and the deep, dynamic sea: skills in second language development
  • Steven Thorne (Portland State University, USA): Mutable patterns and formulaicity as fractal cultural development: Dynamic and/or obedient?
  • Round table discussion moderated by Hannele Dufva (Jyväskylä University, Finland)

Last Updated 05.08.2024