Week 15 Reflection

First off, apologies for the late post. I left HI on Mon, Dec 3, and have been up to my neck since. In fact, even before that, it was a lot of sorting and packing as I had to clear my room, and then it was a field week attending conferences and completing my papers while getting over the jetlag and adjusting to the cool, dry and polluted air in HK, which was pretty hard on my sensitive bronchii system.

I only remembered that I had to make this post, but had not, and worse, had left my notes in HI as well. So, my apologies again for this very short write-up, which Megumi contributed, and many thanks, Megumi and Masaki, for responding to my email requesting assistance. Fortunately, you will not be missing out much because Week 15 wasn't one of those "substantive" weeks. It was more of a recap, and a neat summary of what we had done in the past 4 months.

On Tue, Nov 28, Prof Ortega summed up what we have done for the term. She elicited responses from the class before putting them neatly into the various categories. Below is the bare bones of what had transpired in class (based on what I could gather).

1. Cognitive Interactionist SLA (1970, 1980s): Piaget
Interaction: Long, Gass, Pica, MacKey
Environment
Cognition
Individual Differences: DeKeyser

2. Sociocultural SLA (mid-1990s): Vygotsky, Halliday
Vygotskyan SLA: Lantolf, Swain
CA for SLA: Kasper, Markee, Mori
Language Socialization: Duff
Identity Theory: Norton, Pavlenko
Critical Theory: Canagarajah, Pennycook
Systemic Functional Linguistics

3. Formal Linguistic Approach to SLA: Chomsky
Schwatz, Bley-Vroman, O'Grady
"Native Speaker"
Emergentism: Ellis

How time flew! One term and a lot of hard work had just gone by. With the benefit of hindsight, which is 20/20, now everything seems to come together and make much greater sense once all the pieces of the jigsaw have been pieced together.

Personally, I have found this class to be very informative, and challenging at times.

On behalf of my classmates and myself, I would like to thank Prof Ortega for her patience and support as she facilitates the lessons and guides us, especially on the many installments of our own projects.

On Thu, Nov 30, we had three presenters who respectively presented their rather advanced project for this course. They were Mi Yung, Jung Min, and Masaki, in order of presentation.

Masaki's presentation was entitled "Novice Language Teachers’ Development in a Japanese Language Immersion Camp".

If you are able or so inclined, please feel free to add to this post.

Many thanks, and happy holidays!