Medios de comunicación de emergencias

The genetic method has figured into SCT-L2 research in at least two ways. First is the intra-mental function language itself fulfills in learning a new language. The fact that individuals are confronted with the demanding task of learning a new language creates cognitive dissonance that is far more complex than the forbidden color task described above. To overcome the challenge, learners press their language system into service to mediate their own learning. Lantolf (1997) proposed that private speech serves as a cognitive tool to mediate L2 learning, just as it serves as a cognitive tool to learn other kinds of information. He also argued that learning, in the absence of audible private speech, is not possible and that in fact, private speech provides a glimpse into the learning process itself.

L2 private speech. Several studies have examined the role of private speech in L2 learning. Saville-Troike (1988) studied the private speech of children learning L2 English in a content classroom over a six-month period. The researcher was able to document a relationship between the patterns that children practiced in their private speech phase of development (i.e., the period of time from one to 23 weeks, depending on the child) and the patterns they produced when they began to use English in social interaction with their classmates and teacher. Ohta (2001), Lantolf and Yáñez-Prieto (2003), Lantolf (2003), and de Guerrero (2005) investigated the developmental function of private speech in adult L2 learners. The first three studies collected actual samples of private speech produced in learning environments; the fourth included a great deal of survey data in which learners were asked how they thought they used private speech to learn and think through the L2.

Ohta's study, by far the most robust investigation of adult classroom learners, tracked the private speech of L2 Japanese learners over the course

of an entire academic year. The participants produced three different types of private speech: vicarious response, where an individual privately responds to a question directed to someone else, completes another's utterance, or repairs an error committed by someone else; repetition, where an individual repeats a word, phrase, or entire utterance produced by someone else or by the learner himself/herself; manipulation, where an individual modifies morphosyntactic or phonological patterns usually produced by someone else. The last two types, which in my view, qualify as imitation, were documented by Lantolf (2003), Lantolf and Yáñez-Prieto (2003) and Saville- Troike (1988). A significant difference between the adults and the children, however, is that the adults also used their L1 as metalanguage to organize and comment on their performance, while the children did not. For example, the learner studied by Lantolf and Yáñez-Prieto (2003, p. 106) when vicariously (to use Ohta's terminology) participating in an exchange between the instructor and another student regarding verb agreement in Spanish se-passive constructions, not only completes the instructor's utterance directed at another student (“Se what?”) with the correct past- tense plural form of the verb vendieron “they sold,” but also tells herself, quietly in English, “I knew it!” Lee (2006) documents use of L1 Korean and L2 English private speech among students enrolled in a US medical school. The students used L2 to work on correct pronunciation of new bio-medical terms but relied on their L1 to internalize the meanings of terms. Centeno- Cortés (2003) in a genetic study of Spanish L2 learners during study abroad was able to document the early appearance of specific features of Spanish in learner private speech and use of the same features in later social speech.

Social mediation. The genetic method has also been used in SCT-L2 research to explore the influence of social mediation on L2 development. The study reported in Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994) analyzes the effects of learner-expert interaction in the ZPD among three L2 learners of English. In tracing the development of four high-frequency grammatical features (i.e., article use, tense marking, preposition use, and modal verbs) over a two- month period the study presents four significant findings. First, mediation negotiated in the ZPD between learner and expert varies across an explicit- implicit continuum, such that learner control over a particular L2 feature is a function of movement along the continuum, with less control being indicated by more explicit mediation and enhanced control by more implicit mediation on the part of the expert. Second, different linguistic features for the same learner may require different levels (explicit-implicit) of mediation, and mediation relative to the same linguistic feature may vary across learners. Third, microgenetic development passes through five

different levels beginning at the lowest level where even with explicit mediation the learner has little if any awareness and virtually no control over use of a particular feature and culminating at the level where the learner uses the feature systematically and correctly with self-repair when necessary. Lantolf and Poehner (2006) refined the five-level developmental trajectory, when they discovered that even when learner performance is relatively error-free and when learners were able to self-correct mistakes, they continue to look to the mediator for confirmation that their performance was indeed appropriate. Fourth, effectiveness of mediation along the mediational continuum (or regulatory scale, to use Aljaafreh and Lantolf's terminology) is not a matter of whether it is implicit or explicit in any absolute sense, but what a particular learner needs as negotiated with a mediator.

Swain and her colleagues have investigated the effect of peer mediation on L2 learning. An important aspect of the languaging framework that informs Swain's research is the argument that even though speaking appears to be communicative it can, simultaneously have a psychological function. This notion is rooted in Vygotsky's (1987) claim that speech is a reflexive tool that can be directed outwardly at other individuals and inwardly at the speaker. Wells (1999) argues that this dual potential of speech (and writing) can occur simultaneously so that when talking to others, one can at the same time be talking to the self. Swain and Lapkin (2002) and Tocalli-Beller and Swain (2005) demonstrate the positive effects on learning of peer languaging activity. In both studies the researchers documented learning, at least in the short term, through use of post-tests developed on the basis of those language features that were in focus during language related episodes (LREs) (i.e., segments of dialog where learners negotiate form rather than meaning). They provide evidence that learners are able to mediate each other's as well as their own learning through talk. An especially important finding of this research is that even though learners ostensibly focus on the same language feature during LREs they do not necessarily appropriate precisely the same thing from the interaction. This can be explained by the fact that learners do not necessarily have the same ZPD. Finally, Swain and her colleagues observed that during LREs, the learners not only produced speech that was intended for their interlocutor, but they also generated talk that clearly displayed the profile of private speech (i.e., low volume, lack of eye contact, and no apparent expectation of a response; see Saville-Troike, 1988).

Applications

From the early days of the field SLA researchers have worried about the application of theory and research to pedagogical practice. Indeed, Crookes (1998, p. 6) notes that “If the relationship were simple, or not a source of concern, I do not think it would come up so often.” The solution that most SLA researchers have proposed for addressing the research-practice gap has been focused on ways of making research findings and theoretical models comprehensible and usable for classroom teachers (see Erlam, 2008). Another way of dealing with the troubling situation is to propose an approach which unifies theory/research and practice into a single reciprocal system. In the following section, I consider such a solution in some detail.

L2 praxis

Vygotsky was a profoundly dialectical thinker, who understood the advantages of unifying rather than dichotomizing oppositional perspectives in the study of human psychological processes (Levitin, 1982). This not only enabled him to create a new psychology that overcame the crisis stemming from the long-standing Cartesian mind-body dualism that had afflicted psychology virtually from its inception, but it also allowed him to propose insightful solutions to specific problems within psychology. One of these had to do with the relationship between theory/research and practice, a dichotomy that was particularly problematic for education and which finds its contemporary instantiation in the theory/research-practice gap in applied linguistics.

According to Vygotsky, in dualistic approaches to science theory was “not dependent on practice” instead “practice was the conclusion, the application, an excursion beyond the boundaries of science, an operation which lay outside science and came after, which began after the scientific operation was considered completed” (Vygotsky, 1926/2004, p. 304). In dialectical epistemology, on the other hand, practice is integrated with theory in that it “sets the tasks and serves as the supreme judge of theory, as its truth criterion” (ibid.). On this view, theory without practice is verbalizm, while practice without theory is mindless activity (Vygotsky, 1987). The unity of theory and practice is known as praxis (see Sanchez Vazquez, 1977) as derived from Marx's well-known Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Marx, 1978, p. 145) [italics in

original].

In praxis the unity of theory and practice means that each component necessarily informs and guides the other. The worry of whether or not theory/research applies to teaching is mitigated by the very nature of praxis itself. The research that tests the theory is practice and the process that guides practice is the theory. Hence, there is no gap between theory and practice to bridge because both the processes necessarily work in consort always and everywhere.

Beginning with Negueruela's (2003) dissertation, praxis has been taken seriously by SCT-L2 researchers. This research is carried out in real classrooms and is designed to implement and thereby test the principles of the theory in educational activity, while at the same time improving learning through theory-guided practice. Several other dissertations followed Negueruela's (see below), and Lantolf and Poehner (2008) published an edited volume, which is a collection of chapters reporting on praxis-based L2 research.