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Discourse Worlds in the Classroom and in Foreign Language Learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Willis J. Edmondson
Willis J. Edmondson
Affiliation:
University of Hamburg
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Abstract

The paper begins to explore the nature of the cognitive processing involved in foreign language learning. The notion of a “discourse world” as a set of elements against the background of which a unit of talk makes sense is introduced, and the claim is made that several such “discourse worlds” may be seen to coexist in classroom discourse, in part because of participants' “awareness” (on some level) of why they are there. The notion of a discourse world is then given a psychological interpretation in terms of frame-theory, and the view is argued that the simultaneous activation of several such frames is central to the business of understanding language, and to language learning. The classroom, it is argued, offers rich opportunities for the training of such multi-level perception of foreign language input, with consequent gains in learning. From this perspective Krashen's Monitor Theory is found implausible.

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 159 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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