Learning a foreign language (L2)
as
decoding information (e.g., translation) may be difficult in a local context, such
as in schools and communities where no one around speaks the language, but not
too difficult to address because we can optimize our first language (L1) to the
utmost limit. However, learning L2 speech in the local context in addition to
one’s L1 speech is probably the most complicated and collisional challenge if
it is compared to the other academic achievements in schools pursuing
globalism, such as prulilingualism.
This conflict, which learners,
teachers, and theorists as well, often confront, has its origin in a unique
feature we experience when we learn or teach any L2. In fact, every teaching
plan, in the classroom practice, entails language-in-interaction to maneuver. It
is thus doubled in this sense for us to learn L2 speech by speech; that is, because
we are orally situated in our community, we need to use a spoken language, and
it is so even right at the moment of learning it as the target. Thus, we come
to the long disputed question among theorists, how much we should optimize our
speech. If we increase L1 to optimize our understanding, it hinders our L2
speech. On the contrary, if we get rid of L1 to optimize our L2, we lose a
degree of understanding.
So the bottom line seems to be so far
in our persistent, will-or-choice processes of L1 due to this unique difficulty
of speech learning. In the countries of monolingual society, such as Japan or
Korea, one can hardly acquire the additional linguistic system in a similar way
that he or she has spontaneously (or we should say, “subconsciously”) acquired
the L1. This being the case, the conflict is obviously attributable to the fact
that we have already acquired L1 before the learning starts, and that we cannot
even go through this particular process without accelerating and decelerating
our L1 process.
It is, therefore, not a question derived
from information processing of a sole learner, but an environmental matter of a teacher’s
and learners’ mutual engagement that, through the entire class work, how both become
habituated to the additional unfamiliar system towards the social commitment for
new behaviors or communities. Further, it cost eventually many consistent
efforts to attain this achievement and this is why learning L2 in the local
context is far more difficult and challenging than learning decoding. ao
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