MILE5000 Chap.1 Cognitive and Social Approaches to Language Learning
Cognitive and Social Approaches to Language Learning
Two traditions with different starting assumptions
Second language research grew from borrowed disciplines, and the set reading for the first week argues that the division between cognitive and social work comes from the assumptions those disciplines carry. One side looks for answers in the mind or brain, measures them indirectly through tasks and experiments, and aims at relationships that hold across settings.
The other looks for answers in interaction and its social outcomes, treats discourse as its evidence and accepts that findings belong to the situation that produced them.
How the cognitive line developed
Generative grammar supplied testable hypotheses and the view that first language acquisition is innate.
Teaching turned to comprehensible input, and the errors that followed prompted the Interaction Hypothesis and later the Output Hypothesis. Combined, these form the interaction approach, the dominant model in the field, which holds that learners learn by noticing gaps between their own production and other speakers' and that input and interaction with feedback are both necessary.
The reading notes that cognitive assumptions have become so common that many studies adopt them without saying so.
How the social line developed, and the attempts to join them
Social approaches drew on sociology and turned to agency, identity and investment, with investment used explicitly in contrast to motivation.
The open break is dated to 1997, when discourse studies built on cognitive assumptions were criticised as individualistic and mechanistic.
Emergentism, sociocultural theory, sociocognitive theory and complex dynamic systems theory each try to hold both sides, but the reading explains why research still tends to fall into one camp: a study's methods must align with what it assumes its object to be.
Why this matters for the coursework
Every article you critique and every project you design sits somewhere on this map.
Placing it first stops you criticising a social study for failing to generalise or a cognitive study for ignoring context, and it tells you what kind of conclusion the design can support.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why second language research divided into two traditions
- 02
Ontology and epistemology in plain terms
- 03
The interaction approach and its hypotheses
- 04
Agency, identity and investment
- 05
The 1997 statement of the split
- 06
Theories that try to join cognitive and social work
- 07
Three classroom implications from sociocultural theory
Worked example · free
Place a study before critiquing it
- 2Identify the tradition from the evidence the study uses.
- 2Explain why the classmate's criticism assumes the other tradition.
- 2Offer a criticism that fits the study's own assumptions.
Key terms
- Ontology
- Assumptions about what the phenomena under study actually are, for example whether learning is a process in the mind or an outcome of interaction.
- Epistemology
- Assumptions about how those phenomena can be known, which decide whether experiments, statistics or interpreted discourse count as evidence.
- Interaction Approach
- The dominant cognitive model holding that learning occurs when learners notice differences between their own output and their interlocutors', with input and interaction as necessary conditions.
- Investment
- A social construct describing a learner's commitment to a language practice, used in contrast to motivation to keep social structure and power in view.
- Emergentism
- The view that language arises out of interacting, simpler factors that are not themselves linguistic, which treats social processes as part of cognition.
- Praxis
- The sociocultural principle that theory should be practical and practice theoretical, which ties the theory's research closely to teaching.
Cognitive and Social Approaches to Language Learning FAQ
Is the split between cognitive and social research real?
The reading argues it is real in research and false in people. Researchers divide because their methods must fit their assumptions, yet when anyone learns, teaches or does research they act socially, cognitively and bodily at once. Treat it as a map of research traditions that helps you place a study, not as a description of two kinds of learner.
What is the input, interaction and output model?
It is the cognitive tradition's dominant account, built from three hypotheses in turn. Comprehensible input is necessary; interaction lets learners negotiate meaning and receive feedback; producing output lets them notice what they cannot yet say. The model's central mechanism is noticing the gap between one's own production and another speaker's.
Why does the social tradition prefer investment to motivation?
Motivation is usually treated as a property of the individual, measured and correlated with outcomes. Investment describes commitment that depends on social conditions, such as whether a learner is given the right to speak in a community. Using it keeps attention on structure, ideology and power, which a purely psychological construct can push aside.
Assessment move
Take the three most recent articles you have read for any course and sort them into the two columns of the comparison table in this chapter. For each, write the one sentence of its conclusion that would be unfair to criticise from the other tradition. Doing this once makes the placement step automatic when you open the article you choose for the critique.
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