Language conventions — paradoxically — as grounds for EFL students’ (oracy-oriented) personal experience

https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.5-18.026

Michał Daszkiewicz,

PhD

University of Gdańsk, Poland

e-mail: pedmd@univ.gda.pl

The paper addresses the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of the conventional underlying the personal in foreign language learning, i.e. how the presence of fixed language elements (collocations etc.) contributes to EFL learners’ subjective sensation of personally meaningful educational experience. Resting on the rationale of FL learning taking the form of composing^[1], the paper aims to outline observations justifying the application of ready-given word combinations (which, by some theoreticians and practitioners, tend to be disparaged as being not ambitious or developmental enough). It discusses the key point from the four perspectives: pedagogica — whereby the fact of students’ uttering subject matter is cherished, didactic — here the so-called ‘directed utterances’ are advocated, linguistic — in the case of which the pivotal issue is exemplified with one specific semantic field, and psycholinguistic perspective — whereby EFL learners’ awareness of conceptual relationships within and across topics (“formal control”) proves highly conducive to learning and as such merits being treated as a central educational objective. Although the examples included in the paper are derived from EFL materials, the overall approach presented herein applies to all other disciplines and subjects.

Keywords: foreign language learning, educational experience, linguistic.

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