English 401 Electronic Reserve Text:Claire J. Kramsch, "Language Acquisition and Language Learning," From: Joseph Gibaldi, ed. Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. New York: MLA, 1992.THE inclusion of language acquisition and learning in the second edition of thisvolume is a noteworthy event, for many readers probably do not engage in second-language research but pursue literary or linguistic studies and teach language classes. For those readers, I would like to place the field of research I describe here in its proper relation to the teaching they do.Foreign language pedagogy has long been guided, directly or indirectly, by theories of language and learning. These theories have given rise to various methods or approaches, which have found their way into textbooks and syllabi and, in bits and pieces, into teachers' practices. H. H. Stern gives an exhaustive account of the history of language teaching and its relation to the theoretical thought of various disciplines. Until recently, however, language teachers have not based their teaching consistently on theoretical research. Most of them learned their craft on the job, teaching the way they were taught and the way their teachers were taught. Both literature scholars and linguists were convincedthat learning a language was only a matter of memory, repetition, and hard work and of acquiring skills that students would then learn to use by going to the country where the language was spoken. Language teachers knew nothing of how people learn languages or of why some learners fail and others succeed.My own career is a case in point. Trained in German literature and philology and called on to teach German language classes, I remember my despair at not understanding the most elementary principles of language use. I had to teach conversation classes but did not understand the systematics of conversation; I had to teach texts but had not been told what a text is; I had to correct errors butdid not know why errors had been made. I remember my amazement one day inthe early 1970s when I happened on studies in conversation and discourse analysis, and I immersed myself in the new field of second-language-acquisition research. Everything I taught started making sense. Everything I researched fell into place.I began to see that literature and language scholars and teachers have much to learn from each other. Literature scholars can broaden their critical tools by applying to literary texts the same methods of discourse analysis that language-acquisition scholars use for analyzing the production of public discourses, including the discourse of the language classroom itself. At the same time, language-acquisition scholars can broaden their reflection on language learning to include not just the functional uses of language but also the figurative uses aspresentation[54]and representation of reality (Widdowson, Stylistics). Moreover, literature scholars can bring to language teaching their unique training in the critical analysisI would tell the novice language teacher, Go beyond the textbook you teach andlearn about the way language is spoken and used. The literature you study and the language you teach are practiced in language as social practice, and "language has its rules of use without which rules of grammar would be useless" (Hymes 278). Read work in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics as well as in linguistic approaches to literature. Understand the foreign culture youteach not only through its literature but also through its social sciences andH. H. Stern's Fundamental Concepts Of Language Teaching is the standard reference work for all foreign language teachers, along with Wilga M. Rivers, Teaching Foreign Language Skills; Sandra Savignon, Communicative Competence: Theory and Classroom Practice; and H. Douglas Brown, Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. The United Stares proficiency orientation in language teaching is best illustrated in Alice Omaggio, Teaching Language in Context.There are five major iournals: TESOL Quarterly and Modern Language Journal contain an easily readable mix of empirical research and pedagogic articles; Applied Linguistics, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and Language Learning contain more difficult theoretical and empirical studies.Of professional interest are the Proficiency Guidelines, published by the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL); Helen Komblum's Directory of Professional Preparation Programs in TESOL in the United States, and the publications of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington,University of California, BerkeleyNOTE(1) I am grateful to Carl Blyth, Heidi Byrrles, and Jane Swaffar, as well as tothemany anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.Works CitedAllen, J. P. B, Maria Frohlich, and Nina Spada. "The Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching: An Observation Scheme." On TESOL '83: The Question of[72]Control. Ed. Jean Handscombe, Richard A. Orem, and Barry Taylor. Washington: TESOL, 1984. 231-52.Allwright, Richard. Observation in the Language Classroom. New York: Longman, 1988.American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages. ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. Hastings-on·Hudson: ACTFL, 1986.Anderson, Richard C., and David A. Ausubel, eds. Readings in the Psychology ofCognition.New York: Holt, 1965.Bailey, Kathleen. "Competitiveness and Anxiety in Adult Second Language Learning: Looking at and through the Diary Studies." Seliger and Long