BASEES Talks: 'Why Don’t Learners Learn What Teachers Teach?’

Processing in the language classroom and what we can do about it

 A talk by Natalia V. Parker (University of Leeds)

Monday, 17 May, 4pm (BST) on Zoom , Registration

Whether we teach Russian at a University or at a school, we often discover that passing our knowledge to our students can sometimes be quite challenging, and that our learners do not necessarily learn what we teach. In this talk, I will discuss how cognitive psychology explains this issue, how this applies to teaching Russian which is rather different from English and is classified by the United States Defence Language Institute as a "category 3 language" in terms of the difficulties that it poses to English speakers, and more importantly, how we can address it.

We will examine the teaching process and the learning process separately and then compare them to identify the points of misalignment. In order to establish some possible ways of adjusting this misalignment, thus optimizing the learning process, we will look at some relevant findings in Second Language Acquisition and Psycholinguistics, to see how these could be applied to real classroom situations. Using Russian case inflection morphology, I will illustrate, with a few practical examples, how the processing of explicit information and its proceduralization can be facilitated.

I hope that this talk could help us view what we do in a classroom from a slightly different perspective and perhaps answer some of the questions that any language teacher asks themselves at some point during their career.

Natalia V. Parker is an educator, a linguist and a language practitioner. Trained in Foreign Language Teaching in Russia, Natalia taught Russian for several years, developing a new teaching methodology. Last year, Routledge published Natalia’s textbook Russian in Plain English: A Very Basic Russian Starter for Complete Beginners. She is now in the last year of her PhD at the Russian Studies Department at the University of Leeds. n.v.parker@leeds.ac.uk