Innovation in Language Learning

The presentation will describe beginning on-line university foreign language courses in Chinese, Russian and Spanish which in teaching students to orally communicate in these languages employ Usage-Based Instruction (UBI). UBI is a pedagogical approach which borrowed its name, and was inspired by usage-based model of language and language acquisition. Usage-based theory of language represents a relatively novel view of language and language acquisition shared by scholars in such areas a Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar, Corpus Linguistics, Usage-Based Linguistics, and Cognitive Perspective in Second Language Acquisition. Closely associated with this view is the Competition Model and the Theory of Connectionism. The main tenets of usage-based concept of language are: linguistic system in the mind of the language learner arises from specific exemplars of use; language is a large array of meaningful units or constructions – conventionalized pairings of form and meaning; frequency is the main determinant of language acquisition; language is learned and is learned as anything else; both L2 and L1 learning are seen as essentially similar processes and rely on a single set of language learning mechanisms. The learning mechanisms involved in language learning are rich memory, categorization, associative learning, pattern-finding, schema-formation, automatization, entrenchment, chunking, analogy and imitation. At the described university, this perspective was laid into the foundation of Usage-Based Instruction – an innovative pedagogical approach to teaching students to communicate in the target foreign language which has been successfully applied for a number of years in both face-to-face and on-line language courses. In our presentation, we will attempt to demonstrate how seamlessly this perspective can be integrated with on-line delivery. In the development of our fully on-line asynchronous language courses, we, for the most part, take advantage of Voice Thread, a cloud application which allows both students and instructors to upload, share and discuss documents, presentations, images, audio files, and videos; comment on slides by means of the microphone, webcam, text, phone or audio-file upload. Additionally, the courses rely on such tools as Blackboard Collaborate, discussion forum, assignments, and tests.

Keywords: usage-based theory of language acquisition; usage-based instruction, on-line foreign language teaching;