Teaching processability theory in foreign language teacher education
A short report
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/isla.21512Keywords:
processability theory, teachability hypothesis, l2 development, l2 variation, teacher education, media literacy, tertiary educationAbstract
To maximise learners’ second-language (L2) achievements, high-quality training for future L2 teachers is indispensable. This paper reports on an L2 teacher training course that incorporated processability theory (PT) in a German University. PT is a psycholinguistic theory of SLA explaining and predicting L2 development across languages. Because of this focus, PT can be applied in both natural and instructed settings of SLA. Further, the incorporation of the teachability hypothesis increases PT’s relevance for language teachers. After discussing PT and the teachability hypothesis, this paper describes a post-graduate seminar that introduced PT to the students to provide a basic understanding of PT and its relcvance to the foreign-language classroom. Building on that understanding, the students created short explanatory videos on aspects of PT based on the introductory textbook by Pienemann and Keßler (2011). This course design can be used to motivate and stimulate future L2 teachers.
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