Advisor knowledge: Language, acquisition and learning

You need to know what a language is from the point of view of a teacher, from the point of view of someone who wants to learn a language. A language is not just a linguistic code, it’s also a social practice, you don’t just say anything to anyone at any time. It’s also a vector of culture: words in one language don’t necessarily mean exactly the same thing in another, they carry cultural elements. So there you have all these skills, let’s say linguistic, but also socio-linguistic, psycho-linguistic too, the fact that a language is not the same thing as understanding it or expressing yourself in it, working with it orally, in writing and so on, so there you have it, all these skills that could be summed up roughly as linguistic skills. From a theoretical point of view, it’s all this specialised knowledge that I’ve already talked about, so knowledge about what a language is, what it means to learn a language, what it means to acquire a language, we make a distinction between acquiring and learning, So acquiring refers more to what we know about what goes on in a person’s head when they go from a stage where they don’t know something to a stage where they do, but this process is totally unconscious and involuntary, and that’s what we call acquisition. Du point de vue de l’apprentissage c’est plus justement du domaine de la méthodologie, quelles sont les activités dans lesquelles on peut s’engager pour apprendre, consciemment, volontairement, quelque chose dans le but de l’acquérir. Il faut donc des connaissances linguistiques, des connaissances sur l’acquisition, des connaissances sur l’apprentissage. Quand j’ai dit linguistique j’intègre tout ce qui est fonctionnement non seulement linguistique à proprement parler mais social, de la langue, pragmatique. From the point of view of learning, it’s more a question of methodology: what activities can we engage in in order to learn, consciously, voluntarily, something with the aim of acquiring it? So you need linguistic knowledge, knowledge about acquisition and knowledge about learning. When I say linguistics, I’m including everything that has to do not only with linguistic functioning in the strict sense of the word, but also with social, language and pragmatic functioning.