Browsing by Subject "Skill learning"

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    Extended skill learning
    (Frontiers Media, 2020-08-14) Baggs, Edward; Raja Galián, Vicente; Anderson, Michael L.; Filosofía
    Within the ecological and enactive approaches in cognitive science, a tension exists in how the process of skill learning is understood. Skill learning can be understood in a narrow sense, as a process of bodily change over time, or in an extended sense, as a change in the structure of the animal–environment system. We propose to resolve this tension by rejecting the first understanding in favor of the second. We thus defend an extended approach to skill learning. An extended understanding of skill learning views bodily changes as being embedded in a larger process of interaction between the organism and specific structures in the environment. Such an extended approach is committed to the claims that (1) the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding skill learning is not the body but the activity and (2) learning consists in the establishment and adaptive organization of enabling constraints on that activity. We focus on two example cases: maintaining upright posture and walking. In both cases, environmental structures play a constitutive role in the activity throughout learning, but the specific environmental structures that are involved in the activity change over time. At an early stage, the child makes use of an environmental “support”—for example, holding onto furniture to maintain upright posture. Later, once further constraints have been established, the child is able to let go of the furniture and remain upright. We argue that adopting an extended understanding of skill learning offers a promising strategy for unifying ecological and enactive approaches and can also potentially ground a radically embodied approach to higher cognition.
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    Taking scripts as a model of lesson organisation for the integration of culture and language in ELT.
    (Universidad de Alicante, 2009-11-15) Criado, Raquel; Filología Inglesa
    Culture and language are two intertwined constructs essential to understand the interpretation of reality by different communities. Apprehending the foreign language culture is thus vital to attain genuine and fully communicative competence in the L2. This article specifically focuses on the teaching of scripts in ELT. Scripts (Shank and Abelson, 1977) are defined as proceduralised sequences of events of a temporal, cause-and-effect nature which underlie daily stereotyped situations. In this work, scripts are also regarded as cognitive sequences of events for culturally idiosyncratic situations pertaining to a certain linguistic population. The objective of this article is to propose the integration of culture and language teaching in ELT by means of the pedagogical adaptation of scripts for cultural situations made up of an ordered sequence of events. This will be accomplished through the “Communicative Processes-based model of activity sequencing” (CPM). The present proposal attempts at compensating the shortage of traditional culture teaching, which has been almost exclusively restricted to lexis or Elementary Meaning Units (Lado, 1957). The CPM adaptation will be illustrated with a complete ELT lesson created by the author for the script of the Cheese-Rolling festival in the English region of Cotswolds. This lesson will be critically analysed from cultural, pedagogical and cognitive perspectives.