Tuesday, September 10th, 2024
12:30 pm – 2 pm
Ponderosa Commons North 2012
6445 University Blvd, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
RSVP
The Experience of Error in Adult Language Learning
We often think of language learning as a continuous process of learning from our mistakes: producing incorrect, inappropriate, ill-formed utterances, to which experienced and proficient speakers offer correction or feedback. However, what mistakes and errors are, how they relate to the knowledge of language, what causes them, and how language learners deal with the mistakes and errors they make are very much points of contention in language education research.
This dissertation aims to contribute to the scholarly debates and discussions on the topic by approaching the question of error in language learning from a distinctly educational angle, which highlights the existential and ethical dimensions of committing, and learning from, one’s errors in the context of coming into a new language. Drawing on scholarly discussions in second language acquisition research, educational ethics, pragmatism and phenomenology, I argue that the experience of error is more than the mere realization of epistemic or linguistic failure. Rather, it is a complex process in which the student’s very subjectivity is transformed as she interacts with experienced speakers and knowers in the new linguistic community. Such an experience is twofold, including an intersubjective, discursive and normative dimension, corresponding to the Hegelian notion of Erfahrung, as well as a first-person, subjective and existentially significant aspect for the individual (Erlebnis).
Finally, my dissertation examines the possibility of attending educationally to the ethically and existentially charged experience of error in language learning. Drawing on Claudia Ruitenberg’s reading of Derrida’s ethic of hospitality of education, I examine the appearance of error in the language classroom as a type of unexpected, uninvited “guest”, which can unsettle and disturb, but also expand and enrich, the discursive and hermeneutical possibilities of the host language and culture.