A Critical Analysis Of Second Language Acquisition Theories And A Proposition Of A Dialogical Constructivist Model

Theories of second language acquisition (SLA) have never been in a shortage. From a historical perspective, there are mainly three traditions in the theories of second language acquisition: the old-fashioned behaviorist tradition, the prevailing cognitive scientific research tradition, and the arising sociocultural tradition. A critical analysis of some of them is crucial to the hypothesis of a new model of SLA, a dialogical constructivist model. Some theories, as counter-examples, may provide their disvalue, such as the behaviorist views of SLA and the prevailing information-processing models of SLA. Others, however, may serve as the stable theoretical foundation on which the new model is supposed to be established, and which include the cognitive constructivist perspective of SLA and the arising social interaction theory of SLA.This paper claims that the study of SLA can never be separated from the locally social and cultural contexts or settings, in which and only within which SLA is able to happen. Moreover, SLA is bound to take place in dynamic processes of sociocultural interactions, which can be seen in particular as discursive practice or speech genres. Language learning is thus equal to the learning of speech genres given in various sociocultural contexts. Speech is dialogically, and is manifested in the form of utterance which is always in a dialogic relation with other utterances that precede it. This is what Bakhtin's dialogical theory surpasses Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. Marysia Johnson has merged their theories and proposed her own dialogically based model of SLA, which performs the function of part of the theoretical foundation of the new model presented in this paper.Another part is Marion Williams and Robert L Burden's social constructivist model of SLA. It combines together Feuerstein's social interaction theory, which focuses more on language teaching practice than theory, with the prevailing and powerful cognitive constructivist views of SLA. In their model, they place emphasis on the four key factors, teachers, learners, tasks, and contexts, which they think play crucial roles in the teaching-learning process of SLA. They claim: learners are the center of this process, who learn what is meaningful to them in ways that are meaningful to them; tasks are the interface through which teachers and learners interact with each other; teachers are reflective practitioners and mediators, who attempt to foster language acquisition by means of continuous reflection of their actions and beliefs; contexts, in which learning takes place, have great impact on learning process.The goal of this paper is to merge Johnson's dialogical model and Williams et al.'s social constructivist model into a new model of SLA, which is called by the author the dialogical constructivist model of SLA. The essence of this new model can be mainly summarized as: (1) SLA knowledge building takes place in locally social contexts; (2) all participants of SLA knowledge building, namely, theoreticians, teachers, learners, tasks or activities, and contexts, are in a dynamic interactive relation, and have equal status and rights; (3) the self-construction process is crucial for L2 learners, that is, that only through constructing what is meaningful to them in meaningful ways can learners acquire second language; (4) teachers should often construct and reconstruct beliefs about learners, tasks and themselves in the teaching-learning process through conversational discourse analysis; (5) tasks and activities should be designed according to dialogically speech genres, and be evaluated based on the principle that whether and in what degree they can make learners internalized dialogically speech genres; so on and so forth. This model, of course, has many limitations.