'Cognition' Ortega, L. (2009)

'Cognition' Ortega, L. (2009)

1. Information processing

   • Emerged in the 1970s
   • It became the dominant physcological paradigm
   • The human mid is viewed as as a symbolic processor that engages with mental processes.
     • Input
     • Output
   • Key assumptions
     • Representation and access
     • Automatic or fluent and voluntary or controlled
     • Attention and memory are limited
   • Skill acquistion theory
     • Learning as the gradual transformation of perfomance from controlled to automatic.
       • Declarative or explicit knowledge
       • Procedural or implicit knowledge
       • Long-term memory (representative and unlimited)
         • Recollection of facts and events
         • Skills and habit learning. Things that we know without knowing that we know them.
         • Remember a word
           • Strenght
           • Size
           • Depth
   • Working memory (access and limited)
     • ‘The workspace where skill development begins ... and where knowledge is encoded into (and retrieved from) long-term memory’
       • It is where we develop, apply, and hone our metalinguistic insights into an L2.
   • Attention
     • It heightens the activation level of input in working memory, allowing it to remain there for longer through rehearsal and thus making it available for further processing and for entering long-term memory.
     • Limited
     • Selective
     • Voluntary
     • Access to consciousness
   • Types of learning
     • Incidental
       • Learning without intention
     • Implicit
       • Learning without attention
         • Detection
         • Noticing
       • Learning without awareness
       • Learning without rules
     • Explicit

2. My thinking

   • I really liked its structure, it was very clear and organized, as well as the examples provided in order to clarify one concept. Regarding the contents, I consider this topic is very complex since the brain is itself complex; however, I was able to recognize some of these key aspects in my own learning, such as working memory and attention: the first because I use it when trying to speak in French, trying to remember its rules and syntax; the second when putting in practice my listening skills because it's very difficult for me to concetrate and understand. In general, I do believe cognition plays an important role in second language acquistion.