Wes' case

Wes' case

1. Young Japanese artist

   • Honolulu, United States
     • Learn English without instruction
       • Study conducted by Richard Schmidt
     • Three years
       • Promotional tours, exhibitions of paintings, etc, all in English
         • Transformation of his second language capacities are remarkable
           • Able to narrate, describe and joke
             • charming conversationalist: - topics - steering conversations
         • All his aquantances were in English
       • Wes used English daily (75%-90% of the time)
   • Financially and socially comfortable position
   • Strong professional identity as an artist
     • Confident in who he was
   • Predisposition towards communication
     • Possitive attitude towards learning
   • "Minimal" communicative ability in English

2. Grammatical competence

   • Wes temporal L2 system rudimentary
     • Usage of: -ing verbs and past irregular verbs
     • Lack of -ed verbs
     • Using adverbs and lexical messages to express tense and aspect
     • Stuck in transition btw the lexical marking stage and the next stage of development
     • His articles and plurals had minimal improvement
       • This changes greatly due to the repetition of certain chunks

3. Sociolinguistic repertoire

   • He was able to issue request, hint, make suggestions ( indirectly if they are too strong)

4. Strategic competence

   • He solved communicative problems
     • Heuristic helped him solve immediate meaning- maling needs
     • Never with dictionaries or asking others

5. ‘sensitivity to form’ or the drive to pay attention to the language code

   • Single ingredient missing in Wes’s efforts to learn the L2
     • Schmidt
       • Positive attitudes and an optimalenvironment will afford the linguistic data needed for learning
       • Learning won't happen unless the learner engages in active processing of those data
         • Grammar acquisition cannot be successful without applying ‘interest’, ‘attention’ and ‘hard work’ to the task of cracking the language code.
           • The kernel of the Noticing Hypothesis was born