Dr. Iván Castillo-Lema
Iván is an Argentine linguist who has taught Spanish second-language acquisition courses at universities in Argentina, Brazil, and the UK for more than twenty-five years. His research focuses on tense and aspect, pragmatics, and how Spanish behaves under contact with other languages. He writes for LanguagePlans about the parts of Spanish that look simple to teachers and turn out to be structurally complicated for learners.
- The aspect hypothesis
- The interaction hypothesis
- Task-based language teaching
- Cross-linguistic influence
- Corrective feedback
5 pieces in the archive.
Recasts vs prompts, the corrective feedback you give without knowing it.
Roy Lyster sat in French immersion classrooms in Montreal and counted every correction the teachers gave for a year. Fifty-five percent of those corrections came in one form. It was also the form that produced the least learning.
The Aspect Hypothesis, why preterite versus imperfect is harder than we admit, in a predictable way.
Roger Andersen, Yasuhiro Shirai, and Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig built one of the most replicable findings in second language acquisition. The order in which learners pick up preterite and imperfect is not random. It is structured by the kind of verb the marker lands on.
Task-based language teaching, the framework that distinguishes a task from a worksheet.
Rod Ellis, Michael Long, and Peter Skehan built the most rigorous instructional framework second language acquisition has produced. Most US Spanish teachers say they run task-based instruction. Almost none of them actually do. The gap is the definition of task.
The interaction hypothesis, what conversation does that one-way input cannot.
Michael Long built on Krashen and went past him. Comprehensible input alone, Long argued, is not what drives acquisition. The work happens in the negotiation of meaning. Conversation, not lecture. The empirical record over thirty years has held up his argument.
Cross-linguistic influence, what teachers used to call transfer, and what we know now.
Scott Jarvis and Aneta Pavlenko cleaned up forty years of confused thinking about how a learner's first language affects their second. The category we used to call interference turns out to be a much more interesting set of effects than the negative framing suggested.
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