给养与外语教育

Affordances and Foreign Language Education

在过去的十年左右,社会文化理论及其相关的生态语言学开始对我国外语教学与研究产生影响,而给养作为生态语言教学的一个核心概念在外语教育界也得到越来越多的关注。本文首先梳理给养的定义、特征、分类及其理论框架,接着述评给养的实证研究并勾画出近年一种趋势,即把给养与自主、能动和身份认同等概念结合起来考察外语教育。在此基础上,本文采用给养的视角,重新分析先前在自主性理论背景下完成的一项研究所聚焦的现象,即英语教育专业学生大学四年特别是一年级的学习经历。通过对原质性资料的再解读,本文认为把给养的概念引进自主性的研究会拓宽自主性研究的视野,加深对自主性及相关概念如能动性和身份认同的理解,最终对外语教学与研究也是有益的。

In the past ten years or so,social cultural theory and its related discipline,ecological linguistics,began to have an impact on foreign language teaching and research in China. As a core concept in ecology of language learning,affordance has increasingly captured the attention of educators and researchers in foreign language education in China. This article first presents and discusses the definitions,characteristics,classifications and theoretical frameworks of affordance. It then provides a brief reviewof empirical studies on affordance in foreign language education,which identifies a research trend in recent years-that is,relating affordance to the notions of autonomy,agency and identity in foreign language education. Based on this reviewand adopting an affordance perspective,this paper revisits and reanalyzes the data originating from a previous study by the first author( Huang,2011,2013) focusing on the long-term development of autonomy of a group of BA TEFL students over four years( especially their first year experiences) in a mainland Chinese university. Through reinterpreting the original qualitative data from an affordance perspective,this paper draws a conclusion that bringing the concept of affordance to research on autonomy will broaden our vision on autonomy,and deepen our understanding of autonomy and related notions such as agency and identity. Research in this light will eventually benefit foreign language teaching and research.