Page 95 - Beyond Methods

Minimizing perceptual mismatches 83
The learner in this episode has the right strategy to solve a prob- lem posed by the task through a process of elimination, but is unable to communicate his ideas clearly because of his limited communicative ability. He employs the familiar communication strategy of circumlocution to get his message across. The teacher, as my interview with her revealed, does not get the learner’s in- tended message, but nevertheless closes the interactional se- quence by saying “OK.”
3. Linguistic mismatch: This source refers to the linguistic reper- toire—syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge of the tar- get language—that is minimally required to do a task, and to talk about it. In this case, the teacher correctly senses that the stu- dent has a problem and offers assistance:
Episode 4.3
T1 Do you need any help?
SI (points to something in the text) T1 Do you know what AC is?
S1 Idon’tknow...Idon’tknow.
T1 It is an abbreviation . . . uh . . . abbreviation means to make some- thing shorter . . . like Mr. . . . United States–U.S. . . . uh . . . it is an air conditioner.
SI Oh, air conditioner.
This is a linguistic mismatch in the sense that the teacher did not expect that a very familiar linguistic abbreviation such as AC would be problematic for the learner.
4. Pedagogicmismatch:Thissourcereferstotheteacherandlearner perceptions of stated or unstated short- or long-term instructional objective(s) of language learning tasks. Consider the following attempt made by the teacher to determine the learners’ percep- tion of the main purpose of the lesson, just finished, on scanning advertisements: