Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd. ed.

Foundations of Linguistics - Approaches and Concepts:

Constructivism, applied linguistics, and language education

Thomas Cobb
Dépt. de linguistique et de didactique des langues
Université du Québec à Montréal
Montréal, Canada

March 2005

Tom Cobb taught English for specific purposes (medicine,

engineering) for several years at universities in Canada and
abroad (Saudi Arabia, Oman, Hong Kong), and then did a
PhD in educational technology involving constructivist
approaches to exploiting information technology in language
learning. He now gives courses and directs dissertations
involving computation and language instruction at a French-
language university in Montreal.

Abstract
Constructivism, the notion that knowledge must be assembled from pieces
rather than assimilated whole, has been a principal learning theory in
psychology for about 20 years and in psycholinguistics for 10. The theory is
now making a strong entry into educational thinking, but in language
education it is less in evidence. That is because applied linguists have “always
been constructivists,” implicitly, and have already confronted some of the
implementation problems facing constructivism in mathematics or science
education. Nevertheless, a more explicit understanding of the constructivist
 approach is useful within language education, particularly in providing a
framework for exploiting information technologies.

Keywords
Constructivist, constructivism, objectivism, learner-as-linguist, language
technologies, second language acquisition, educational reform

Cross-references
Second language acquisition; Teaching technologies, second language;
Communicative Language Teaching; Corpus studies, second language; Vocabulary,
second language

Text
Reading the educational research literature of the last 10 years, one encounters many
instances of the terms ‘constructivist’ and ‘constructivism.’ Here education is
following its parent discipline, psychology, where the occurrence of these terms
‘multiplied five-fold … between 1980 and 2000’ (Mahoney, 2003). Unfortunately,
one might also emerge from these encounters without a very clear idea of what these
terms actually mean. In recent classroom-based research, constructivism often seems
loosely associated with any type of student-centered or project-based learning. In
more theoretical research, the situation is no more clear. In Constructivism in
education, Steffe and Gale (1995) identify no fewer than six core paradigms of
constructivism, namely social constructivism, radical constructivism, social
constructionism, information-processing constructivism, cybernetic or systems
constructivism, and sociocultural or mediated-action constructivism (1995, p. xiii).
It is somewhat difficult to determine (or indeed “construct”) any sense of what is
common across these approaches, partly because of their proponents’ tendency to
wage private battles against each other rather than a common foe.
And yet there is a common foe implicitly known to all constructivists, if not always
stated, and that is the epistemological claim (variously designated as dualist,
positivist, objectivist, or Cartesian) that knowledge in the head is both separate from
and an objective representation of an out-there reality, and further, that the
transmission of whole, objective representations from out-there to in-here is the
main business of education. The positions can be distinguished by differing stances
toward external reality:

• it does not exist, or it may exist but we have no way of knowing much about it
(von Glasersfeld);
• it exists objectively, but it cannot enter a learner’s head whole from out-there,
rather must be reconstructed in-here through piecemeal encounters with
previously unencoded data (Spiro);
• … and the success of this depends hugely on what has been constructed
previously (Bruner);
• it exists intersubjectively, and must be reconstructed by each learner, but this
works best as a social not individual operation (Vygotsky).

For a more detailed linking of names to ideas, see Ryder’s excellent online collection
of hundreds of new and classic constructivist documents, or an insightful review of
Steffe and Gales’ book by Jaworski, both online.

For psycholinguists, the particular reality that must be reconstructed piecemeal from
data by each language learner is, of course, the grammar of a language. For
Chomsky (e.g., 1980), a universal grammar exists in each human mind, whole and
prior to the arrival of any linguistic data, and indeed is the precondition for building
a system out of such data. But this idea has been strongly disputed since the mid-
1980s by constructivists, emergentists, construction grammarians, and
connectionists, whose neural-network computer simulations seem to show that
grammatical systems could be constructed from interacting instances alone, i.e.,
from raw data. On this view, the rules and structures of language do not precede
instances but rather ‘emerge from simple developmental processes being exposed to
massive and complex environmental input’ (in the words of Nick Ellis, whose 1998
paper provides a broad review of the idea). In approaches to language acquisition,
then, constructivism is an important and novel idea.

Against such a background, it seems truly amazing that if you enter the
term constructivism into the search engine of a major journal in applied linguistics,
you come up with a resounding “Not found.” The journals Applied
Linguistics and Language Learning, at least in the years covered by their online
collections, apparently offer no titles or references whatever bearing this term. Why
is this? Let me introduce a perspective on this question through a homely analogy.

The Ministry of Education in Quebec, Canada, has recently launched a major reform
in the public school system. Everything from textbooks and teaching methods to
classroom organization has been affected. The word constructivism is writ large
across the many documents accompanying this reform; we are effectively living
through a constructivist revolution. And yet, as many of the province’s language
educators point out, the “new” recommendations for science and mathematics
classrooms seem to be about doing precisely what ESL (English as a Second
Language) and FSL (French) language educators have been doing for a long time:
group work, project work, emphasis on active use rather than passive understanding,
emphasis on what the learner does rather than on what the teacher does, concern for
the key roles of motivation and prior knowledge—and many others in the
constructivist line-up.

The language educators’ observations are more than coincidental. When applied
linguistics, and more broadly modern approaches to language learning, departed
from the behaviourist agenda in the late 1970s, they did so in ways that anticipated
the more general adoption of constructivism in educational thinking. Consider
several of the key learning principles in the constructivist agenda:

1. The to-be-learned knowledge, a human language, is not exactly out-there in any

objective sense. (Who imagines that if there were no humans to speak it, a language
could be said to exist?)
2. Fully formed knowledge representations can not be successfully ‘transmitted’ to
passive learners, conceived as ‘containers,’ in Bereiter’s, 2002, metaphor. (Who would
dispute that a language learner must use a language in order to gain control of it or truly
know it? There is a large body of literature in applied linguistics devoted to the ‘output
hypothesis’ e.g., Swain, 2005.)
3. Knowledge can be constructed collaboratively. (There are longstanding research
traditions in applied linguistics in both interaction and group work as a main source of
learning, e.g., Long, 2001, and specifically Vygotskian manifestations of this idea, e.g.,
Lantolf, 2004.)
4. Constructed knowledge is difficult to test, since learners will construct individual
representations of any to-be-learned content. (Who would dispute that my mental
representation of English or French is inevitably and legitimately different in large ways
from anyone else’s?)

At some point in the 1970s, it seems that most applied linguists departed from
audiolingualism-behaviourism, our own brand of objectivism, and adopted, instead
of the Chomskyan principles that were the official alternative (but which never really
lent themselves to a useful pedagogy), a proto-constructivism. There were, after all,
two roads out of behaviourism for language, Chomsky’s innatism and Piaget’s
constructivism (Piatelli-Palmarini, 1980). Applied linguists and language educators
paid lip service to the former but in truth were closer to the latter.

And having gone into constructivism earlier, applied linguists have run into some of
its problems earlier. For example, in second language vocabulary acquisition, which
has been a test-bed for many constructivist ventures, a major proposal from Brown et
al (1989) is that learners should not be handed fully formed or “pre-emptively
encoded” word meanings, but rather should grapple with raw evidence, constructing
their own meanings out of numerous partial encounters with instances. This is a
rather familiar idea to applied linguistics researchers. Under the headings of
“inductive” or “data-driven” learning (e.g., Johns, 1991), a number of studies have
looked into the value of this approach. In fact, such approaches, for all their
theoretical appeal, have a mixed track record in the language classroom. In
vocabulary studies, there is a long bibliography of research findings showing
learners unable to make much use of raw data for the purpose of inferring word
meanings (Laufer & Sim, 1989; Schatz & Baldwin, 1986) or for inferring rules for
grammatical forms. Grammatical rules and word meanings may be constructible
over a lifetime, but classrooms work in a somewhat shorter time frame. And where
constructivist approaches have been successful, they are known to interact strongly
with learning style, intelligence, and (in one of my own studies, Cobb, 1997a),
gender.

In education, the case for constructivism tends to be argued from nature and first
principles: if reality and the human mind are thus constituted, here is what a
classroom should look like. In applied linguistics, with our longer experience, the
case is more likely to be argued in relative terms and judged by outcomes. Second
language learning is known from the beginning to be a somewhat unnatural
enterprise, where one is typically acquiring a selected portion of a human language,
often as an adult rather than a child, usually in a few months rather than 15 years,
and so on. If constructivism is to have any value in the practice of language learning,
it will be on the grounds of utility, not nature. And is there a case for utility?

A hue of constructivism that seems relevant to learning a first or second language is

one proposed by Spiro et al (1991) within the information processing paradigm
mentioned above. This paradigm proposes a number of specific and verifiable
benefits to be realized through a constructivist approach, especially within ill-
structured domains including language acquisition. One is that representations
constructed from grappling with raw data, as opposed to representations resulting
from someone else’s having grappled, are not just generally “better” in some vague
way but specifically are more successfully transferred to novel contexts and form a
better preparation for further independent learning. This paradigm also proposes a
methodology for helping learners perform this grappling with raw data, namely the
adaptation of the tools and methods that experts have developed over the years to
help them with their own grappling. Like learners, experts in any domain experience
difficulties in their encounters with unencoded data, but unlike learners they have
developed tools and methods to overcome these difficulties.

I have argued (in Cobb, 1999) that constructivist ventures in language education
would involve pedagogical adaptation of the tools and procedures of relevant
language experts, such as lexicographers and computational linguists. For example,
the word-learning task facing a learner and a lexicographer are essentially the same,
and are essentially ‘constructivist.’ Both must make sense of an overwhelming
amount of raw and distributed information in an artificially brief amount of time.
Lexicographers use a corpus and concordance to assemble in moments and force the
patterns out of data that would otherwise require years, and it is not inconceivable
that learners might be able to do some scaffolded version of this too. In two
controlled experiments (Cobb, 1997b; Cobb & Horst, 2001) a strong transfer-of-
learning effect was found for constructing word-meanings from learning-adapted
corpus and concordance tasks, as compared to learning pre-constructed meanings
from dictionary definitions. Work is currently underway to extend this approach and
technology to grammar (Gaskell & Cobb, 2004).

It is often noted that the exploitation of information technology in language

education is proceeding without a theoretical underpinning. A learner-as-linguist
variant of constructivism might provide this underpinning. It might also provide
what was often missing from the inductive, discovery, and constructivist approaches
of the past—the tools learners need to induce, discover, and construct.
References

Applied Linguistics [Online at https://applij.oupjournals.org/ ].

Bereiter, Carl. 2002. Education and mind in the knowledge age. Mahwah, NJ:
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Brown, J.S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of
learning. Educational Researcher 18 (1), 32-42.

Cobb, T. (1997a). From concord to lexicon: Development and test of a

corpus-based lexical tutor. Concordia University: Unpublished doctoral
dissertation.

Cobb, T. (1997b). Is there any measurable learning from hands-on

concordancing? System 25 (3), 301-315.

Cobb, T. (1999). Applying constructivism: A test for the learner as scientist. Educational
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