The thinking for speaking hypothesis is a neorelativist proposal developed by Slobin (1991) and colleagues over the last twenty-five years. Its main argument is that the structure of a language directs the attention of its speakers to specific aspects of the experience when talking about them. As a result, speakers, guided by the linguistic resources available in their languages, will mention some elements and ignore others in the on-line verbalization of an event. The different linguistic patterns resulting from the TFS constitutes the rhetorical style. The TFS model has been widely applied to the study of first languages from a semantic typological perspective (cf. Berman and Slobin 1994, Strömqvist and Verhoeven 2004). In recent years, it has also become increasingly popular among second language scholars (Han and Cadierno 2010, Javis and Pavlenko 2008, Pavlenko 2011, 2014, among others) under the name of “re-thinking for speaking” (Robinson and Ellis 2008).
This talk focuses on the advantages of taking into account TFS in second language acquisition and its pedagogical implications. The main goal is to show how crucial it is to describe and consider which the rhetorical style of the languages involved is in order for the learners to acquire not just grammatically-correct sentences but also discursively-adequate and native-like utterances. I will illustrate these points with several studies developed by our research team, MovEs project, on the lexicalization and acquisition of motion events from a crosslinguistic perspective (Romance, Germanic, Japanese, Basque).
[Lecture in English]