Immediacy의 개념과 외국어교육

Abstract

The present paper explores the concept of immediacy as it relates to language use in general and foreign language education in particular. As such, it opens with a general discussion of the concept, which is informally definable as the distance, physical or otherwise, between language and its learner-user. This is followed by a more specific discussion, in the course of which a distinction is made between the immediacy of awareness and the immediacy of relevance, between teacher- and learner-centered immediacy, and between absolute and relative immediacy. Each of these types of immediacy is illustrated with examples from English and/ or TEFL. In the main chapter, which is Chapter 3, the suggestion is made that the concept of immediacy can find applications in various aspects of language education, especially foreign language education. For one thing, it is argued that the concept can be instrumental in further refining the presently available statistical technique of vocabulary control. For another, it is claimed that the concept throws considerable light on the types and characteristics of errors that occur in the process of language acquisition.