| This qualitative study examines second language (L2) teaching and learning with an emphasis on the meaning-making processes of 17 young L2 learners learning the Korean language within a multilingual context at a Korean Saturday School in Montreal, Canada. Based on Vygotsky's (1978) dialectical analysis, this study explores the microgenetic analysis of young L2 learner's concept formation in non-school and school contexts within the larger macrogenetic analysis of the historical, socio-cultural, political, economical and educational contexts that affect L2 teaching and learning. The major goal of this study is to investigate the role of literacy-based and concept-oriented playful activities in the teaching and learning of language within a L2 classroom. As a teacher/researcher, based on the theme of shapes, I focus on integrating potentially mathematical experiences around literacy activities within my students' social and cultural contexts. In particular, I examine creative language use through dynamic collaborative engagement while considering how young L2 learners internalize, appropriate and externalize multimodal mediators and language(s). In order to clarify the meaning of an interpretation, this study has involved multiple interconnected interpretive sources over the duration of the 2005-2007 school years. Macrogenetic analysis reveals that teachers still implement traditional Confucian ways of teaching, such as content-centered curriculum, teacher-centered instruction, and passive learning. However, microgenetic analysis of students' meaning-making processes provides new insights into L2 learning-and-teaching, with an emphasis on the creative co-construction of meaning by L2 learners, their parents and their teachers. That is, as active social actors in a shared literacy practice, young L2 learners, their parents and their teachers should be motivated by aesthetic, creative experience and should be actively engaged within a collaborative social context. The results of this study suggest a substantial role for creative teaching, and leads to my development of a model of 'creative apprenticeship', which describes an ongoing, multidimensional, dialectical process of L2 teaching-and-learning. |
