Topic Management-Kuma

The idea of giving students the freedom to choose possible topics as the basis for interaction was originally brought about by Hatch in 1978.  The importance of this was later emphasized by van Lier and coined "topicalization" meaning a process that students take something from the teacher or another student and try to come up with the next topic from that.  Benefits are illustrated in that it results in personalizing the complexity of the input to the learner's own level, better opportunities for negotiating meaning, and fostering motivation for more complex production of the student.  "Assia Slimani (1989) found that learners benefites more from self- and peer-nominated topics than from teacher-nominated topics" (Kuma 120).  This idea takes brings ideas in that need to be considered such as investment, relevant content, and motivation.  Besides the benefits topicalization brings about in language learners, students will be more motivated to learn about something that they chose to learn more about; they showed a desire and have the interest.  This leads into investment.  When a student has more of a connection to the content, the result is that they will have more committment in their learning and the process of learning, specifically a second language, as a whole.  Also, topicalization allows students to come up with possible topics as the basis of interaction.  In this case, I think that the teacher should have to facilitate and monitor these so that lessons don't get too off track and can still scaffold.  Therefore, it is the teacher's job to pick meaningful and relevant topics from students' options.  From here, students would be learning something that they wanted to learn by showing interest, would have more investment in the material and the learning process as a whole, and would be learning content that is relevant and meaningful to their language learning.  I think topicalization is great for native speakers and non native speakers in other content areas as well because the idea of having students show interest in what they want to learn (according to relevance in the subject) isn't necessarily language specific.  It can provide benefits to Math (learning how many miles to the gallon a students' car takes), history (maybe one student really likes the Civil War period), English (some students might prefer poetry over essay writing, giving options), etc.  Overall, I'd say I'm a fan of topicalization.