Questão 66618

In a teacher education program, a debate arises regarding the best approach to help L2 learners overcome the 'intermediate plateau,' a stage where they seem to stagnate, relying on simplified communication strategies and showing little progress in grammatical accuracy and syntactic complexity. One student-teacher advocates for a behaviorist approach, suggesting a massive increase in grammar drills and pattern practice. Another suggests an innatist-based approach, arguing that once learners reach a certain age, their capacity for native-like acquisition is limited, so the focus should be on fluency and accepting the fossilized errors. A third student-teacher, drawing on sociocultural and cognitive theories of language acquisition, proposes a different diagnosis. She references Merrill Swain's 'Output Hypothesis' and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). She argues that the plateau is often caused not by a lack of input, but by a lack of 'pushed output'—that is, the learners are not being pushed to produce language that is slightly beyond their current level of competence. She quotes Swain (adapted): 'Producing the target language may be the trigger that forces the learner to pay attention to the means of expression. The activity of producing output pushes the learner to move from semantic processing to syntactic processing.' Her argument is that learners need to be put in situations where their current linguistic resources are insufficient, thus forcing them to notice the gaps in their knowledge and try out new forms.

Based on this socio-cognitive perspective, analyze the following pedagogical proposals for tackling the intermediate plateau:

I. Implement collaborative tasks that require learners to negotiate meaning and solve a problem, such as planning a complex event. In this process, the teacher acts as a facilitator, pointing out moments of communication breakdown and scaffolding more complex language forms.
II. Use dictogloss, an activity where the teacher reads a short, dense text at normal speed, and students must work together to reconstruct it, forcing them to focus on form and structure as they collaborate.
III. Increase the amount of authentic listening and reading materials (e.g., movies, podcasts) without any specific production task attached, operating under the assumption that more input will automatically solve the problem.

Which proposal(s) is/are directly aligned with the 'Pushed Output Hypothesis' and a sociocultural view of learning?