First of all, I like how Dr. Lyster begins his presentation with cognitive advantages of bilingualism and selective attention. He makes an interesting point that having to manage two languages and switch between them allows learners to hone cognitive skills, but this “two for one” ability does not come to learners for free. According to Dr. Lyster, attention of learners must be drawn to their L2 that is well manipulated and enhanced through content-based instruction. So, based on this idea of attention, I think that language teachers must consider psychological aspects of learning and then come up with effective ways for their students to fully concentrate on language learning before choosing appropriate contents.

The second interesting point Dr. Lyster makes is that L2 learners in French immersion curriculum demonstrate high communicative abilities and confidence as well as native-like comprehension skills but low production skills in grammatical accuracy, lexical variety, and sociolinguistic appropriateness. In other words, separation of language and content allow students to bypass grammar and lexicon. Just as Dr. Lyster proposes systematic integration of language and content over decontextualized language teaching, I believe it is imperative that teachers think about flaws of traditional language teaching such as subject-matter instruction and transfer-appropriate processing.

Third, Dr. Lyster introduces integration of language and content through what is called counterbalance. The crux of this concept is that there must be a proportionate influence of content and language in ways that reinforce connections in memory as well as increase depth of processing. I think it makes sense if teachers look at it from a psychological perspective because something can be remembered for a longer period of time if learners take more time to focus on it and then mentally process it. This idea of counterbalance seems to be the basis for Dr. Lyster’s proactive and reactive approaches to content and language integration.

Fourth and the most interesting point of all is Dr. Lyster’s instructional sequence for integrating language and content. To explain the noticing and awareness steps of his instructional sequence, he shows the video of a moon-walking bear that walks through two teams passing balls among the same team members. The first time I encountered a video of awareness test was in the cognitive psychology class back in my undergraduate, and I learned from the course that most of the viewers would not notice another object or person changing or moving if they did not know about selective attention in advance. Thus, it is interesting to see Dr. Lyster labeling certain grammar points like conjugation and gender as moon-walking bears, which can be learned more attentively to learners through guided and autonomous practices.

My last comment is on the notion of corrective feedback (CF). Dr. Lyster makes a rather surprising remark that teachers are reluctant to provide CF assuming that students prefer not to be corrected. Honestly, I feel uncomfortable to know that there are teachers who hesitate to correct their students. If CF is verified to be effective by four recent meta-analyses and even most effective during interaction among students, then I would strongly argue that after receiving proper training and information of CF types, all language teachers should at least consider trying to give CF to their students and then observe for its effectiveness. Personally, I would like to learn more about scaffolding functions behind recasts as well as output hypothesis and skill acquisition theory behind prompts.

Overall, I truly enjoyed listening to Dr. Lyster’s presentation on proactive and reactive approaches to integrating language and content. I must say that this topic makes me realize how much I have missed studying psychology ever since I got my Bachelor of Science in psychology. In this sense, language acquisition intrigues me very much as it connects two fields of study that I love the most: language and psychology.