Response through the Intentional Arc: Merleau- Ponty, Dreyfus and Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

Skillful Coping: Intentional Arc and Maximal Grip Merleau-Ponty’s intentional arc is “the tight connection between the agent and the world, viz. that as the agent acquires skills, these skills are ‘stored,’ not as representations in the mind, but as more and more refined disposition to respond to more and more refined perceptions of the current situation” (2002, p.1). This connection between the learner and his environment culminates in “more Abstract Language, when considered as part of the lived experience of human beings, fails to be reduced to mere representation. Purposiveness in skill acquisition and second language acquisition may be understood through Dreyfus’s skillful coping, based in Merleau-Ponty’s intentional arc and maximal grip. Such an approach to second language acquisition decentralizes rule-based representationalist understandings of the process, such as universal grammar (Chomsky 1977), and instead sees language and communication as responsive, dynamic and dyadic.