THE ROLE OF PREDICATIVE AWARENESS IN LANGUAGE REFLECTION

The notion of reflection is traditionally associated with the transformational aspect of one’s inner being and consequently applies to something deeply intimate and inaccessible. As an implicit constituent of any language learning process reflection has long challenged researchers to explicate and use its hidden mechanisms in knowledge management and education in order to stimulate learners’ continued endeavor of self-cultivation. The scope of reflection being very broad, much entwined with other mental phenomena and still somewhat fuzzy, the main objective of the research presented is to highlight reflection strictly in terms of verbal activity and language learning. Being an intensional mental process reflection is conventionally treated as energetic exercise of mind implemented through initiative-taking and active involvement. Learners’ reflective orientation, though, is not developed as an isolated inner activity. In the current research the ability to reflect is assumed to largely depend on the learner’s evaluation of their own expressive means in comparison with those produced by other participants of naturalistic or instructed communication. Reflection is thereby viewed as the individual’s capacity to estimate the running verbal information and return it to the virtual social environment. Having ramifications across practically all human activities the phenomenon is manifestly shown in second language acquisition, with reflective patterns being described either transcendentally or merely empirically. Models of reflective learning are thus formulated in terms of the opposite extremes, which might be happenstance but usually not a universally upheld framework. In order to make inner mental procedures tractable and thus capable of forming an underlying a base for attaining language proficiency, reflective processes of language acquisition could be highlighted in terms of the mechanisms of predication. The major background premise of predication states that language is a materialized substance that makes interpretation of thought as the product of reflective activity possible. In the light of predicative interpretation language, communication and inner thought activity — reflection — are treated as the indissoluble unity whose domain structure allows for the specification of a universal functional unit considered both as a learning segment and assessment measure.

Keywords: reflection, predication, universal predicative unit, predicative unit class