Here we go...

This'll be fun.

A warm welcome to you, and thank you for visiting my blog on foreign language learning. It may evolve into something else, but for the moment I'm developing it for a class project.

The assignment: create a website for students learning French as a foreign language.

The class covered several really neat open-source programs - HotPotatoes, Audacity, Gimp, BlueGriffon. With these in the arsenal, I do believe that the brave language teacher might sooner succeed in his quest.

What is the end of that quest?  To help the students, of course.  But that begs the question, what dragons are THEY trying to slay?  Certainly the shy bloke with a crush on the French girl at the coffee shop will have different motivations than the shining star of a young woman hoping to work in diplomacy, no?

Enter the central challenge of teaching.  Having been a student for all my life and a teacher for but a few hours, my perspective is limited. But the dilemma is well known: different students learn at different rates for a variety of reasons, including interest, focus, self-esteem, etc. This applies to many if not all academic subjects. So what is the teacher to do when she has a class of twenty?

One approach is to develop more effective teaching methodologies and classroom management techniques. It may work for some. In my experience, although learning can take place in the traditional classroom, it is not the best setting for foreign language learning, study, acquisition, or appropriation.

Here's why:

Language is for communication. When learning to use a foreign language, we must learn how it is used by native/fluent speakers. I tend to agree with Diane Larsen-Freeman's argument (see this) that grammar, indeed language itself, is an emergent phenomenon. Very few languages have committees that sit down and determine proper use, and even then their rules are taken as recommendations (e.g. French according to l’Académie française, and French according to young residents of Marseille).  Patterns of speech evolve over time, and we can call the sum of those patterns the grammar of the language.

That said, it can be helpful to look under the hood of a language, especially when starting out. The 'rules' of grammar both emerge from centuries of evolving use and determine what is and is not normally acceptable in different situations.

How should we teach grammar? Introduce a dictated rule, then give examples?  Or give examples, then ask students to figure out the emergent 'guideline'?  Should we give them endless structural exercises and formulaic role-playing activities so they can practice rigid requirements of the language in question?  Or should we let them express themselves like children left with a bucket of paint and a white wall - can we accept a beautiful thought without cringing at the grammatical formlessness of the 'modern art'?

This dilemma in teaching grammar is similar to other questions about how to develop various other competencies - listening, reading, speaking, writing, interacting, mediating, cultural awareness, etc.

I have perceived an identity crisis in the discipline of foreign language teaching, as those entrusted with literally broadening student's horizons stand unsure whether they should lead students and survey the landscape click by click, fly across the world and jump right into the foreign culture, or put up a fight to stop technology from driving them out of business.

The whole debate about teaching methodologies is, I believe, becoming obsolete as it becomes easier to access information.  A l'époch, if a young Iowan wanted to learn French, he had his teacher, and he had a few books in the local library.  Eventually, maybe he could get his hands on some records of Charles Aznavour.  Of course, the situation has changed.  People have instant access to digital archives of authentic material at various levels of difficulty, in addition to many free linguistic and cultural guides of various calibers.

The information is out there.  For those with an Internet connection, much of it is available free of charge.

Yet for some reason, we have yet to optimize the teaching of foreign languages on a grand scale.  Particularly in the United States.

Maybe......

Maybe we should think about learning rather than teaching.

(If you've already come to this realization, forgive me for showing up late to the party with a lame costume and your hundredth bottle of bargain soda - and please comment if you've come to other conclusions than the ones I detail below.)

Learning rather than teaching, because we are here for the students, right?  

And if every individual learns differently, should we really try to control the what, how, and when of every learning opportunity for every student?

Should the education system itself be concerned with producing productive members of society with certain basic knowledge and skills?  Sounds nice enough.  Or should we, as parents rather than administrators, sensei rather than instructors, see to it that our children have the opportunity to follow their own paths?  We can give them a compass and mark the trees, but I think that to fully appreciate the jungle - not as a danger but as a refuge and a wonder - we must all, at some point, decide for ourselves where to walk.

That is to say, the path to wisdom is a deeply personal experience.  That does not mean we should take our kids out to the Amazon when they're 5 and come back to pick them up when they're 18, hoping they've grown up.  Interaction with others is essential to growth and happiness.

So how to balance these two elements of learning?  We need to find our own way, but we could use some companionship.  The jungle metaphor breaks down at this point.  If you and I are trekking through Brazil and decide to split up, well, that's probably the end of our mutual experience of the rain forest.  In order that we may each blaze our own trail independently, we must physically separate.

This is not the case when it comes to growing up in a town or city in the modern world.  At school, children remain physically in the same building with one another, yet they do in fact find their own way.  It happens socially and it happens academically, despite our best efforts to standardize and regulate – all with the best of intentions, of course.  Unfortunately, we may be stifling children’s curiosity and creativity by holding them to a curriculum, and we may be encouraging them to misplace their priorities when we assign so much significance to grades (see, for example, this, this, this, this, and this).

Most of the elements for a revolution in education are already here.  Accomplishing one will just take a little insight and ingenuity, and most of all the will to effect a change.

Change for change's sake is not progress.  Swinging the pendulum to the other extreme for no other reason than to rebel against systems created by our mothers and fathers – or political predecessors – is childish.  What then, are the motives for such a revolution in education?

We should change the way we look at education in the United States (and many other places) because the emphasis is presently on outcome more than opportunity.  And if that's not bad enough, we fail to deliver on the promised outcome.

In my country, we pride ourselves on a particular political preference for equality of opportunity over equality of outcome.  For all the ways we could still improve our system of government, we have generally stuck by the principles that (1) it is impossible to attain or maintain equality of outcome in nearly any sphere of human activity across a large society - from wages to nutrition to happiness, and (2) even if we could, we wouldn't go for it!  A government with the power to grant equal wages, nutrition, or happiness has the power to take it all away.  The weight of history requires us to be skeptical of such a system, for men tend to abuse such power.  Much better is the agreement among citizens that a person is born with the right to live, be free, and pursue happiness so long as she does not infringe upon the rights of others.  When the human spirit has the opportunity to grow as it will - supported by the trellis of other loving souls, nourished by the amazing planet which we inhabit, and protected and challenged by whatever or whoever is behind it all - the result is so much more beautiful than any mass-produced product of a self-proclaimed benevolent system of government.  Legitimate human authority is still important, in education as in society, but we must take care.  In our ambition to make the world a better place, we would do well not to define the limits of human potential or to foolishly promise its attainment through standardized programs.

*******

In the world of foreign language education, teachers often struggle to help students acquire both the knowledge and skills to become successful users of the given language in a given set of contexts.  We stay up late thinking about this: how to better manage our time so that students learn more?  What kind of new activity could I try to produce better results?

Return to the heart of the issue: an oak tree growing organically, or a plastic cuckoo clock being assembled by cold steel fingers?

I'll be honest, I have immense respect for teachers.  They helped make me who I am today, and they suggested routes that, as I try them out, are at this very moment making me who I will be tomorrow.  As I try my hand at teaching as an intern, I realize how very challenging - and potentially rewarding - a profession it is.

With that said, I very humbly propose a new way of looking at foreign language education.  By no means the only or the most original, and not necessarily the best.  I've thought a lot about this over the past months, and I'm still making it up as I go along.  But that's the key - it's organic.  As Logan (1973) described, a successful program grows in response to student needs and interests.

I intend to use this blog both to think out loud about how we can transform foreign language education for the better (holding on to what works, discarding what doesn't, proposing new ideas), as well as to trace out my own path as I explore various foreign languages.

Here it is, the long-awaited proposal:

Blogs.  Yep, that’s about it.

Learning is a deeply personal experience of looking inward and outward, of reflecting in solitude and of connecting with others.

Instead of prescribing syllabi and textbooks, let's take the "blaze your own trail" concept seriously for once.  It's what happens anyway - unfortunately, if a student's own way diverges from the curriculum, his report card reflects only the greatest distance he walked down the accepted road, regardless of the marathons he may have run on another course.

The keys to a successful blog-based learning experience are access and accountability.

Access to the Internet and other tools is, for many (but not all) people around the world, a daily convenience.  Organizing the multitudes of relevant information and resources could be one job of the teacher, but the motivated student will often find what she's looking for.  It certainly does not require the massive amounts of money spent on textbooks which even in their entirety provide but a snapshot of the living world of a foreign language.  The reliance on textbooks over the Internet, however, seems still to be a defining element in many classrooms today.

Accountability is another frequently missing element in today's classrooms.  In my experience, some teachers are beginning to rely more on technology, but it is rarely student-led.  When it is - i.e. when students are free to roam the Internet or watch TV - there is a real danger that the time will be wasted.

Why?

Take a group of kids who are used to the restrictions of sitting in class, tell them they're free to look up whatever helps them learn French, and you may well find that many are watching unrelated music videos or perusing social media.  How would a responsible teacher react? I would expect her to say, "you have to control the access, set limits, define boundaries."  I would bet that this freedom - and the teacher's resultant lack of control over her classroom - would scare many educators and parents.

Institutions will vary in their flexibility concerning Internet use.  This is understandable. But we must also understand that when young kids come to see 'school' as boring or as a punishment, it is only a natural reaction if they jump to YouTube when given a little freedom.  The Internet, for all its dark corners and daily distractions, can be a great tool for learning.  I am not advocating here for any particular change in schedules or room arrangements (there are a lot of more fundamental changes we can make to the education system). Nor do I think kids should spend their whole school day staring at a computer. Rather, I only wish to assert that the web can supercharge learning if used intelligently, and that if kids only use it for trivial purposes upon being set free from the normal way of doing things, we should have a little faith that they will find their way if they really want to, with some guidance from us.  Imagine time-traveling to the year 1900 and seeing a bright young 9-year-old sitting in a one-room school house in a rural community.  If you then take him to the Carnegie Library in New York, would you be surprised if he spent more time reading Yeats than Euclid?

Enter the journal, the record of thoughts.  Encourage students to keep a diary, a journal, a blog.  On paper or online, or both.  Allow them to keep it private, if they wish (otherwise they may be tempted to write what they think you want to hear).

This is the second part of what I am attempting to do in Withinaword.  I am sure others have tried this in the past and are trying it in the present.  I came to this method, honestly, because of the confluence of two lines of thought: I was trying to envision a website for this class project, and I was thinking a lot about how to improve foreign language education.  For the website, I wanted to create a way for learners to track their own progress in a user-defined environment and share their thoughts with others.  I spent so much time mulling the concept over that I left little time to code.  I then discovered WordPress, looked into it, consulted a review comparing it to Google's Blogger, went with the latter for the time being, and thus began this project.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.  A blog is a personal space that I can use to record my thoughts as I go through the process of learning a foreign language (or anything for that matter).  I can embed videos and reference authentic texts, write up a summary or a reflection, and ask for comments from others.  The huge advantage learners have today with the web is the opportunity of exposure to real language use.  If I can then keep a rough record of the most useful videos I watch and documents I read, along with my responses and others’ comments, I may see more of a benefit than if I simply spent two hours watching Italian news reports without writing anything down.  This is a self-directed process with no clear path at the outset but with a clear goal of all-around improvement in language competency.

Consider the mangrove tree.  It germinates in the water and spreads its roots so as to trap dirt passing by, which nourishes the plant and allows it to further spread its roots.  Eventually it creates an island where there once was none.  It does not know which particles will pass by in the current at any given moment, but its goal is to grow and survive.  In the same manner, I think one could develop foreign language proficiency by combing through the Internet/books/films/language guides, recording and reflecting on those experiences, and practicing oral and written production both on the blog and in interactions with others.

When it comes to interaction, I am hopeful that forums such as the language learning community on Skype will provide a workable solution.  Nothing beats a good friend who's a native speaker of the language you're trying to learn, but video conferencing might have a future in supporting education.  One of the drawbacks I find in traditional classroom interaction activities is that, no matter how willing the students or how well-organized the process, the lack of context and exposure to native non-verbal/para-verbal habits renders the whole experience inauthentic.  Activities such as impromptu dialogues may help in practicing linguistic structures and even pronunciation, but there is so much more to interaction than what is on the surface.  Nor can such patterns of behavior be efficiently studied and rehearsed so as to improve the authenticity of the classroom exchange.  Two American students talking in simple, broken French is simply not the same as engaging in even the more basic of social interactions with a waiter in Paris.  Of course, there are limits to videoconferencing, but it could be one tool in a successful, independent learner's toolkit.

What else...grammar.  There are many resources out there.  It is time to get over our fear of grammar and start seeing it as our friend.  It's what will help us decode a language that looks or sounds very foreign to us in the beginning.  We need not memorize all the points of grammar - better to dive in and start working with authentic material.  But, perhaps, two or three 30-minute study sessions of the essential grammar points and the 'little words' like pronouns and prepositions could do a lot of good in the early stages.  I prefer this way to the method many textbooks use, whereby they unveil a few grammar points each lesson.  It's ok to take it easy with the linguistic terminology and obscure moods and tenses, but an initial overview of how the language works - even if you don't retain all of it - could go a long way.  This could be particularly useful for learners of a second language within one family - e.g. I can speak French, now I want to learn Spanish, so going over the grammar of Spanish should go more smoothly than if I were to do the same with that of an East Asian language.

*******

In sum, blogging could provide a solution to the problem of accountability and record-keeping that we might otherwise see with self-directed language study.  Years ago, we had little access to authentic materials and few opportunities to interact with native/fluent speakers, so our best option was to take a class.  Nowadays, we have this incredible access, but too often, teachers and students either make too little use of it, or they get lost in the forest of information without leaving any bread crumbs.  Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."  I ask myself, and I ask you: what is true education but an engagement with the world and a reflection upon the experiences which, like rings on a tree, come to define one's life?  Maybe, if we stopped stressing about our national rankings on standardized math and reading tests; if we moved away from our relatively-recently-adopted mentality of scientific control in areas of human activity; if we started to appreciate the concept of worldwide, instant digital communication as a powerful tool to help us achieve individual and collective human potential and harmony in this wonderful world of dirt and grass; and if we took more time to think...

just think...

we just might transform education.

we just might give our kids the opportunity to realize their dreams.

we just might save our species and our planet from the more dismal fate that awaits a slumbering society, one that has long since ceased to stop and simply...

think.