Posted by Apostolos K. on October 8, 2008 at 9:34am
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By the time we finished school, 90% of my generation hated the mandatory Irish lessons. Hundreds of thousands of kids (aka language learning machines) failed to master even rudimentary communication in the language we had studied for years. If the teachers had set out to kill the language, I’m not sure they could have done it more effectively. But, of course, they didn’t set out to kill it, they set out to teach it, which would sound almost comical, if it weren’t so tragic.
There is no single reason for the failure of traditional language teaching. It’s more like a constellation of bad pedagogy, irrelevant objectives, a school system that was calcified in another era, etc. Crowning it all was the illusion that you could and should teach a language to children, i.e. that you could/should explain it to them. The teachers’ focus was grammatical, rather than psychological - What are the structures of the language?, rather than How might we induce the language learning process? It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that if the kids were encouraged to use the language they would pick it up painlessly and quickly. Nothing (and I mean nothing) could have been less relevant than lectures on declensions or the conjugation of prepositions (they do that in Irish) to a bunch of children, but that’s what we got.
I don’t want to harp on about my particular country. I used it to make a point but it was definitely not unique. For the most part, language teaching the world over remains in a fossilized state. The paradigms that inform it are often more Quintillian, and less web 2.0 even though there’s tons of amazing alternative ideas on the web these days - try Stephen Downes’ Stephen Web, or Connectivism for starters. (These treat learning generally, rather than language learning specifically, but they are relevant.) As far as I can see most kids leave schools to this day, with an abysmal record on language learning.
Yesterday I talked with JP Villaneuva. He’s a tremendouly talented linguist and teacher who is leading the new SpanishPod team that launched last week. (You can sample his excellent work here.) Well, JP and I share a belief in the need for change in language teaching - in this case in how Spanish is taught. (Note: I’m not saying there are no good Spanish teachers out there. Of course there are! I’m saying the discipline as a whole needs change.) JP and I will be working together and reporting here as we progress. (I’m delighted to say that we also have an awesome tech team behind us to help make our ideas possible!)
Over the coming week and months I’ll try to bring concrete examples of what we might call ‘language learning 2.0′. I beleive ChinesePod has already demonstrated a number of these, but I’m keen to keep developing the discussion beyond Mandarin. We certainly have ideas over here but we realize that you, the Big Brain, know far more than we ever could. I hope you’ll all stop by to add to the conversation in a ‘co-active’ way.
Ken Carroll
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MY TAKE:
Well, I should say that Ken does have a business in foreign language learning, so part of his post could be construed as advertising. However I do see merits in his blog post.
When I was living in Greece and attending public school there I took mandatory French language courses starting at the 4th grade. That's great one would say! Well in most circumstances I would agree with you - in this case I won't.
Most of my classmates did not pick up French in public schools. In order to keep up their performance and grades in public schools they needed to go to "frodistiria' (after school, for pay courses) to do French. I didn't because of various reasons. End result: having taken 5 years of French in Greek public schools I learned almost nothing! Seriously!
The pedagogical model used, and the attitude of the teachers was awful (as far as I recollect), and this made me dislike languages! If not for some very talented instructors at Umass boston as an undergrad, I would have never discovered that I really like languages!
I would be interested in hearing what others have to say about second language learning and their experiences
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