In stressing real-world relevance, 21st century skills, and personal connections, today's most outspoken education experts have forgotten the notion of learning for learning's sake. Explicitly or implicitly, many of them dismiss the possibility that students might enjoy a subject simply because it's interesting, and not because it contains obvious, practical connections to their personal lives and future vocations.
The latest of example of this is seen in an article in this past week's Education Week. Entitled Language Education We Can Use By, it assumes that the only purpose of foreign language instruction is to enable students to communicate proficiently and understand "internationally":
Here's how authors David Young and J.B. Buxton open their piece:
As the global nature of work and life in the 21st century becomes clearer by the day, calls for a greater focus on international education and language learning are growing louder. Leaders from the education, business, and national security communities are agreed: International understanding and second-language proficiency are critical to individual and national interests—and our K-12 system must do more to promote them.
Echoing claims by advocates of other types of "reform" that most classrooms are still defined by desks in rows, teacher in the front, rote drills, and pen and paper activities, Young and Buxton claim that foreign language classrooms are stuck in the past in other ways as well--ways that, in particular, fail to foster oral communication and international understanding:
For too many years, we have maintained a language-learning strategy that simply does not work. In programs using outdated pedagogies focused on grammar and translation and coupled with low expectations, students take foreign languages with goals that seemingly include everything except actually learning to speak the language. If graduates of our high schools regularly reflected that, after four years of mathematics, they couldn't solve for an unknown variable, we would be outraged. But we share a laugh when someone says, "I took four years of a language, but I can't really speak it."
Of course, many high school graduates
can't solve for an unknown variable after four years of mathematics, precisely
because classrooms
have changed (something that the "we" of Education Week is decidedly
not outraged about). Such detrimental changes extend to foreign language classrooms, where, in fact, there has long been a decreasing emphasis on grammar in favor of oral communication, and where translation exercises have mostly vanished to make room for "culture." And, perhaps most worryingly, where multi-year training in one language has been supplanted, at many schools, by "world languages" programs in which, echoing Reform Math's "an inch deep and a mile wide," students gain "awareness" of multiple languages by spending a mere year or semester on each.
For Young and Buxton, there are two goals of foreign language instruction. One is true oral proficiency, which they rightly argue emerges only from intense immersion environments--of the sort that schools, unless they are dedicated, multi-year bilingual education programs, simply can't provide.
The other goal of foreign language instruction, the one that applies to non-bilingual schools, should be "cultural awareness and sensitivity, global knowledge, and exposure to the target language."
It is time to convert existing courses to a classroom experience that provides a combination of introductory language exposure, cultural studies, and deep, experiential learning about the countries that speak the target language. These middle and high school language courses would have the following three components:
• Specific, real-life language instruction narrowed to focus on survival travel skills and with the goal of teaching a subset of the current language curriculum to greater depth and understanding—with relevance and utility as guiding principles;
• A cultural-studies framework that teaches students how to understand a country's cultural identity and to compare and contrast countries; and
• Global knowledge through the study, comparison, and contrasting of countries that speak the target language.
To be clear, students will not leave these classes with advanced language proficiency. What they will obtain, however, are the language skills needed to travel in countries that speak the language, an understanding of other countries and cultures, and an awareness of the global issues that impact both those countries and our own.
"Cultural awareness" sounds suspiciously like the "science appreciation" that is increasingly eclipsing science learning. "Deep, experiential learning" about countries and cultures sounds better than mere "awareness," but what makes the authors think that classrooms can provide this any more than they can provide linguistic immersion? After all, what holds for linguistic proficiency also holds deep cultural understanding: the best way to acquire it is to spend time immersed in the culture. Short of this, the next best strategies are:
-Watching films and TV shows produced by and for members of the culture in question (with English language captions).
-Reading popular novels and magazines (ideally not in translation; students can start with texts written for children).
Popular entertainment, especially shows and texts that include realistic portrayals of the culture, provide highly revealing windows into such key aspects of culture as popular taste, popular humor, daily life, family life, social dynamics, and popular pastimes. These are things that classrooms and "comparative culture" lessons simply cannot capture, and they are more "deep," meaningful, and experienced-based than the sort of formulaic and reductionist food- tradition- and etiquette-based instruction that often masquerades as meaningful multi-culturalism.
Yes, teachers could assign novels in translation and spend class time showing movies, but a much more effective role for foreign language teachers is to focus on
foreign language instruction. Young and Buxton are right that "advanced language proficiency" will elude most students. But the most advanced language skills are
productive skills: speaking and writing.
Comprehension (reading and listening) is another matter. A class that emphasizes such "outdated" things as grammar, translation, vocabulary building, and auditory training (instead of the kinds of social studies topics that Young and Buxton favor) can vastly improve comprehension skills. And as their oral and reading comprehension skills improve, students can gain more and more from those cultural artifacts (shows and texts) that, to those who aren't immersed in it, reveal the most about the culture as a whole. For those who eventually do have an opportunity for cultural immersion, a classroom focused on foreign language instruction (as opposed to "cultural awareness") will give them a leg up in maximizing this immersion experience.
Culture, of course, is inherently interesting. But so is language. Young and Buxton don't seem to realize that one of the great pleasures of learning a foreign language comes from
learning for learning's sake. Especially for the more linguistically minded students, and there are more of us out there than you might think, there's something deeply interesting in realizing that English structures are fundamentally different from those of other languages, and in learning the details of how a particular language deviates from English in how it constructs words, phrases, sentences, and
thoughts. For this, too, an emphasis on grammar and translation, however "traditional," is absolutely necessary.
As
another article that came out last week (this one in the Economist) reveals:
A series of announcements over the past few months from sources as varied as mighty Microsoft and string-and-sealing-wax private inventors suggest that workable, if not yet perfect, simultaneous-translation devices are now close at hand.
That is, the "universal translator" that has allowed science fiction humans to communicate face-to-face with aliens will soon be available to real humans. When that happens, many of the practical arguments for learning a foreign language will lose their force. The learning for learning's sake argument, on the other hand, will endure as long as humans, and languages, exist.
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