Sectori on Education

by Sectori

[Cross-posted from Le Multilingue]

In addition to the issue of teacher wages and school structures that others are discussing, I'm going to bring up two more specific points, both mentioned in brief in my response to the other topic, which Young Sentinel so graciously posted on my behalf. These two points relate to the teaching of specific subjects close to my heart, namely foreign languages and history. Seeing as I'm taking up so much room with this study of foreign language teaching, I guess I'm going to save history for another post.

Foreign languages first. I happen to be a language fanatic—I take French and Spanish at school, have taken Ancient Greek during the summer, Japanese during on weekends, and have dabbled in a variety of other languages, including teaching myself Gothic this summer. I've had experience with a variety of teaching techniques, including the classic drill-based method for Gothic and Greek, the primarily usage- and pattern-based method for Spanish and Japanese (i.e., "this is how you say you like things..."), and something in between for French.

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All of these classes suffered from a serious failing, namely, a lack of interactivity. It's one thing to speak French with a classmate who is also studying the language, but it's another thing to speak French with a native speaker. You and your classmate will probably have similar non-native accents, use similar vocabulary, and build sentences with the same grammatical structures. You could, on the other hand, encounter a native speaker with a completely different accent, who uses regional vocabulary, and who builds sentences in ways only a native speaker would.

In a world where we are increasingly interconnected, where, for example, an immigrant is just a cell phone/trip to the local library away from instantaneous communication with home, rather than weeks away by snail mail, the "one classroom" model of language education is obsolete. (So, incidentally, is the "melting pot" concept that is so ingrained in American minds, but that's another discussion.) Language is not a closed entity, to be used in the classroom and nowhere else. Language is alive, growing and changing, and it should be treated as such. The technology that allows immigrants to communicate with their families can and should be harnessed to allow students the world over to communicate with each other (and indeed it is used for that, but not to the extent it could be).

Language teachers of the world, unite! Harness the power of emails, internet penpals, and YouTube! Maybe instead of assigning your students weekend homework from the textbook, have them make a short movie for YouTube—in the target language, of course. Rather than give workbook exercises one night, assign them a poem to read. Sign up for some internet penpal service and write letters to students in France, Germany, Mexico, China—wherever. Use the tools that are available, instead of plodding on with the same method that's been used for fifty years. Times are changing, and it's time to start changing with them.