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The Modern Language Association has issued a report with recommendations for changing college-level foreign language instruction. There is a good summary of it at Inside HigherEd.
quote:The report calls for moving away from this “two tiered” system, integrating language study with literature, and placing much more emphasis on history, culture, economics and linguistics — among other topics — of the societies whose languages are being taught.
I think that in general that's a good idea. My German skills are not that good at all -- part of that is my own fault. But part of that is that I went through the classic two-tiered system.
The only thing I worry about is that this will lead, as it has in other areas (composition studies), to less rigor along with the more flexible approach. Doing literary studies in a foreign language is very challenging. It's a good way to test the limits of your spoken, written and reading comprehension skills. It also introduces you to variants of the language and rhetorical constructs that you might not be exposed to otherwise.
One of the things I agree with most (see the table in the Inside Higher Ed story) is the language instruction disparity between doctoral and non-doctoral granting universities. Bottom line -- you go to a doctoral-granting department your first year (and probably your second year and even in to your third year) of language instruction is going to be from grad students. This is not a criticism of grad students -- I had some great ones who taught German classes at Cal. But rather because of that, tenure faculty don't pay as much attention to those critical first 2 years worth of classes as they should in terms of evaluation, curriculum development, etc. [And incidentally, this you might consider going to a state school.]
Right. So this is probably only of tertiary interest, but I know that quite a few jatraqueros have college foreign language instruction in their background. Thoughts? Experiences? Opinions?
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I think it's a great idea. The best way to become literate in a language is to read a lot of good books in that language. Though my Spanish is at the level of childrens' books, that's how I practice it most. Starting with long vocab lists and grammar for the first few years is a tedious way to go about it. Humans are hard-wired to learn language. Why not take advantage of some of that hard-wiring by teaching in ways that humans naturally learn?
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We learned to speak Russian by speaking Russian, reading Russian, writing Russian, and learning about(then) the USSR. The third year majors went for a semester to Moscow, while most other students went for a year. they found that Moscow was a bit much for the whole year. I am not sure if they go the whole year now.
My college was always considered one of the best, if not the best, schools for languages. I transferred my major to English because Russian was just too intense, but most people were speaking and writing fluently by the time they left.
Tatiana, I disagree that humans, in general, learn by reading. I think humans learn a language by speaking it, first.
One of the reasons we had to learn the culture was because the language was so different, and reflected a different world view.
We were taught by professors, both in drill and class. And they kicked our butts. Good lord. I remember ducking behind corners to avoid Alexandra Gregoryevna, who was all of four feet ten inches tall.
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We never had a Russian text book, the first two years. We had to go down into the dungeon, into these little cubicles, and listen to tapes, and practice for drill class. We had one hour of drill class five days a week, and one hour classes two times a week.
I am tired and unprepared just thinking about it. I loved it, but it was all-consuming, and I had too many other things going on.
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Although nowhere near as intensive as Elizabeth's Russian class, my Chinese class had a textbook that was designed to teach through reading, writing, speaking, and listening. It came with tapes as well (of course, almost no one in the class owned a tape player at that point, so I ended up copying the tapes onto CDs for the entire class).
Oddly enough, I learned more Chinese when I took it at the community college than when I took it at the university. And I don't think it was because I had already taken it. That only gave me the edge for the first few chapters. It was the same curriculum both times.
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I have always wanted to go back to summer school and finish up the course, just to say I could do it.
I loved reading Russian literature. The Master and Margarita was one of my all time favorite novels, as was Zamiatin's "We." The weirdest, though, were the Soviet novels. State-sanctioned literature at its finest!
I am trying valiantly to remember, but I know we could not take the tapes out. In fact, I am not sure they were cassettes, but even sme more ancient form. We had to sign them out at the desk, then sign them back in. We had a binder with workbook-like pages, which you could only do if you listened to the tape.
Unlike many of my classes before Russian, there was no faking. The professors knew within a second how much time we had spent in the lab based on our accurate or lame responses. And there was no catching up once you got behind, so for a procrastinator, it was hell.
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Anything that gets more solid grammar into language classes gets my vote.
Modern languages always seem to get taught "whole language" approach, which for people like me is almost impossible. I need paradigms to memorise, dangit!
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hmm, my german classes were all pretty good, but i think i got the best cultural experience through Concordia College's immersion programs during the summers. working there is also a blast if u are fluent or near fluent in any language.
for my japanese and portuguese classes, they were considered "Critical Language" classes. no more than 8 people can take the class at one time. 1 day a week is grammar and structure, the other day is culture and literature. the teacher speaks about 60% in the target language on the grammar day, and about 95% on the other day. it's really tough the first couple weeks, but after that it gets sooooooo much easier. best way to teach it without a total immersion.
ON TOPIC: my classes were all taught by the same professor for each language at all levels. I think that is a good thing because they can gauge the progress of their students more accurately. Having native speakers teach the class is also something that i think helps a lot.
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I didn't like the emphasis on the written language. I am decent at figuring out French written, but I stick at speaking and understanding it. Even with 3 years of French in school.
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Before we overhaul foreign language instruction, I'd love to see us overhaul ENGLISH instruction. For one thing, requiring much more linguistics than we do now. Unless you are a linguistics major, the English majors at my school need only three hours of linguistics. I think that's incredibly sad.
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I graduated from a very small foreign language department at a state college and consider it the highest education I've ever received.
My program was two years of grammar/culture classes taught in English, which were fun and somewhat productive, followed by two years of small classes, some literature, some culture, and a seminar whose subject changed according to the professor, all taught in French. I remember the first few weeks of the all-French class in literature and how I honestly thought the Chanson de Roland would be the death of me. Literally. But at a point three weeks into that semester, I went from learning about French to actually speaking French. It made that much of a difference. The required courses in that upper division included two semesters of literature, one on French history until the revolution, one on history through the 20th century, one on contemporary politics and economics of Europe, one on enlightnment literature, and various seminars on topics ranging from the arts and literature of France's Muslim minority to poverty in first-world nations. (plus conversation, pronunciation and advanced grammar courses.) It is because of those "whole language through whole culture" courses that I can speak French. You cannot divorce a language from history and society and art and expect any level of fluency.
Dang. I was all decided and gung-ho on my aspirations for an art history masters and now you've thrown me back into the language vs. art debate. Thanks a lot, Zal. Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Belle: Before we overhaul foreign language instruction, I'd love to see us overhaul ENGLISH instruction. For one thing, requiring much more linguistics than we do now. Unless you are a linguistics major, the English majors at my school need only three hours of linguistics. I think that's incredibly sad.
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I don't know why it needs to be done before... as if one is more important than the other. Let's improve everywhere we can.
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As a Ph.D. candidate who just finished a 3-credit foreign language teaching theory course as well as a year of teaching an introductory Italian class, I am in a great position to say something fascinating and momentous.
Um.
The problem is that I'm not terribly interested in teaching language; I do it because I have to. I'd much rather be teaching a lit. course. That doesn't mean I'm not good at it. I am. Not great, but good. Before my indoctrination, I based most of my ideas on how language should be taught basically on my own experiences as a learner (French, Japanese, Latin, Italian, Greek). After a year of practical experience and heated debates with my superiors, I have to admit that I was usually wrong, and that people who study that kind of thing know what they're doing.
Basically, I resisted for months (in terms of theory, not in actual practice) the order to teach 90% of the class in Italian (starting the first week) and to focus grammar instruction from the specific to the general rather than the other way around. Both of those approaches "felt" wrong to me, and both turned out to be more effective.
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The problem is, Annie, I do think one should come first. I think students should get a good solid foundation in the structure and rules of their own language - then they would be better prepared for foreign language study. Unfortunately, we've seriously neglected the study of English structure and a lot of students, even English majors, don't understand how their language works.
I'm not throwing stones from a glass house, either - my own command of linguistics is woefully poor. I am opting to take an additional course in order to improve that - but that extra study is not required - even for someone who is going to teach English! In a 48 hour English major, only 3 hours of linguistics are required. That's pathetic, and one reason why many college professors complain kids can't write or don't seem to even understand rules of grammar and structure. Even the people we're preparing to teach the language don't have a good grasp on the languages' structure.
Yes, I'm all for improving foreign language instruction, but if we improved students' grasp of their own language first, the improvement in foreign language acquisition would follow, I think.
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You have a point, Belle ... I learned a lot about English rules when I started taking Spanish. Rules I'd never thought about before, but just subconsciously used - I discovered them when I learned parallel rules in a foreign language.
I'm sure there are a lot of English rules I just never learned.
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I learned a lot about English by taking Latin. Knowing Latin halped me even more when I was taking Russian.
Still, there are people who can speak many languages, but may not be good writers in any languages.
At this point in my life, I could give a hoot about linguistics, I just wish I had spent time in a country where I would have to learn to speak another language. I wish I had stuck it out with Russian, or continued with French in clooege instead of taking Russian.
Ah well. I chose to speak the language of Love and The Party, but I turned out pretty well.
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With foreign langauges i look forward to learning the grammar and structure. i always think the literature and culture aspects are fun, but i really like to have a grasp on the fundamentals first.
And as Elizabeth said, learning a foreign language (german for me) improved my english grammar ten fold. i was just so-so at english, but after structure was forced onto me with a foreign language it made me see things in english a lot clearer.
So i think reformatting the language programs might help get people more involved in foreign languages and cultures, the current program worked wonders on my structural understanding of languages in general. I think i might be an exception though because i had a few special (dorky) occurances that got me very interested in languages. My thanks mainly go to the Concorid Language Villages and their programs.
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I completely agree with the comments that learning a foreign language helps students understand language structure better which then helps with learning grammar etc. in their own language.
I also agree that American students should be required to learn more linguistics. The problem is that I'm not sure how you make that interesting or of apparent value to students.
Perhaps what we need to be doing is looking less at English instruction and foreign language instruction and more at language instruction -- try to get the learning of a foreign language and of higher order English skills to happen in concert and in a more related way than it does now. I'm not sure how you exactly do that, but I do know that in the few instances where a comparatist approach happened during my schooling (whether me doing it on my own -or- it being part of actual curriculum), I learned a lot more than normally.
For example, translating something that I really was interested in translating from one language to another taught me a lot about grammar, word choice, colloquialisms, etc.
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Well, one way we could get people interested in foreign languages is starting them younger, rather than cutting all the foreign languages.
It is amazing how many middle schools have lost languages. It is harder to learn a language the later you start it, yet we cut, cut, cut.
I remember taking Spanish from early elementary school on. Sure, we sang songs and learned a few simple sentences, but it made it so much easier when I got to middle school and the high school. It didn;t matter what (Romance) language I was taking, I just "got it."
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