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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4625 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 25 of 26 15 January 2013 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | ||
This is also a flaw in the Scottish system. To teach languages you must have a language degree and at least a year's residence in the appopriate country under your belt. Sounds sensible enough, but it effectively bars teachers of other disciplines who are actually fluent in a foreign language from being given a few language classes to work with. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5985 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 26 of 26 15 January 2013 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I find the idea of having a language acquisition or linguistics class in high school quite interesting. My own high school attempted a watered down version of this. I think they called it "language awareness" and you had to do it for your first few weeks at high school before they let you loose on real language lessons. In some respects I think this was actually a really good idea, however the actual implementation seemed to fall short in a few ways. One particularly stupid exercise I remember we had to do was creating a tourist guide for people who couldn't speak English. So basically I wasted a couple of weeks creating a picture book involving lots of road signs and stick men. Art was never my thing, and it annoyed me that I had to do this kind of activity rather than starting to learn French (which I actually really wanted to do!)
There were some high points though. I remember at one point getting given a list of words from different languages grouped by themes, and you had to figure out the words and the theme. They were mainly cognates with English, so with a bit of thought it was quite easy to work out what they were. I think we might have had things like a list of colours in Danish. The other really cool thing they did was made use of some of the teaching staff at the school who were not in the language department, but had a native language other than English that wasn't usually taught in English schools. So we all got one lesson in a slightly more unusual language. I had a Dutch lesson, other lucky classes got things like Polish, Welsh or Chinese. But it was just a "taster". I learned how to do greetings and counting in Dutch at 11 years old, but there was no follow through, no sign post to resources or anything like that. But then again, I also remember getting properly told off by my language teacher in my first year at high school, once we moved on to doing the standard French/German curriculum, for asking advice on how to say something which didn't fit in with the particular sentence pattern we were supposed to be practicing that lesson. Her words were along the lines of "I'm fed up of people like you who are always trying to get ahead of the class". So maybe the problem wasn't so much the concept, as the person in charge of delivery. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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