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A class that "works"? | ||
Tags: Class Learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6469 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 25 of 29 13 September 2013 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A class "works" for me if I can get the sort of feedback that I can't get studying on my own. Classes have been very helpful for me when I've had someone correct mistakes--particularly spoken mistakes--that I wouldn't have caught on my own.
2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4819 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 26 of 29 14 September 2013 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes, classes are not charity, they are a business where a lot of money is being paid for laughable results. Most language schools earn more by praying on stupid,ignorant people who are shy to demand results and lazy to correct teachers' mistakes than by providing good quality education. That is the trouble.
I also believe that students who are lazy and slow down the class should pay more than the better students. They are not throwing away only their money and results, they are damaging other people. And some people only respond to financial motivation. Sure, you can learn something from a class. But after I found out I absorbed more mistakes than value in the class lead by a native, I was quite disappointed. I really liked the I'm With Stupid's post. I think that is the way. Homework as further pointers for people to get better, not a way to waste fifteen minutes on correction of exercises (which happens in high schools) or to do a babysitter. I didn't suggest the class should be centered around difficulties of individual learners, that is a misinterpretation. I just believe the grammar part of the curriculum should be as much home based as possible and the in-class-grammar-time should be based on catching the bugs, both shared and individual (and I belive most of the individual bugs are actually trouble for more than one person in the class). I just dislike the usual approach where whole class wastes time on grammar exercises, than on the correction and than there are the questions. In 99% of the classes, a few others and me were wasting time because the grammar either wasn't difficult for us or we had enough brains to look at it on our own as well. And those who were wasting our time were just lazy to understand "ah, I have a trouble with this, I should look at it at home and find good questions instead of making the teacher reexplain everything and hold hands of the whole class during another sheet of fill in the gaps exercises". And the wasted time could have been spent on speaking instead. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7015 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 27 of 29 26 November 2013 at 9:48am | IP Logged | |||||
I agree. I had a native speaker in middle school (grade 8) Spanish and she did the whole class in Spanish. It was fun realizing how much of communication is not only non-verbal, but also how much can be understood by paying attention. There really is a great deal of variety in a course like that. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4254 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 28 of 29 27 November 2013 at 5:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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In my opinion learning languages require a lot more of your own effort to be successful than the classroom can
provide. Back in my high school days took French for a few years. Out of a class of 30 people only 2 can communicate fluently outside class. Classes aren't exactly waste of time. It all depends on what you get out of it. You have to decide for yourself everyday you spend just 2 hours in a language class. And outside class you are not getting any exposure to the target language(s). The ones who will succeed are the the people who are enrolled in summer exchange or in an immersion environment. On top of that you need to cut your TV, radio and other programming in the language you know already and spend more time exposing yourself to news & info in your target language(s). In a country like Canada we recognize 2 official languages: English & French. In Quebec they would teach English 1 class a day in school and the rest of Canada the other way around. Only the people who are enrolled in immersion courses have any success of becoming bilingual. The rest of the people learned grammar & vocabulary but most are unable to communicate fluently in both languages. In this country, education is funded by tax dollars unless a child is enrolled in a private school. The government in the provinces and local jurisdictions paying for teachers and language classes that are intended to keep a few professionals employed than actually getting people to be bilingual. For a number of years the Canadian government fund languages classes to get its workers to become bilingual (learn the other official language) without much success either. When you are attending language classes and paying out of your own pocket, at some point you would have to make a decision to continue paying money or stop because you are not getting anywhere. But with a publicly- funded education system like Canada, people don't think whether they are getting anything out of a language class. Edited by shk00design on 27 November 2013 at 5:48am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5036 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 29 of 29 26 December 2013 at 10:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Although I have gone about my views on classes many times before, it is always refreshing to find and discuss new angles to it. As a 'maverick' type ESL/TEFLer, it also feels less lonely to see people advocate 'old school' practices and... oh, my God -- homework! I was brought to tears! ;)
So, basically, what Cavesa, showtime17, and I'm with stupid said, although I'll add a couple of (hopefully useful) reflections -- mind you: additions, not my own 'be all, end all' of classes.
The problem is especially bad because, like in many long-standing issues, the schools are bad providers that have gained so much momentum that they get nearly all the attention regarding classes while giving ALL of them a bad name. Which in turn only tends to perpetuate the situation: any non-mainstream (better) approaches are doomed to stay marginalized. Sad, sad, sad. With possible exceptions, I believe any of the self-study approaches advocated here is better on average than most classes. So why won't be seeing mainstream classes based on any of them any time soon? First reason, you have it above. Time waste and 'work transfer' is the second and most important one.
This would be akin to a scholarship system. I just love the idea, Cavesa! At some point I even thought of implementing something similar in my own school. Now that won't happen, but I think this deserves some more thought. How would you convince existing schools to implement it? I see what's there in it for the students (especially good ones), but what's in it for the school? [On homework and 'work transfer' (= time waste)] At the beginning of my courses/tutoring I always try to explain how the more time one spends working on anything, the better results they get, and how those willing to take some homework will only benefit from it. Needless to say, most of my students give two hoots and choose not to do any work (not even something like watching short YouTube videos) besides their classes. This will not necessarily sink/kill a class, but it'll most certainly take it to a crawling pace, for a very simple reason: most of the time along any course, nothing can really be done in a class without previous knowledge and command of other stuff. Now if students don't know that previous stuff, or they didn't work on it so it 'sticks', then class time has to be sacrificed to make up for that, or neither this *nor* the next thing will get ever anywhere. Such a waste. If we let the number of students and their interaction aside, class is different from self-study in one 'simple' point: a competent/knowledgeable person is paid to help you with whatever you're studying. Now, studying can be split into chunks of stuff students can deal with on their own, and others where a hand would come in handy (no pun intended). Isn't it the most sensible, logical, and productive approach to make students do such stuff on their own outside the class, so precious class time can be devoted to what actually requires help from the teacher? Wouldn't that --as the OP asked-- be the best possible way to make a class 'work'? If you asked most students I've met, apparently it isn't. Why would they have to --gasp-- work, if the teacher is the one getting paid? Let him do ALL of the work. And they wonder why class won't work for them. Well, actually just some of them complain, so we can expect the business model to stay alive and well for a good while ;( In short, when life doesn't get in the way and self-study still fails, there's no one else to blame for it, because no one else can fail at doing the student's work. Classes are so much better for that, that you'll never see (mainstream, anyway) classes heavily inspired by self-study methods. What really gets me is that I sometimes feel like only language teaching gets both this 'throwing money at a problem hoping it will pick it up and solve itself' AND the complaining that it doesn't. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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