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Teaching Languages at School: Strategies? | ||
Tags: School Education | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4790 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 25 of 45 19 February 2014 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You can learn quite a lot in classes if you have 1)a good teacher 2)quite interested
classmates 3)your own motivation. However, these three conditions aren't met that often. I went to an elite highschool so the results weren't bad. But the overall results of the population here are nothing to be proud of. I sometimes think you could just remove the classes and give easier and cheaper access to native media (or just stop criminalisation of piracy because it is just filling the hole on the market) and the results would be better. But languages should be obligatory at school despite or those faults. In countries with worthless native language, like mine, the reason is obvious. But even the anglophone countries, there are reasons to keep teaching foreign languages: 1.Even today, many americans have trouble realizing there are other people on this planet. And given the power of their country, whose governement they elect, they shouldn't be taken away one of the rare opportunities to get to know something else. 2.Learning another language at an early age helps develop certain brain regions and certain not only linguistic skills. It is a rare combination of logical thinking, memorisation, visual and sound and so on. A lot of things taught during childhood and teenage are worthless on their own (80% of highschool maths, majority of science, 90% social sciences, vast majority of the theory of literature and so on), especially when you look at an average adult and how much people retain of the knowledge. The point is often not the matter itself but something behind it. Logical thinking behind maths is a common example. Better oral and writen production coming from lots of reading. And so on. By taking away obligatory foreign language classes, you would take away much more than hours of boredom with poor results. 3.People who start learning a second language as adults without ever having tried before, those are at serious disadvantage. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5547 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 26 of 45 19 February 2014 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
As a teacher you can't solve the problems some of your students have at home, you can't force them to sit down and do homework, you can't always make them pay attention in class when they have one of their first crushes or are concerned about whether their best friend is still their best friend or are thinking about a new movie or video game. You can't stop puberty. And I think it's not a good idea to introduce foreign languages at exactly that time, but many school systems do, so unless you have the money to throw at your school system to train language teachers for primary school education and employ them, well. But I think a teacher can do some things. S/he can, for example, not take certain things personally. There'll always be that student who forgets to do homework, or to bring their book, or somebody daydreaming and having to ask their friends what was just said. It's quite possible to use this tendency to, well, collaborate to your advantage, and for example after explaining a point once or maybe twice, tell students to ask somebody who thought they understood it to explain it to them. (Some of my classes were incredibly slow because my classmates knew they could get away with not paying attention again and again, and then when they were supposed to do exercises, telling the teacher 'oh sorry I didn't get it before, could you please explain it once more?') Of course that's probably not possible to begin in a class of rowdy, anti-school minded 16-year-olds, but 12-year-olds ... I can imagine it to work in many cases. And then, ability. Language learning might be faster if you have talent for things like memorization, but natural ability does not limit your prospect of becoming functional in a second language. Believing that you're bad at memorization and thus can't learn a language well, now, that very much limits your prospect of ever learning it. So I think one of the most important attitudes a teacher needs to convey is: You can't learn to use a language in the classroom alone - nobody can - but if you spend enough time on the language, you can learn it, even when your classroom performance seems hopeless. And I think it's also important to teach students to look at their own progress rather than at their relative progress in comparision to their classmates, because that exactly is what teaches those who don't always experience smooth sailing that the things they decide to do, the time and effort they invest actually make a difference. ETA: Also, being enthusiastic doesn't make you a good teacher. Being able to take in the mood of two, three dozen students at once (or more!), being able to tell when they find an explanation or exercise too difficult (or too easy), to adapt to such situations, being able to come up with solutions to problems you never expected to exist, on top of caring for them and for your subject, and being convinced that learning your subject actually has some relevance to their lives (present and future) and being able to convey some of that - well, yes, that may set you on the path to becoming a good teacher.
Not as far as I am aware of, the question is rather: Can you get the students to find exposure outside of school? Edited by Bao on 19 February 2014 at 5:29pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5211 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 27 of 45 19 February 2014 at 5:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is a bit off-topic, but really I don't think we should call any language worthless, especially one's own language. Maybe something like "not widely used" would be more accurate. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| PeteP Newbie United States Joined 4818 days ago 27 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Romanian | Message 28 of 45 19 February 2014 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Michel1020 wrote:
"They shouldn't teach languages - they should teach how to learn languages. Learning languages is something you do at your own pace - this does not fit with classes. What I would do - first, asking my students what movies, tv series and other tv show they watch and rewatch on tv, computer or what other screen. The question could be something like : what would you like to watch 100 times a week ? I would then give each student a mp3 of the soundtrack of the show they love or something similar if their show doesn't have enough conversations. Better I would teach them how to create their own mp3 out of their choosen shows. Then I would tell my students to listen to the mp3 at least once every day. Play with speed and looping. Don't worry about understanding. Just listen to the music of the language. Listen many times and you will end up identifying sounds then words and so on. Remember how long you listen to your native before you start to understand it. The next class I will test 5 students - asking them questions about their mp3. Questions could be did you recognise any words (student could first identify words that sound like a word in their native). Another question could be what character take part in a conversation ? Did you understand the name of the guest character ? I would put a goal and first step - to understand as much as possible - don't try to speak, to write or to translate." These are great suggestions for a self-learner but might not be feasible for a school teacher. A teacher does not have the luxury of turning a blind eye to copyright laws. Michel seems to be suggesting that the teacher officially, and as part of his job, encourages the kids to make their own bootleg copies of copyright materials. This would be illegal or, if done legally, be too expensive. Again, they are VERY good language learning suggestions, it is just that they might not be feasible in a school classroom. Actually, now that I think about it, you COULD find lots of good stuff on YouTube, but I'm just not so sure how legal it would be to find a movie on YouTube in the target language and assign it to a student. The suggestion also, in my opinion, seems to be in the "learn the target language like a child learns its native language" camp. The child has YEARS of constant exposure. It might take 5 years of the suggested method to begin to learn the languge. This could be shortened by SOME instruction in the way the target language works, being careful not to over-correct and end up in the "grammar, drill, translation" camp. Adults and adolescents learn a target language differently from the way an infant learns its native language. Edited by PeteP on 19 February 2014 at 5:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 3863 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 29 of 45 19 February 2014 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
Language learning is not an easy endeavor. Class time does not come close to being sufficient. The question arises whether a huge time investment in acquiring a new language is worthwhile, and weather that investment is better than an investment in learning more math, economics, science, biology, carpentry, home repair ... For me and the majority of students, the answer is no, it is not worthwhile. Unless a student sees some tangible benefit of spending her time, she makes the rational choice of not putting in the effort. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4403 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 30 of 45 20 February 2014 at 12:19am | IP Logged | |||||
That's a very strange thing to say about your native language. Most people are proud of their national identity and language. I don't think we should really class any language as "worthless", certainly not one which has over 10 million native speakers and is the official language of an entire nation. Czech is obviously not worthless to the people who speak it every day. The vast majority of Czechs live their lives through the language and it's all they ever need for their job and social contact. Only a small proportion of people in any country go to live abroad or work in a multi-lingual environment. By all means learn extra languages but learn to respect your own. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4403 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 31 of 45 20 February 2014 at 12:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Yet I've spoken to German teenagers who are perfectly able to hold a conversation (of sorts) in English. Given their tender years and the fact that they've never lived in an English-speaking environment, you have to applaud the German education system. Clearly they are doing something right. British pupils are nowhere hear this level. Most woud be completely unable to say something like "I bought my first car yesterday" - a sentence involving extremely common verbs and nouns. Yes, you can go on about English being the international language, so kids have an obvious motivation to try it out. But the bottom line is, they still have to sit down and learn it. Is there much exposure outside the classroom? Probably not a great deal. German kids conduct their lives (naturally) in German, films and TV shows are not in English, massive amounts of German books are published every year. Ok, you've got pop music and the Internet, but Spanish and Portuguese kids have these resources too and they seem to lag behind other countries in terms of competency in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4225 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 32 of 45 20 February 2014 at 12:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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The issue is more than just increase the budget to public schools and change the curriculum. From a practical
point of view, the # hours a person spend in the classroom is just too limiting. To make a comparison, a student takes piano lesson once a week. He/she practices a few hours a day before the next lesson. The workout is a technical exercise as well as ear training. When it comes to languages, most people only rely on textbooks once they are out of the classroom. They would speak with their friends in their mother-tongue or a language they know. Besides doing the required exercises, there is no effort made to listen to radio and TV broadcasts or watch videos in a target language. In other words, the exposure to a language is very limited. Recently came across a video from Hong Kong on YouTube. The HK government is trying to promote English and Mandarin in the curriculum on top of the Cantonese language used locally. Based on surveys in a 10 year period, the school students' level of English have actually gone down compared to other neighbouring countries including Korea, China & Taiwan. Before the handover to China in 1997, schools would teach English on top of Cantonese. After 1997, Mandarin has been added to the curriculum and the students are getting less exposure to each language. On the street a number of people were interviewed and not many can confidently say they can speak English or Mandarin fluently. Unfortunately the original video is in Cantonese only and there is no subtitles or English translations: ATV-時事追擊-港人語言水平-2013-7-13 In any given day you only get 2 hours of classroom instruction in a foreign language. No matter how much you try to improve the curriculum, you need to encourage people to read books, watch videos in a language outside classroom hours. Don't forget in a lot of places you have a 3-month long summer holiday. Unless you are in a foreign exchange program, you have several months with "0" exposure to a language until the next school term. The people who are polyglots don't have the problem of being tied to a school curriculum. Because they are learning on their own, they carry a phrase book around 365 days of the year. And most of them do tend to push themselves ahead by learning more words & phrases all the time. Edited by shk00design on 20 February 2014 at 1:00am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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