This week’s readings reminded me of one of the key things about learning a foreign language (I teach Spanish!) -- students must model their use of the language after some other person. Usually that model is the teacher, but a good classroom allows for many different people to be the models – other students, native speakers, videos, etc.
Another characteristic of a quality foreign language classroom is the implementation of “situated learning.” Students can learn ABOUT a language all they want, but they will never learn the language itself unless they have to use it to meet an end. Therefore, they have to be engaged in active communication, not simply completing grammar exercises about situations that are irrelevant to their lives. The neat thing about it is that this is when my students tend to thrive – when I give them a task they have to complete using only the target language (or a game played in the target language), I can see their proficiency growing rapidly. It doesn’t matter if everything they say is grammatically correct – their “approximation” of the correct grammar forms will eventually become the correct grammar form after many opportunities to try to say something.
Cognitive apprenticeship and situated learning remind me (again) of the Chinese proverb, “Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand.”. The unfortunate thing about our schools today is that we are very often forced to “teach to the test,” and our teaching style ends up being very didactic with little opportunity to include techniques like cognitive apprenticeship. Our students are forced to memorize information and regurgitate it to be “proficient” on an end-of-course test. In my classes, for example, I am forced to stick to the vocabulary units that make up our benchmark standardized tests, even if some of those units are extremely irrelevant to my student’s lives. The challenge them becomes finding a way to use innovative teaching techniques to help students learn the things that they really don’t relate to very much. It can be extremely frustrating.
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As a language teacher myself, I totally agree with the need to make language learning authentic - after all, in foreign language pedagogy I was taught to scaffold using "realia" - real objects from the target culture, and to situate language learning within learning about culture. My question, having done the readings this week, is - does just making learning authentic and relevant make it "situated"? Or are other elements required as well to make it "situated" (such as selecting materials within the zone of proximal development or articulating native speaker strategies for students or making them articulate these strategies etc.)?
ReplyDeleteyour comments about foreign language are interesting. as a former study abroad student, i'd like to add that situated learning exercises in the classroom worked well, but nothing works as well as immersion... partially because there is no "out" if the person you are speaking to does not speak your home language. do you think this means that we need to "raise the stakes" on our exercises so that they are more authentic? it's just not the same if you can switch back to english in a pinch.
ReplyDeleteI agree that often our hands are tied to teaching a specific curriculum and it can be very difficult to make a connection to relevance for students. As I mentioned in my post, this is when I mention that the material is a foundation for more relevant material, but that a strong foundation is very important.
ReplyDeleteKaren Hughes