I took my first French class in 10th grade at a public school in a small Alabama town. The class was typical of most high-school foreign language courses. We spoke mostly in English and the assessments were designed to ensure that no one would fail the class. Vocabulary tests typically asked us to pair French terms in column A with their English equivalents in column B, like so:
| ____ Banane | A) Apple |
| ____ Pomme | B) Orange |
| ____ Orange | C) Banana |
Grammar tests were only slightly more challenging and usually consisted of simple sentences with missing verbs to conjugate, as shown below:
| Demain nous ___________ à la bibliotheque. | |
| (go) | |
I often memorized the verb conjugations the night before (or in some cases, just minutes before the start of the test), then filled in blanks feverishly the minute the exam was in my hands. Speed was key, since my mental snapshot of the proper endings for each verb would begin to blur after five to ten minutes. Occasionally, we were subjected to some other form of memorization torture. This usually involved reciting poems or singing French Christmas carols.
That first year, I thought my French was formidable. (Or, as the French would say, “formidable.”) I could rattle off the French names of almost any object in the classroom. I could tell you exactly how to say I go, you go, and we go. (Saying where I, you, or we were going wasn’t always so easy.) The following year, I transferred to the Alabama School of Math and Science (ASMS), a rigorous magnet boarding school in Mobile. I had to take a French placement exam before enrolling at ASMS, and I knew I was in trouble when there wasn’t a single matching question on the test. My horrible score on the placement exam meant I had to start all over again with French I—along with nearly every other student who had taken a year (and in some cases, two years) of traditional high-school French.
On my first day of French class at ASMS, my teacher explained that our lessons would be built around French In Action, a series of videos designed to teach us French through total immersion. (“Videos” really isn’t the right word, since we viewed everything on gigantic laserdiscs.) As we watched the first few episodes, I was completely overwhelmed. I wondered what language I had been studying for the past year in my hometown, because it certainly wasn’t whatever those people on the screen were using to communicate with each other.
French In Action was part soap opera, part Sesame Street, and it wasn’t great at being either. The storylines were bland and the lesson recaps were repetitive. Yet, despite the actors’ dated haircuts, the overacting, the two-dimensional characters, and the ludicrous plot twists (or perhaps because of them), the whole class was hooked. We were so hungry for anything other than the usual verb conjugation tables and vocabulary memorization that we actually felt invested in the simple narratives. We cheered when Mireille’s bratty sister fell in a fountain in the park. We leaned forward with anticipation when it seemed Robert would finally ask Mireille on a date, and we laughed when our teacher tried to explain a new verb or noun through her own unique system of charades. She would flail her arms wildly, run around the room, improvise with props—anything to avoid a direct translation to English. The goal was to make us think in French, and that’s exactly what the class did.
I went on to major in French in undergrad and was the first student at the University of Alabama to participate in a semester-long exchange program with a French university. (There was another student who was supposed to join me for the adventure, but she went home when she discovered the dorm rooms didn’t offer private bathrooms.) After my semester in France, I decided to move to Germany to live with a few German friends I had made in France. I didn’t speak a word of German at the time.
By the time I left Germany five months later, my spoken German was nearly as good as my French. Of course, there were times when I wished I had learned a few basic grammar rules the old-fashioned way. I was forced to rely on my instincts when trying to conjugate a verb in a complex tense or pair the proper article with a masculine, feminine, or neuter noun. And I still couldn’t explain key differences in the four German cases—nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive—if my life depended on it. However, none of that stopped me from understanding and participating in lots of great conversations with my German friends or communicating with strangers at the grocery store or the pharmacy.
My experience learning German made me wonder (more than ever before) why student progress in learning a new language is still assessed through fill-in-the-blank tests and short essays. Before the days of YouTube, I could understand why an immersive approach to foreign language education was easier said than done. I can still recall how my class “oohed” and “aahed” years ago when one of my professors brought in a VHS tape with a few grainy episodes of Friends that she had recorded while in France. She clutched the precious black plastic cartridge tightly, hugging it to her chest as though she feared one of us might snatch it from her before she could insert it into the VCR. She told us that it cost over two hundred dollars to convert the tape to a North American video format, and we all shook our heads to express our disbelief and our gratitude.
Until recently, supplying students with a German episode of The Simpsons or a Japanese news broadcast required about as much planning and sacrifice as a cocaine smuggling operation. A devoted instructor might record a soap opera during a vacation abroad and carry the tape home like a priceless artifact from an archaeological dig. Once the tape was transported safely, the search would begin for the rare translator of foreign media formats—an elusive code breaker who could make the artifact accessible to the instructor’s students. Today, a wealth of foreign media is only a click away.
So, why isn’t everyone leveraging foreign-language media to create more immersive learning experiences? Some instructors might argue that, YouTube or no YouTube, good foreign language education isn’t primarily about learning enough to understand words and phrases used in popular entertainment and carry on an everyday conversation. The argument over what’s really important in language education (grammar, syntax, and spelling vs. general comprehension and diction) is nothing new. Yet, no matter which side you sympathize with, I think most instructors agree that video and audio can go a long way to promote thinking in a foreign language (as opposed to translation), reinforce key concepts, and burn words and phrases into long-term memory. This brings me to the critical, concluding question of my article, which I hope you will respond to by answering the survey below. (And feel free to provide further feedback by posting a comment.)
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Just throwing students into pieces of authentic media does not serve them well in the end, there should be some degree of structure (scaffolding) upon which they can build new pieces of knowledge. Unless you are living and breathing a language 24/7, it’s not realistic to expect that students will simply absorb language ‘like children’. Immersion in this sense only works when it’s all the way, not when it’s only between 9:50 and 11am on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Some people may be able to learn that way, but I would argue that most cannot. Especially, for adults (including high school students), more work is necessary. Sometimes that means drilling, but it can’t be solely drilling. There must be a blend of techniques.
As someone who does faculty support specifically for language educators, and as someone who is trained in language teaching herself, I would say that the problem is a lack of support (financial, in the form of on-going teacher training, and support personnel). It takes an enormous amount of time to develop worth-while activities around rich media, there are frequently practical issues (video encoding, compression, transcoding, subtitling, etc) that make it nearly impossible for the standard language teacher to cope with on a regular basis, and they frequently lack the tools necessary to do the job.
And then there is the need to recognize, and then attend to, the different learning styles that students have. In order to do this, the instructor needs to produce multi-modal materials and lots of them. How do they do this alone? Where do they get the skills for handling different media types, and know how best to deliver them to students? Must they also be tech experts in addition to being language learning experts?
Unfortunately, it’s not that language teachers don’t want help, it’s that they rarely get it. Many institutions in the US place little emphasis on language learning, it’s not where the funding goes. So they are frequently left under funded, under staffed and without much choice to use pre-packaged materials from aggressive textbook vendors.
I’m lucky enough to work at a college that values language education enough to hire someone like me, I specialize in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and language teaching pedagogy. But even in this case, I am stretched between the language departments and other departments who also need instructional tech support. So I do not get to spend the time that I would like to focus on language learning and the various strategies for improving resources for students via technology.
Most people WANT to be teaching language so that their students become fluent. But there’s a lot more to it than just picking the right TV show. And most language teachers, particularly those in high schools, don’t have nearly enough support to innovate beyond the textbook. And I believe they only way they’ll ever get it, is if the US, as a government and as a culture, begins to seriously value foreign language education. When that happens, we’ll all be much better off.
Thanks for that great response, Carly. I’m not on the front lines of this battle the way you are, and I hope more people will read this post and give me additional feedback that will help broaden my understanding of the challenges instructors face in this field. As an interactive designer, I’d love to put my talents to good use by developing better resources for instructors like the ones you work with.
I get what you’re saying about the need for scaffolding, and I totally agree that it’s unrealistic to think that an instructor could quickly find a Spanish episode of Seinfeld or a Japanese cartoon and somehow make it work for a lesson on foods and dining or common greetings or travel and transportation or whatever the textbook says should come next. I guess my question for that instructor would be, “Why do they have to learn the names of 20 vegetables this week?” Who says it’s essential that students know the right word for onion by week X and that they shouldn’t mix it up with the word for green beans by week Y? For that matter, why bother teaching students how to conjugate a verb with the formal and informal “you” pronoun?
Why do we have to first establish the lesson topics, then go find media to try to force into that round hole? If you’ll humor me while I take this to an extreme, why not let the words and phrases that one finds in popular media dictate what we want students to learn and build lessons around that? Why not just pick a movie or a TV show to watch and have the goal for the next few weeks be that the students be able to understand and repeat any line from it? I doubt many administrators would like the idea of a final exam in which students must properly conjugate all the verbs used in lines from Pan’s Labrynth or Run Lola Run, but surely someone would think of it as a great PR opportunity. I can just see the Chronicle of Higher Education headline now: “Students Learn to Talk Like Movie Stars in Experimental Language Course,” or what about, “Students Gain French Fluency from Film Noir”?
My mother took French in high school, and the only complete statement she still knows today is, “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi, ce soir?” It’s hilarious to me (and a little sad) that the only French question she still remembers is one she learned from “Lady Marmalade,” not from her French teacher. I love to wonder what my mom’s French communication skills would be like today if she had taken a few classes in which almost everything was taught as part of a song or as a memorable quote from a movie or TV show. True, this would have its drawbacks. One day she might want to say, “I have a proposal for you,” but instead, all she would know how to say is “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse.” (And she might mis-conjugate the verb, since the original line used the “he” pronoun.) She might want to say, “That’s none of your business,” but only be able to say, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” Personally, I think this would be a fabulous problem to have and French people would adore her. She’d certainly have an easier time making friends than if she were stuck with her current one-liner—although on second thought, that might make her popular as well, but for all the wrong reasons.
For anyone who thinks I’m either joking or incredibly naïve for suggesting that we throw textbooks out the windows and teach every French I student how to quote every line from Amelie, allow me to offer a less far-fetched approach. Why not put the burden of rounding up the media on the students? Why not have an assignment in which each student (or small group of students) must find a short clip from one of their favorite shows? They could transcribe a certain percentage of the dialogue to meet a minimum requirement and look up words they don’t know. They could then have the class watch the clip (during class time or outside of class), provide their transcript, and give a short summary of key phrases and vocabulary introduced.
Well, it’s not like it hasn’t been tried. There are very adventurous people out there who have thrown caution (and any chance at tenure!) to the wind to start the media revolution in language education. But several realities exist (at least in higher ed, I’m not as familiar with high school politics, so I will respectfully defer on judgment in that field):
1) Tenure and job stability for language faculty is a very real problem. When your field is not usually required coursework, your job is literally at the mercy of student enrollments. You may argue that media-rich courses would attract MORE students, and you may be right initially. But student enrollment drops like a rock once they figure out that doing it that way is hard or ineffective. Why would it be either? Because not every teacher can teach effectively using these kinds of resources (you tend to teach the way you were taught) and because of my second point.
2) You are clearly someone who learns best through visual and aural media, I understand this well because I am the same way. But it is absolutely true that not everyone learns like this. Some students who can succeed in a grammar-based instruction model will feel utterly lost and confused in the type of model that you suggest. That is why I emphasize the mulit-modal approach. That, and the need to keep switching things up to avoid formulaic language and outright boredom.
As to why students must know how to refer to 20 different vegetables by chapter 3, the answer to that one is also practical: Because textbook writers are unimaginative and they have to start somewhere. It’s a lousy reason, but there it is.
There are texts out there that do not follow this pattern, and perhaps more in certain languages than others. In my experience with Japanese, these type of texts tend to be sold and used much more in the target country and less in US college classrooms. If I were teaching now, I would be basing my lessons on some in between text and spending a huge amount of time preparing multi-media materials for use in and out of class. I would focus much of the class time on having students USE the language and finding ways to integrate it into their daily routines.
As for the teaching approach, it’s all about balance. You need the drill-and-kill activities just as much as you need authentic input from news media, etc. The tendency is to rely too much on one or the other, and that will not serve anyone well in the end. Unfortunately, it’s a trap that many language teachers fall into.
One last comment: my theory about your German experience is that it was so easy for you to pick up for a few reasons:
1) You had previous language learning experience (this is huge, it’s about training your brain to think in different directions),
2) German is related to the two other languages you knew so it was easy to make equivalent relationships with words and grammar you knew, (German is 60% lexically similar to English and 29% to French)
3) You could read, German is written with the Latin alphabet, and
4) You seem to have a learning style that gives strong preference to aural input so absorbing the language that way just works for you. And you just might be a gifted language learner. :)
If you were doing the same thing in Japan, you would have had a different experience. Japanese grammar is quite a bit different from Western languages and the writing system is one of the more complex in the world. You might have a chance in China, though, your tendency towards the aural input will serve you very well with this tonal language. :-)
Hi Danny,
I’m Mona’s mom. She sent me a link to your blog. I enjoyed your (funny) “bio” about language learning (French, then German), and I voted (for #1), and I read Carly’s reply, which I would have said myself if I were as educated and articulate in the field as she is, which I’m not!
I teach adult ESL p/t and I wish we had more opportunity for some on-line/e-learning &/or audiovisual learning but in the district where I teach we lack either the equipment or the facilities &/or, as Carly mentioned, the funding for expanding with such technology. I definitely don’t teach ESL using the methods you were taught in your high school French class, however! Of course, I learned Spanish the same way when I was in high school WAY before you were — but I took Spanish for FOUR years — and when I went to my first Spanish language film I couldn’t understand a word. Ultimately, my brief experiences with total immersion in language schools in Mexico and Costa Rica were extremely beneficial, but I had the advantage of already being at a high beginning to intermediate level.
Good luck with this project — I’m afraid I’m just not able to contribute much to the discussion. I hope you get some more input from someone at Carly’s level of expertise!
(And I hope you’re enjoying the Chicago area.)
Wilma
Hey Wilma! Thanks for your feedback. I think a lot of teachers would agree that a lack of resources plays a key role in how they teach. There is lots of great, expensive language education videos, audio CDs, and software out there, but I think there’s a need for more high-quality supplemental materials that are free or very inexpensive for instructors to use in their courses. Hopefully, as I talk to more people who work in this field, I can apply what I learn from others and create useful interactive tools that make language learning more engaging and effective.