NBLT - Richard and Warschauer

In regard to “I’m not sure what we’ll be using these blogs for” in my last post… I had my favorites open, pushing the assignments column of our schedule off of the screen. I wondered why I had taken all of those notes about the article.

So… my summary of key points of the article…

Language education has become increasingly less about drilling specific grammar points and more about communication in social contexts.

Earlier structural approaches (1920s-1950s) viewed the sentence as the primary unit for evaluation.

Later contructivist approaches focused more on increasing the comprehensible input students were exposed to. Exposure to authentic readings and recordings would enable students to construct structure of sentences and banks of vocabulary.

More recent sociocognitive approaches focus on students communicating in culturally authentic situations. Reading and writing are products of these types of interactions.

Computer Aided Language Learning has developed along these same lines. Earlier language programs emphasized immediate feedback on very specific grammar points, accepting only one specific correct response.

Later programs allowed students to interact with an environment existing in the computer. The programs could adapt to the input from the operator, but still had few programmed responses.

A more recent push is for the interaction of language learners with other language learners and native speakers via computer networks and the internet.

My reactions:

I believe my approach to teaching language encompasses all of these approaches. On one hand, I am very grammar focused. I want my kids to know why they do things. I want them to be able to explain to their parents who are not learning a second language why they know this is the right way to do it. On the other hand, I don’t want them to leave my class unable to interact with native speakers in a variety of situations. I want them to see the grammar constructions we use in class used in authentic language (writing, songs, etc.). I want them to see constructions that are different than what we’ve drilled, talk about different ways we say the same thing in English, and find meaning when they cannot yet explain all of the reasons for why a phrase looks how it does. I want them to produce language that will be evaluated by native speakers.

This semester I am teaching a Foreign Language Teaching Methods course. There are 3 students in my class. One is an undergrad student. Another teaches at a parochial school. The third teaches at a charter school that focuses on standards-based projects. Already we’ve had interesting conversations about our approaches to teaching language. We’ve shared great strategies.

Personally, I am quite “old-school” in many of my approaches. However, I believe I truly span the entire range of approaches mentioned in this article.

In the future, I want my students to use the internet to communicate with native speakers and other language learners around the world. I’d love to see them use resources like wikis and blogs at all stages of learning a language to communicate.