A new language is a new language

At times it seems that many well meaning language teachers seem determined to push their learners back into their native language. Here are two paragraphs from well meaning teachers on how to help their learners. I am opposed to these ideas since I believe that to learn a language you want to distance yourself from your own language as completely as possible. The only exception is the occasional dictionary or text translation into your own language. For the rest you need to let the brain get used to the new language naturally. The following two paragraphs do not represent natural language learning at least in my view. I welcome comments

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........the quickest route to understanding students' language problems and solving these problems is active error analysis.  At this time I have speakers of four unrelated languages in my adult class. I ask them questions about their languages such as "What is the closest sound to this one in your language?" "How do you say this in your language?" etc. and we do quick comparisons. Putting the structures of English and L1 next to each other on the marker board is productive. This seems to help a lot and students generally find it interesting to see how different languages work. At the same time, I learn a lot about how different languages function to better help the students.

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What a fabulous idea! I never thought of having my adult learners write a
children's book based on their cultures. That is such a wonderful way to
show that you respect and honor their culture and heritage, and yet all the
while have them working on their target language skills.

Comments

[Joshua]

Steve,

Hi. I haven't commented here before. I may try to split this into what I see a couple issues. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

Re: age & classrooms in general: As an ESL teacher at a university, I am of the impression that students are mainly going to be successful if they have a strong interest in learning the language. I have many student who seem to have no desire to learn English at all. They spend all their time speaking their native language outside (and even inside class despite English only policy). There are large differences between students with motivation and those without. In my opinion, students with motivation will learn much more outside my class than inside. My responsibilities include working with both kinds of students, so capturing students interests can be a big problem.

Some of the things at work in students' seeming lack of motivation are affective filters (I don't remember if you ascribe much to Krashen). Activities to lower these filters can be good, including ones that include the first language. However, I, like you, also don't think first language activities are so great for adult learners. On the other hand, these can be especially helpful to children in ESL classrooms, and in this case more than any, I think it is appropriate for this "repect and honor" for their culture. I would suggest reading Igoa's The Inner World of an Immigrant Child if you want to explore the topic.

Re: error analysis: I do think that meaningful error analysis for teachers is a good thing. Notice the kinds of errors that a student makes can tell a teacher the types of grammar areas in which the student needs to improve. Solely marking up a students' output (as in giving a recast) can be vague as whether a teacher is correcting content or form.

Re: second quote: What is your issue with writing a children's book about their culture? It seems to be in the target language, which is what you promote.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Joshua

Thanks for commenting.

A university student who is not motivated and not studying is basically cheating the person who paid for his studies, usually the tax payer, and sometimes the parents. That said, if you as a teacher can find a way to turn a learner on, to motivate him or her, that is your greatest achievement.Trying to find that switch is your greatest challenge.

As for error analysis, of course that is useful. We do it at LingQ. We do it in order to help make the learner more attentive to those kind of problems and to look for examples in their reading and listening.

The idea in my quote in my original post, that 4 people speaking 4 different languages can give a few examples of structures in their own language that would be meaningful to this ESL teacher, is just another example of the teacher-centristic nature of much of the ESL teachers' dialogue I experience on these forums.

No, the teacher can get nothing more than a superficial sense of the language of the learner from those few sentences. That superficial knowledge may make the teacher feel important, but is irrelevant to the task of the learner.

My comments referred to adults.I do not think adults should be asked to write children stories, or at least that should only be one of many options. The teacher should not limit the range of things that an adult can choose to write about.

If the learner can write about the new culture, or about neutral things, that is better. To force the write to learner to write about things that are his, personal, is in my view not wise. If the learner chooses to write about his/her personal culture, no problem. It is not obvious to me that this is a great thing for his/her language learning.

The learner does not need the teacher to show respect for his or her culture. This just more of the mothering and condescension that dominates the ESL world. If you were a Chinese teacher of Chinese, how much time would you spend showing respect for the American culture of your American students.

[Valina]

From a teachers perspective, I personally find the idea of comparing Japanese and English to find the similarities so that the students can better understand to be a daunting task. Finding out WHY people say what they are saying is wrong from a structural point of view doesn't seem to help anybody. After 5 years of teaching and many more years of learning, I can attest that it doesn't work.

I don't have a problem writing a children's book... but as a student I wouldn't like to write a children's book in japanese based on american culture. Personally that reminds me of my terrible 7th grade writing teacher who told us we can only write about things we had experienced in life. Well first of all, as a 7th grader, I hadn't experienced much, and what I did experience I wasn't about ready to tell the teacher. Most importantly, it limited my personal creativity as a student (a stark contrast from my 6th grade teacher who encouraged me to just write anything to your hearts consent and have fun).

Having a teacher tell you WHAT to write about in a foreign language class would take the fun out of it.. I would NEVER want to do it.

Now, I did write a children's story in Japanese... I wrote it many years ago when I first came to Japan. I just got the idea when i learned the kanji for bridge. I wasn't at a high level at the time, but I just wrote to my heart's content and the next thing I knew I had 10 pages (It has since been polished, corrected at lingQ, and will be made available once I can get a nice recording of my friend reading it. )

Language teachers need to just do what I do, encourage students to just write about ANYTHING they want to write about, and at a length they are comfortable with. Writing comes from inspiration... and inspiration in language learning comes from exposure mixed with a spark. That spark can not be forced, it just has to come naturally.

Also, Emma would be so bored not reading my brand of strangeness in my writings

[Brian Barker]

As far as learning another language is concerned, can I put in a word for Esperanto?

Although it is a living language, it helps language learning as well. Four schools in Britain have introduced this neutral international language, in order to test its propaedeutic values.

The pilot project is being monitored by the University of Manchester, and the initial results are very encouraging. These can be seen at http://www.springboard2languages.org/Summary%20of%20evaluation,%20S2L%20Phase%201.pdf

An interesting video can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670 and a glimpse of Esperanto at http://www.lernu.net

[Carlos]

I think a very good complement to this kind of sites is to practise with a real teacher like in Linkua, live language tutoring. Classes are done via videoconference