Exposing vs. Mastering
This morning I was reminded how important it is to allot time for professional discussion. Over coffee, I had an impromptu five-minute conversation with our illustrious Craig Bouma, Science department chair (You know, the guy who was on NPR). It was very pleasant and thought provoking.
After his usual reprimand regarding my reckless (bike) riding, I asked him what he thought about the future of the Foreign Language Department. Since he did not have any answer he asked me questions (what a Socratic!) :
-What do you want to accomplish? Mastery or give students a taste for different things that they may pursue later in college?
-What do your paying customers want? How do you balance what they want and what you know is best as a professional?
-What do other department chairs recommend?
(Although Craig proposed some answers, I'll leave it at that and let you chime in with your own take on it.)
Ebiner, you are the man.
ReplyDeleteThe way our program is currently designed fosters mastery. Students are required to take three years of one language to graduate.
ReplyDeleteHowever I would venture to say that some of our students (not a negligible number) do not reach mastery within this length of time.
Then the natural question comes up: should we allow them to take another language after their first year? Or after their second year?
Craig brought this up this morning saying that students who would take two languages could actually get a taste of a variety of languages rather that try for mastery and fall short.
Take a concrete example: of one of my French 1 students who currently hates French (highly improbable, but let's pretend). What good is it to force him to take French for two more years? What if he were allowed to transfer out and take another language (say, German), then this student might not reach mastery but accomplish a couple of important things. He would have learned about his own taste for two different language, discovered he had no affinity for French and may find out that he has something special for German.
If something like this is proposed, we could still propose mastery to students who want to go on for three or four years of the same language but also allow the option of exploration.
(More later . . .)
<astery is very difficult in a non-immersion setting, which is hard to create at the high school level.
ReplyDeleteI've been open to the idea of letting the students chose between mastery and exploration, Meaning they would either do 3 years of the same language or 2/2 (4 years total, 2 years of each of 2 different languages).
There are arguments to both options which I won't get into right now. If I had to only pick 1, I'd stick with 3 consecutive years BUT if we allowed students to have the choice and make a commitment up front to one path or the other, you could allow for great exploration and mastery at a later level.
I took 4 years of Spanish in high school and I really did not "master" Spanish until I studied abroad in college. Now granted I wouldn't change my choice of 4 years of Spanish, but I still wouldn't say I "mastered" it in high school despite having completed 4 years.
Mastery of a target language (TL) requires years of immersion and constant practice. This includes a strong vocab and grammar base, a good balance of input (listening and reading) and output (writing and speaking) skills, along with cultural and idiomatic sensibility (such as expressions, colloquialisms, mannerisms, nuance, mood, etc.) I think the better term is "proficiency" for our secondary school students. Three years, I think, is a must, to at least reach proficiency. In those three years, we can facilitate mastery of the TL. If the student chooses to continue forward with the TL, say, in studying abroad or pursuing the TL in college, then mastery is possible. There are always exceptions.
ReplyDeleteThe "Natives" tend to have an advantage in listening and speaking over the "Non-natives". If the natives' first two years were balanced and focused on developing and harnessing all 4 skills of comprehension and communication, high-level proficiency is possible. In a very few cases, I would recommend a highly-proficient native student to move on and be exposed to a third language. However, as incoming-Juniors, most of the students are struggling with intellectual immaturity and a lack of reading and writing strategies. I am not one to leave a student in limbo, and I think only two years of exposure/learning in the TL does that. The third year for both "natives" and "non-natives" is a necessary bridge to achieving proficiency.
Lastly, I recommended last year that we re-think our course title/description/reqs for the Spanish 3 Honors "Natives". Mychela, Rick Pedroarias, and I began a dialogue last week about "Spanish as a Heritage Language". The word "natives" assumes too much about linguistic capabilities. More later...
For sure proficient is right word, not mastery.
ReplyDelete