Foreign Language teaching: a broken model

I’ve just returned from the most discouraging conference I’ve ever attended in my twenty years of academia. I am more convinced than ever that the “business as usual” model for U.S. foreign-language teaching is bankrupt, yet we are encouraged to move forward with this same model with even more enthusiasm and new technological gadgets.

The first session I attended was meant to be an uplifting one: a new film demonstrating success in some experimental schools in San Francisco. However, the effect of the film was to make it even more evident what a miserable failure the “normal” schools are. One of the first images on the screen during this film was a research statistic: “The best time to become bilingual: before age 13.” This is not news; we’ve known this for a long time. Yet we continue to throw money and resources at the wrong age group while using the wrong methods.

We need to use foreign languages in elementary schools to teach content (e.g. geometry in Spanish, science in French) after a brief introduction to the language. Waiting until students are in high school and then giving them small amounts of communicative language instruction is a huge misuse of time and energy. Students who begin in elementary school will be able to work professionally someday in the target language; those who start later will not.

In one session a veteran high school teacher showed what she can do in the classroom with the latest technological gadgets. With incredible energy and enthusiasm she showed us film clips of how her students can now record their language production with these gadgets: “Hola” (with a heavy accent) “Me llamo es Erin” (with a heavy accent) “Mi color favorita es azul” (with a heavy accent). She doesn’t correct errors “at this stage” because she doesn’t want to interfere with the flow. What are these students learning? To communicate simple, mundane tidbits of information in Spanish; that language teachers can be cool; that new gadgets are cool. These are not bad things to learn, but the cost is too high: years of study, the teacher’s salary and energy, and the millions of dollars spent on technological crap. This is not education!

A presentation by an “expert” (a university professor) left me yet more discouraged. She showed off her knowledge (in English) of discourse analysis as applied to narrating in the past in Spanish. She certainly learned big words in graduate school, but throughout her entire presentation—full of vague generalities about discourse, dressed up in jargon—she ignored the elephant in the room: students won’t memorize verb endings. Without memorizing the imperfect and preterite verb endings, students cannot narrate in the past in Spanish. I don’t believe her university students are that different than mine; they won’t memorize.

In our current system 99% of our students will never achieve any useful proficiency in the target language (e.g. translate, conduct business). I don’t consider “becoming a language teacher” in our current model as “useful” since it is just a game that perpetuates incompetence. But therein lies my character flaw: I’m “unprofessional” because I simply can’t just shut up and play the game.

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