Mary Beth made this point:
…re-educating is difficult when people are stuck in their ways and do not care about the research and will not read it….
The part about people in a professional position not reading the research is really, for lack of a better word, poignant. It ties back to the people Jeff mentioned and that student he mentioned:
…I told a parent and VP that I teach Latin not English grammar. If English grammar is so important, then we should teach it in English or offer a class in grammar or linguistics. I also got some blatant blow back when a certain student couldn’t lord her knowledge over every one else. Instead of trying to become more proficient in Latin, she wanted me to teach in a way that valued her perceived superiority. She wanted to feel better than everyone else and wanted me to make sure that she got that. That others were doing well was like taking away her only power. It was brutal….
Laurie also commented on what Jeff said with this:
…it perfectly describes a) how many people teach b) how many language departments function c) how our 4%ers feel and d) what many parents (and administrators) expect us to do for their children. No wonder they need re-educating….
Ultimately, re-education of administrators, parent and students, not to mention the general public, is about connecting to research. I think we should all get copies of Foreign Language Education: The Easy Way by Krashen and have them at the newly republished (the book has been out of print for years) but Krashen told me last week that Contee is . I am going to ask Contee when he will have them ready. Maybe we could get them at conferences. We need them. That book rocks.
Krashen has given me permission to actually print his book here, and Diana has a file that I can attach. I’ll work on that. But, in the meantime, I think it a good plan if I just quote paragraphs from it here from time to time. Just randomly. That’s a start. We need to keep in touch with what Krashen has done in that book.
What I like about it, really, at its core, is that The Easy Way is not at all like the hard research that we sometimes encounter in language education. Stuff like what VanPatten has done. Although VanPatten has it right, that we acquire languages by interacting with others, it’s too hard. It’s hard to decipher. It’s not gentle. Krashen’s book, every word of it, has a kindness in it. It talks about moving from effortless and enjoyable conversation via CI to “academic” language if necessary, but it stresses how language acquisition should be something that the student fricking actually wants to do.
I think I’ll try to support that point with this, as this turns into a ramble:
I question hard statistical research in education. There is too large of a grey area, and the grey area in the research is connected to the word motivation. If a student just isn’t really into the subject, then how can any research done on the achievement of that student in that subject be accurate? Does anyone else feel that way? I mean, for the research to mean something, doesn’t the student have to be interested in the subject being measured?
In foreign languages, the National Language Exams might provide an example. If most kids who take that exam are trained with the book and most are forced to take that exam, which is probably a fairly accurate statement, and if we know that most kids trained with the book aren’t really into the language they are studying, because they are being trained with the book and because the book is boring, then what does it mean to say that a certain percentage of those students got a certain score, called the national average, on the exam? I mean, what does it mean? How can we use that information to draw any accurate conclusions about what led to those results? Isn’t real teaching connected to drawing out what is invisible, what is immeasurable, what is invisible? It is to me.
Statistics measure what can be seen. But the most important part of a student is the unseen part, the potential, which is why we are teachers in the first place, isn’t it, to bring out their potential. The painfully shy French horn student who could not emote worth a damn in Mr. Holland’s music class who then becomes governor of her state in part because Richard Dreyfuss drew her out via her music is an example.
Another example is my student Joannie Hayes, a girl from the roughest part of a rough part of a very rough neighborhood in South Carolina who studied her way into a four on the AP French exam and passed a number of other AP exams and is now a medical doctor. Had risk assessment researchers labeled Joannie, who did not have the silver spoon thing going on for her as a child, and whose test scores were not very high early on, they would have predicted another career for Joannie.
I think that statistical analysis and labeling of students (and teachers!) is very dangerous, actually. We all have so much more potential than may be showing up right now. TPRS takes at least a year to get a handle on. There are so many teachers who are interested in TPRS, but whose confidence is being shattered on a daily basis because of received ideas and the naysayers around them, naysayers, in fact, who have nothing to offer in the way of statistical evidence that their way of teaching works either, which is real hypocrisy.