Last year from time to time our elementary French teacher would bring her 5th graders in to visit my middle school classes. Whenever the kids came, they would share something that they had been working on. But I could always tell that the stuff they said was rehearsed. They weren’t actually saying it, they had memorized it, and that is far from true speech. In fact, in my view memorized speech in an L2 learning setting is devoid of any value at all.
It’s a false activity, like so many others that we see in language education. When can the memorized expression “I have two dogs” be of actual value? The child may even be chance be asked by someone in the TL “How many dogs do you have?” but they wouldn’t understand the question to know to respond to it. And, of course, over time, they would forget it anyway.
Anyway, the kids would come in and pair up with my students and make their little memorized presentations. On one occasion a child whom the teacher said was the star of the class came up to my desk to share a little presentation on her iPad about her family, but the thing was she said “I’m sorry” when it didn’t come out perfectly on each page.
She would stumble a bit in her memorized speech and say “I’m sorry” like 20 times. What is happening in education when a child feels so flawed if they can’t do something perfectly? It made me very uncomfortable because I knew that we weren’t communicating, and that that wasn’t speech. I wasn’t able to ask her anything. Is this how we teach our children languages?