John Piazza brought up a great topic in this repost from 2012:
Ben,
I was speaking with a colleague recently, a math teacher, who is helping her middle school age daughter decide which language to take, Spanish, French or Mandarin at another school. I told her that, in my opinion, having a good teacher is more important than which language they take. She then asked me exactly what to look for when speaking to teachers or looking at course descriptions. The obvious terms CI and TPRS are often not on these descriptions, or teachers are reluctant to mention them; or on the other hand, there are teachers who use those terms (as well as “immersion”) who aren’t really doing CI based instruction. I am at a loss. I mean I know what I would look for, and I would be able to intuit things about the teacher and the course from a quick conversation, but I’m not sure what to tell a non-language teacher to look for. Does anyone have some brief words of advice to give parents?
Thanks.
John
My response: I would tell the parent that the goal of middle school, from a parent’s perspective, is to get the kid through the worst years of 7th and 8th grades with their curiosity intact. American kids typically go from happy and engaged 6th graders to unhappy and disengaged high school freshmen in a few short years. That is due to all those “tough” middle school teachers and their “rigorous” (read homework and memorization based) programs.
I cannot believe that they get away with it, but they do. It is as if the parents and the kids buy into a kind of mind set about how serious middle school is. Accordingly, I would counsel the parent to go and meet each of the three teachers and just listen to them describe their programs in a few sentences.
Here is what to tell them that they DON’T want to hear from a language teacher:
“We work hard at learning the basics.”
“I insist that my seventh graders know the structure of the language.”
“It’s not an easy course.”
“We use computers a lot. It’s the way of the future in language learning.”
or anything along those lines. Rather, they want to hear things like:
“We speak to each other in fun ways.”
“We listen to music a lot.”
“We concentrate on how to learn to communicate with each other.”
“We try to have as much fun as possible.”
“My job is to make your child feel as if they are good at languages.”
“I try to teach the kids communication skills that they will need in the workplace.”
“We learn more than the language, we learn how to listen to each other.”
Another thing to tell them is that they should pick the teacher who best exemplifies someone that they as a parent would want around their kid. They should be told that in middle school it’s crucial that the kid emerge with a good impression of their own abilities as a language learner. Middle school and high school have notoriously destroyed infinitely more possible life long interests in world languages than they have sparked. This is inexcusable, and is what fuels my fire in this online professional community and in my job more than anything else. I know that in this community, because it is private, we can share truths about our own desires to help kids in the real way – by making them feel good at something. We will keep trying to build kids’ confidence so that one day there aren’t millions of adults walking around who actually think that they can’t learn languages, which I find to be a national disgrace and an indictment of the flagrant hubris found in too large a percentage of American teachers.
Remember that most language teachers were 4%ers in school – they excelled at conjugating verbs and, when confronted with 96%ers – all but a few of the kids in their classes – they don’t know what to do with them because they may process language slowly or are poor memorizers and they end up making them feel stupid. If we do nothing else in our work using comprehensible input, we encourage and motivate all the kids in the room to learn to love languages. This is enough. If a person needs more than 10,000 hours to even come close to full mastery of a language, and we get our students for, at best 400 hours of listening and reading input instruction in our four year high school programs, then we will keep many of the first year kids to stay with the program for four years. Saint-Exupéry made that point for us when he said:
“If you want to build a ship, don’t gather people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
For language teachers, that would read as:
“If you want to teach a language, don’t gather people together to work on memorizing how to conjugate verbs and remember grammar rules , but rather teach them to long for real acquisition, which comes from immersing oneself in happy ways in the language for long periods of time until the language has been mastered effortlessly and unnoticed, amidst lots of smiling and laughter.”