As many of you know, I have spent my career in academia, teaching English to speakers of other languages. A noble profession, but one filled with frustration at times, given the slow progress and lack of achievement on the part of so many students.
Having time now to contemplate these deficiencies and investigate at length the issues of neuroscience and linguistic acquisition, as well as cross-disciplinary studies, I believe that I have come upon a new technique which might revitalize – if not revolutionize – how we teach foreign languages. The potential for spectacular results is enormous.
In the evangelical Christian movement, there is a sub-culture of believers who practice what is called glossolalia, speaking in tongues. In a state of religious fervor, these practitioners spontaneously begin discourse in a language that they have not formally learned. Some say it is the language of the angels while others claim it is an ancient holy language.
The key here, for those of us in the language-teaching field, is that the language they speak has not been formally studied; the speakers suddenly begin using it with native fluency on the spur of the moment! Imagine if you could replicate this process in your language classroom! No more worries about that discouraged student with his head down on the desk, or frets about whether your lesson plan will last 15 minutes or two! Your students will begin speaking fluently in a very short time, maybe as fast as one day!
Of course, I am sure all of you have some questions about this new technique. Let's look at some of your questions.
1. Traditional techniques that we have grown accustomed to might not be effective in teaching this new method (with the possible exception of Total Physical Response), so what can we as teachers do in the classroom to cover for this deficiency in methodology?
2. This is pretty obvious, but we don't want our students to suddenly become fluent in Angelic, so how do we get them to speak English?
3. If the students learn in one day what has typically taken at least 450 hours of intensive instruction to acquire, what will become of our jobs?
Let me address these very real concerns one-by-one.
1. How do we as teachers re-tool ourselves to meet the new challenge of an entirely different way of doing things? I would like to draw my readers' attention back to the 1960s and '70s when the audio-lingual method was in vogue. The key component of that method was repetition and substitution.
The teacher would cue the linguistic point (S-V-O), "Johnny has many girlfriends" and the students would repeat it, "Johnny has many girlfriends!" in unison. Then, branching off from the sentence but still using the same subject-verb-object pattern, the teacher would make a substitution, "... sex with all of them" and the students would instinctively know that this was an object and would substitute it in the object slot, "Johnny has sex with all of them!" Then still another substitution from the teacher, "... STDs in spades", and the students would dutifully respond, "Johnny has STDs in spades!"
You get the picture. Of course, most of the lessons were not as interesting as that one, and students would slip into boredom-induced comas in about 3 minutes, but the keys here are the "instinctive nature" by which they grasped that the substitution should be an object, and the way that teachers around the world made the transition from the pervasive audio-lingual approach to other more modern and no less effective techniques.
Let's face it, the people who are speaking in tongues right now are the same people who believe in creationism, so clearly a high IQ is not a requirement for learning with this technique (see earlier post). The teacher simply needs to create the proper atmosphere in the classroom: perhaps some rattles, incense and chanting might be helpful to raise the students' spiritual fervor to new heights. Perhaps Jazz Chants could be adapted to this new technique. The method is new, but I am confident that my colleagues in the English-teaching world will rise to this challenge as they did back in the '70s when people suddenly realized that the audio-lingual method was stupid.
2. Attractive though it is that our students might suddenly be able to speak ANY foreign tongue – even Angelic – we must not lose sight of our goal which is that they come away from our classrooms, speaking English. Research shows that the language the glossolalia practitioners speak comes from deep within them, so having some access to the students' inner selves is critical. It is my judgment (based on extensive research, not just sitting around making things up) that the ability to speak in tongues involves a transitional stage, that people do not actually break out into fluent Angelic or whatever, but rather start slowly and within a short time, achieve amazing fluency. It is during this transitional phase, that the students' natural tendencies to Angelic need to be supplanted with English forms. Subliminal projections in a powerpoint presentation, for example, or previous-night, dream intervention might be able to preempt the development of Angelic speech patterns and substitute English. Of course, failure among some of your students is inevitable; some will simply end up speaking Angelic. But considering that they spoke no foreign languages before, even this will be a sign of success.
3. Efficiencies in production always result in a loss of jobs and using this new, ground-breaking technique will certainly result in efficiencies. When you are cranking out fluent English-speakers in a day or two, it seems that it wouldn't be long before you ran out of students. I believe, however, that the use of this technique will not result in a continuing ability to use English fluently. There will be inevitable slipping back into Angelic or even loss of fervor to speak like this at all. This is where the teacher's role will become even more critical. Workshops in reinvigorating fervor, for example, or remediation of Angelic-creep into the students' English will be the focus of our work, providing a new and exciting challenge everyday.
As I see it, this is a win-win opportunity. Students come away with real language skills and teachers gain the opportunity to branch out into new and different challenges that will provide a break from the humdrum of today's lessons and methods.
If I am awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, I will definitely accept; I can use the money.
No comments:
Post a Comment