View Content #20014

By CASLS Director Julie Sykes

A few basic assumptions frame the ideas in this week’s summarizing piece. While exceptions can be found in any context, it is essential to acknowledge the following:

1. Language teachers are amazing.  They put in tireless hours and endless effort to create the best possible learning contexts for their students. Even in the face of wildly varying approaches to the same subject, teachers believe in education.
2. Students are amazing. They are required to do more and more in the face of competing priorities, never-ending studies, and a world that changes quickly all around them. They are passionate and dedicated, even if that can be hard to feel sometimes.
3. Researchers are amazing. We know a great deal about best practices for classroom learning, independent study, and language acquisition. This multiplies each year providing insights that are transformational if properly applied in the right conditions.
4. Innovators are amazing. Because of innovation, each day presents increased opportunities for connections, collaborations, trade, and travel, making language proficiency more and more critical each day.

It is precisely the ‘amazing’ in the world languages field that keeps me up at night striving for something even better.  This means acknowledging our weaknesses and finding solutions that are not just different, but rather transformational. Teaching is both an art and a science. We must embrace both elements of that equation for truly transformational educational practice.

As we examine our current approach to curriculum development, three elements seem to be missing. If we can find a way to collectively integrate each, students will not only increase their language proficiency, but also become better communicators able to interact with a variety of people from all walks of life.

First, pragmatics and the study of interaction are absent from the national standards on language proficiency, the curricula available, and teacher training programs. While we are highly proficient at teaching the structures necessary to, for example, greet people, apologize, and respond to compliments, we are not adept and teaching when, how, and in what order those structures should be used. A proficiency-based approach to language learning emphasizes functions, but, in the end, primarily rewards accuracy of form over accuracy of meaning. While the ultimate goal is both, we cannot reach this goal until we openly acknowledge success in multicultural interactions is impacted by much more than a missing structure or incorrect word use.

Second, the idea that there is more than one ideal native speaker model pervades everyday discourse, but is not implemented in practice. The majority of language educators would vehemently defend language variety; however, in currently existing curricula and assessments a ‘standard’ model still prevails. Transformational curricula must find a way to balance language variety, learner subjectivity, and co-constructed idealizations of expert speakers in order to build learners’ strategic skills for successfully interacting with the widest variety of people possible.

Finally, alternative assessments must reflect a way to measure pragmatics, interactional, and strategic competence in language learning. As we build curricular materials which include pragmatic behavior and a variety of native speaker models, we must also strive to create assessment to measure learners’ abilities.

I am optimistic about the future of language teaching and learning and look forward to continued collaboration with amazing teachers, students, researchers and innovators and we all work towards transforming both our art and our science.