My position on language teaching

Language Teaching

Kumaravadivelu’s (2003) said that “there is no best language teaching method” (p. 1), and that the dichotomy separating theory from practice has hurt the profession. I envision a language classroom that integrates theory and practice and that is conducive to the creation of a communicative setting. In communicative language teaching, students receive language form as input, negotiate for meaning and process that input as intake, try to communicate their ideas and identities as output, even when the form of their output is completely accurate, so long as they are able to concentrate on the conveyance of meaning, and through that process co-create the collaborative dialogue that is interaction (Richards & Rodgers, 1986; Omaggio Hadley, 2001).

Given these principles, I believe that a communicative approach will allow my students to practice negotiation in interaction that is guided by the language learning macrostrategies developed by Kumaravadivelu (2003). I also feel it is essential that learner communication be contextualized in meaningful and authentic target language use, and that the activities and tasks undertaken “involve the completion of real-world tasks” (Omaggio Hadley, 2001, p. 117), that help students learn the language forms they need to know to meet their personal, academic and professional goals.

In this section, I will first discuss the issue of authenticity in language learning. Then I will talk about certain language learning macrostrategies and how I believe they relate to language teaching practice that promotes a classroom community that engages the “learners both affectively and cognitively” (Borg, 1994). Next, I will explain what I believe are the other essentials of an effective language classroom, specifically, content- and task-based instruction. And, finally, I will elucidate those elements of language assessment that best match my conceptualization of optimal language teaching practice.

Authenticity
Much has been written about authenticity in language teaching. For some, authenticity is a matter of choice of materials and texts, which are considered “authentic when they are not especially written or prepared for the language learner, but rather taken from the world at large” (van Lier, 1996, p. 13). Any text that is written or spoken in the target language for the purposes of its speakers is authentic material, while texts and materials created expressly for the purpose of teaching language are not considered authentic material. Van Lier (1996) explains that authenticity is more than a matter of texts and materials, but extends to the motivation and rationale for the task or action at hand. That is, authentic actions are “intrinsically motivated” (van Lier, 1996, p. 13), and, therefore, relevant and interesting to those who are taking the said action.

Following van Lier’s position, I hold that authentic language use involves the exchange of ideas and the expression of identity through contextualized communication. Within that interaction, interlocutors co-create dialogue by giving “meaning to utterances by shaping the context in which those utterances are produced and received” (Kramsch, 1993, p. 177). Because meaning is determined, not in the written or spoken text itself, “but in the dialogue between the [person] and the text” (Kramsch, 1993, p. 177), learner language is more likely to be authentic and relevant to the students’ needs and purposes when it is in response, or related to authentic materials. Furthermore, I believe that not only should learners’ communicative tasks and activities be authentic, but that it essential that the materials that comprise linguistic input, and the means of assessing progress and proficiency also be authentic and useful in promoting fluency and acceptable language use.

In order to emulate real-world language use, thereby allowing learners the opportunity to produce authentic language, I think that it is necessary to encourage conversations wherein students are interested and motivated to participate. Despite foreign language students’ not being native speakers of the target language, their interactions in that language are, indeed, authentic language use inasmuch as authenticity is not based upon the demographic description of the interlocutors, but is a function of “the response of the receiver. Authenticity in this view is a function of the interaction between the reader/hearer and the text which incorporates the intentions of the writer/speaker . . . Authenticity has to do with appropriate response” (Widdowson, 1979, p. 166, as cited in Kramsch, 1993, p. 178).

Authentic materials and tasks in lesson/unit planning.
I strive to help my students achieve such authenticity by providing them with carefully chosen materials and carefully designed tasks and activities. For example, I designed a series of lessons on immigration in France that used newspaper and magazine articles, news footage, and anecdotal passages relating to different aspects of the topic. This unit was intended for intermediate-mid to advanced-high (ACTFL, 1999) French proficiency students enrolled in the MIIS course, Social Issues in Contemporary France, and was part of a unit on French politics. I believe that the best way to encourage students to receive input and feel compelled to participate in interaction is to present them with different kinds of target language texts and input materials, covering various topics, from the onset of their studies. I think it logical that the more numerous the types of input they are given, and the broader the range of topics covered, the more likely the students will become fluent and critical consumers of target language materials, which (hopefully) will lead to an increase in their willingness and ability to use the target language.

Not only is it my responsibility to provide authentic and meaningful materials to my students, but I must be committed to designing lessons and creating tasks that provide my students the opportunity to use French in an authentic manner. Knowing what motivates my students is an important result of ongoing needs assessment that allows me to understand my students’ “reasons for, orientation towards and interest in language learning” (Kalaja & Leppänen, 1998, p. 166). Keeping their needs and motivations in mind can help me ensure that I engage my students in the creation of such authentic dialogue through the use of tasks that are “representative of the native speaker’s community” (Kramsch, 1993, p. 180), that help them emulate the French-speaking world’s cultural reality, and that provide them with tools for fostering their “critical understanding of the target culture and its social conventions” (Kramsch, 1993, p. 182). In the case of my immigration lesson, since my students were primarily International Policy Studies (IPS) students, interested in political issues and government processes, and since the unit was related to French politics, I selected materials that touched on relatively controversial contemporary political matters in France. In the lesson plans included in section C of this Portfolio, you will see further exemplification of my using the content matter of the lesson to provoke student interest and discussion.

Language teaching macrostrategies
Kumaravadivelu (2003) says that teachers can best meet their students’ needs by acting as “strategic thinkers and strategic practitioners” (p. 2). I agree, and hope to become a strategic thinker and practitioner. That hope led me to implement a teaching framework that is guided by the ten language learning macrostrategies that were developed and elucidated by Kumaravadivelu (2003):

1. Maximize learning opportunities.
2. Facilitate negotiated interaction.
3. Minimize perceptual mismatches.
4. Activate intuitive heuristics.
5. Foster language awareness;
6. Contextualize linguistic input.
7. Integrate language skills.
8. Promote learner autonomy.
9. Raise cultural consciousness; and,
10. Ensure social relevance.

I believe that my primary responsibility as a language teacher is to maximize my students’ learning opportunities by facilitating their participation in negotiated interaction (macrostrategies 1 and 2, above) (Kumaravadivelu, 2003). My understanding of language as form, meaning, and use that takes place within co-constructed interaction has caused me to be guided above all by a commitment to facilitating negotiated interaction, and contextualizing linguistic input within the language classroom. This set of values influences my lesson planning in such a way that I hope to minimize perceptual mismatches by anticipating both what interests my students and what difficulties they may encounter. I also carefully select materials and design tasks and activities that promote cultural consciousness, and that are socially relevant as well as relevant to my students’ needs and goals, as determined by the nature of the program they are enrolling in, an initial needs assessment conducted during the first class session, and subsequent reassessment of their progress and needs, conducted throughout the course.
The students enrolled in the course for which I designed my immigration lessons have needs that are more program-specific than personal or professional. In contemplating how to plan the lessons, I focused upon the goals established for the course itself, in its syllabus. These goals included becoming informed about contemporary France and developing oral and written communication skills while considering topics such as French politics, economic centralization and decentralization, intellectual and cultural life, and French throughout the world (Coly, 2004). I believe that this is best achieved this by guiding students in discovering language meaning, teaching them language form, and encouraging them use the language to investigate, discuss, and write about topics of interest to them, that is, to interact.

My general approach is to give students an introduction to the topic of the lesson, followed by their working together to read and discuss materials, watching a movie, television show, or news program, and then discussing issues of topical import among their groups and as a class. After that, the groups talk to the rest of the class about their discussions. In-class work can be followed by relevant homework, such as a short opinion or reflective essay, or additional reading. In the case of the lesson on immigration, I had the students work together to read aloud a handout about general issues in immigration. After that, each group discussed an immigration-related topic that was related to newspaper and magazine articles they were given. I chose the questions specifically hoping to interest and involve the students in the discussion, using thought-provoking questions such as: (a) Comment les immigrés s'insèrent-ils dans la société française, notamment dans l’emploi?, an, (b) Est-ce que les immigrés sont victimes de pratiques discriminatoires pénalisantes?

My intention was to create an environment conducive to interactions where my students felt compelled to participate and to try different language forms and discourse strategies. By actively seeking to achieve my principal goal through the use of Kumaravadivelu’s other language learning macrostrategies, I should be able to facilitate my students’ language learning and improved fluency. I hope to achieve this by increasing their awareness of French and how it is used in different contexts, through the use of authentic materials.

In designing the immigration unit mentioned above, I tried to: (a) make the lesson relevant to my students’ experience and background and their needs; (b) engage the students in discovery and analysis of texts, while developing specific language skills and strategies; (c) help the students use and understand authentic texts; (d) “provide intercultural focus [, . . . and] develop [the students’] critical social awareness” (Graves, 2000, p. 156); and (e) create authentic tasks, incorporating various groupings, activities, and purposes by using authentic texts from the print media. These choices were made in an effort to contextualize linguistic output (macrostrategy 6), and that input subsequently contextualized student language output and the nature of the interaction. I also wanted to integrate the language skills of reading, speaking, and listening (macrostrategy 7). Finally, the topic, texts and materials, and tasks themselves were designed in an attempt to raise cultural consciousness and ensure social relevance (macrostrategies 9 and 10), in a manner that was interesting and relevant to the students and their courses of study.

Content-based instruction
Recent trends in language teaching have involved integrating language and subject-specific content learning. This content-based instruction fits well with language teaching outlined above. I think this approach makes language learning more palatable to students, and allows language to take its place as a tool for achieving the communicative goals of exchanging information and meaning, and establishing one’s own identity in the communities within which we exist and interact. Content-based teaching has the further advantage of allowing students to be motivated by their interest in the course content, and letting language learning follow as a natural benefit of studying something that is of interest to them. For example, I think it important that English-speaking learners of French be aware of the problems they may encounter due to false cognates. I teach this to them by first having the students work in groups to examine authentic passages in French and English that involve a false cognate. I try to choose current news pieces on topics the students might be interested in, and ask them to use those texts to determine the meaning of the cognates in question. It is my hope that allowing them to discover how French is actually used, and the relationship (or lack thereof) between cognates in French and English will increase their awareness of real-world language use so that they can better target their own.

A further benefit of content-based instruction lies in the built in cultural context created by the content itself. Students are not learning language merely for the sake of learning language, but are, instead, able to use the course content to situate the language in an understanding of its context. I would like to use my background in literature and the social sciences to create content-based language classrooms focused on subjects such as the arts, history, and politics. Topics such as these will provide my students with a language curriculum that is subject rich, and, hopefully, both interesting and relevant to their lives and personal academic goals.
The students in a content-based language classroom are not learning language in isolation, but are provided with an opportunity to use the context of the situation to develop their language skills to the content of the course. Almost by its nature, a content-based curriculum will make use of authentic material such as newspaper and magazine articles, television and movies, literature, and transcriptions of oral language. Using this kind of real-life language as course content and studying its occurrence in real-world contexts will be more interesting and meaningful to my students, no matter their age (Brown, 2001).

Conversational activities designed around authentic material will likely provide more opportunities for my students’ participation in meaningful conversation and interaction, which will allow them to produce complex utterances in context, to practice their pragmatic knowledge, and to feel challenged to understand other people’s input and negotiate for meaning “in order to get to know the other person on the interpersonal plane” (Nakahama, Tyler, & van Lier, 2001, p. 401). This leads me to believe that meaningful conversational interaction relevant to interesting authentic materials is not only more interesting to the students and (hopefully!) more in keeping with their needs, but also more motivating as students are more invested in participating in the negotiation when they feel challenged to support their opinions or ensure that their identity is properly depicted.

A prime example of the power of using authentic materials and structuring a course around conversational activities based upon topics of interest and relevance to the students can be found in the French language courses offered at the Monterey Institute. I am currently enrolled in the course, Security and Democracy in Africa at MIIS. The course is taught entirely in French. The materials are mostly in French, although some articles are written in English but discussed in French. The majority of the students in the course are IPS students who are interested, and personally invested in the areas of development, security, and the promotion of democracy in Africa. Although this is an advanced, content-based language course, there is considerable variation in the French proficiency of the students. The course is designed using authentic materials from the print media and video documentaries to present different issues in the fields of security and democracy in contemporary Africa. Students are expected to talk about these issues in small groups and as a class. Grades are determined according to a peer-teaching event and two small papers.

Since their grades are not at all dependent upon classroom participation, and given the disparity in proficiency among the different students, one would think that some of those students might completely dominate the discussions, or that less proficient users of French would drop certain topics in favor of discussions featuring less difficult vocabulary or grammatical forms. On the contrary! Over and over again, I have witnessed students get so involved, so invested, and so excited about a topic that they almost forget their language issues in their haste to make themselves understood. Not only do they appear to be very motivated by and committed to the classroom discussions, but also they explicitly seek out assistance with their language use, asking for clarification, to be taught new words, and for feedback on difficult structures and forms. Without knowing that there is such a thing as scaffolding or negotiation for meaning, these students are constantly and consistently scaffolding each other and using feedback to adjust their French, increasing both their own comprehension and their comprehensibility. It is downright exciting to witness active language learning in progress!

Assessment
Since high school, I have been interested in language assessment, especially in non-traditional assessment. In the 1980s, the French government was piloting a new form of assessment, that they called contrôle continu (continuous assessment). Promotion into upper division high school courses involved passing a standardized national examination, the Brevet des colleges, as well as the work done throughout the year. This form of continuous assessment was also authentic in that it evidenced our learning and growth, and reflected achievement in instructionally relevant content (O’Malley & Pierce, 1996). This form of assessment is in keeping with the notion that, “when measurement is on-going and non-intrusive, a better sample of student learning is achieved—a more complete picture of what students have learned” (Turner & Phillips, 2005, p. 2).

This idea of continuous assessment intrigues me. I am interested in using this idea to a guide in my own on-going authentic assessment practices. To the extent possible, I intend to avoid traditional and standardized testing programs, preferring instead to rely upon assessment that is directly tied to my teaching. The way that I envision continuous assessment is somewhat analogous to portfolio assessment. In fact, it is my belief that portfolio assessment is a form of continuous assessment in that different assignments and projects are saved and integrated into the assessment process.

I am concerned about the incongruence of what we teach in foreign language courses and how we test student learning and proficiency. So I have sought to base my continuous authentic assessment process upon activities that are interesting, relevant, and realistic to the students. For example, to test vocabulary, instead of a traditionally formatted fill-in-the blank or choose-a-word tests, I prefer to format the test as a crossword puzzle, word find, or another game. Even though the actual questions are still testing vocabulary, and may even be questions taken directly from a traditional test, I believe that something as simple as formatting the assessment instrument in a manner that makes it seem like a game or puzzle makes enough of a difference in the students’ perception of the assessment instrument that they perform better. I have included just such an assessment instrument in the Kirikou et la Sorcière lesson plan contained in Section C of this portfolio.

I also plan to use other forms of authentic assessment that reflect the content and activities in my classroom including: (a) the compilation of portfolios evidencing student work and progress over time; (b) listening in on small group discussions to unobtrusively assess students’ progress in oral language, keeping a journal of short reflective passages on student progress; (c) having the students keep journals in French as well as writing short reflective essays on content matter from the course; and (d) involving my students in online and book-based research projects and presentations.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have described how I think that language is the means we use to connect signs and meaning in order to express identity through language use. I have shown how those factors are reflected in language learning where linguistic input is received and internalized as intake, which leads to the production of output, all contextualized within interaction. I have explained how I intend to parlay those principles into effective content-based classes involving authentic materials, activities, and assessment. And I have talked about how certain other principles of authentic, ongoing language assessment guide me in my assessment practices.

I believe that this discussion has shown how the MATFL program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies has provided me with a useful set of tools I can carry with me as I continue my language-teaching journey. I have learned to use those tools in an effective and practical manner.

One thing that gives me great joy is helping people. Teachers have the privilege of helping people attain the skills they need to meet their goals. Language teachers are given the further opportunity of helping others express themselves and discover and interact with new communities. Although I am still daunted by the idea of joining the language-teaching profession, I will be proud to finally be able to become part of the family business.

Copyright 2005, D. Pensec