language teaching – Educational Sociolinguistics

Getting ready to embrace a new language or getting ready to pass an exam …

Carlos Slompo

My experience with adult second language learners in the last two decades has confirmed the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) prevalence in the instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) settings and so has my participation in two professional training courses intended as pedagogical updates: the Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CELTA), and the Certificazione di competenza in didattica dell’italiano a stranieri (DITALS).

These training experiences have confirmed a very high expectation for elicitation; reduced teacher talking time and class management, always having the CLT as approach and task-based language teaching (TBLT) activities as a primary pedagogical tool.

According to Cambridge University (2022), the CELTA gives teachers (both native and non-native speakers) a range of techniques and practical experience. Teachers get hands-on practice and observation of experienced teachers and apply the content learned during the course by delivering communicative teaching with authentic language learners. According to the University of Siena (2022), the DITALS theoretical basis is the communicative approach and grammar as instruments for language acquisition.

In these training contexts, where teachers are subjected to growing pressure regarding planning, and management of communicative-oriented tasks, besides constant assessment and grading, there is no or little space to consider one crucial purposeful direction of instruction models: personal student development. The preparation process for proficiency exams can illustrate the frustration of an adult L2 learner, doubting the prevalence of CLT in foreign language learning settings where proficiency exams are usually concerned. Tasks proposed in the exams can be accomplished through individual studies and form-focused drills, which was my personal experience. For some adult students, a very tangible outcome is needed: passing certified proficiency exams, frequently designed to fit the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) on a six-point scale, being A1 for beginners, up to C2 for those who have mastered the target language.

Allan’s (2006) study shows that paradox. Proficiency exams may actually act as “the only” gate to acceptance in the main stream of academic studies, and students might want to overcome that barrier by constructing individual strategies. Therefore, reinforcing the individual pragmatist study of a language for “passing” purposes only, leaving government policies of integration having language competence as a parameter even more blurred.

Such contradictions, where teacher training courses and employers advocate a communicative-orientated posture from teachers and, conversely, proficiency exams have few communicative tasks required, raised my interest in arguing the legitimacy of the CLT method prevalence.

Discussion questions

Would a more critical position towards CLT and TBLT help teachers and students create a healthier balance in foreign language learning settings? Where such an approach could be seen as not the only one, but one of the tools at hand.

Have you ever taken any CEFR proficiency exams in any European language? If so, what languages and levels did you take? How did you study for it?

Was taking the exam a gateway for something? Did it feel more like an obstacle? Why did you take it?

References

Cambridge, U. o. (20022). Teaching qualifications. Retrieved from https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/teaching-english/teaching-qualifications/celta

Dawn Allen (2006) Who’s in and who’s out? Language and the integration of new immigrant youth in Quebec, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 10:02-03, 251-263, DOI: 10.1080/13603110500256103

Siena, U. o. (2022). Certificazione de Competenza in Didattica dell’Italiano a Stranieri. Retrieved form https://ditals.unistrasi.it/home.asp

A Special Case of Language Anxiety?

By Wai In Chan

In one of our last classes, Lauren Godfrey-Smith gave an amazing lecture on language anxiety and the experiences of people who went through language anxiety. It was a really emotional experience for me because I felt that the study was acknowledging and validating my feelings about speaking and learning French in Montreal. Over 25 years of my life I have been learning French as a second language in English as a first language schools, and I STILL feel so much anxiety using the language that I avoid it at all costs even until today.

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Anxiety

Sophia

Growing up attempting to speak multiple languages was not an easy task and there were many struggles that came with it. I always felt as though, I was not competent enough in any of the languages I was speaking, whether it was my mother tongue or a new language. This lead me to being a very shy and introverted child, I was to afraid to speak any language for fear of being inadequate. Ironically years later, I learned that many others feel this way and that there is actually a name to it, Language Anxiety. I realize now it was silly of me to think I would be the only person feeling these struggles, but having someone put a name to it, was a moment of clarity.

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Monolingualism or multilingualism?

By Wei Yang

Recently I read a few articles about different foreign language teaching pedagogy, there are two main streams, monolingualism and multilingualism. Monolingualism was really popular in the past 100 years, while received plenty of criticism recently.There are three inter-related assumptions regarding best practice in second/foreign language teaching. These assumptions are that: (a)the target language (TL) should be used exclusively for instructional purposes without recourse to students’ first language(L1); (b) translation between L1 and TL has no place in the language classroom; and (c) within immersion and bilingual programs, the two languages should be kept rigidly separate (Cummins, 2007).

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I pledge to be a better teacher

Ethan’s 3rd post:

In the closing plenary of yesterday’s Learning to Teach workshop, Doctor Andrew Hendry, professor of Evolutionary Ecology at McGill, demonstrated a terrific example of what he called an ‘inspirational class’.

According to him, since information is easy to access nowadays, what distinguishes a good teacher from a mediocre one is whether he or she is able to inspire the students and make them feel sad when the class is over. He surely can do that. In his lecture, he demonstrated how to pass on hands-on learning, how to use social media to inspire students and how to ‘perform’ in front of the class. At the end of his lecture, I could literally sense the energy in every audience and feel that the spirit of the entire hall was lifted up. A picture says a thousand words, and here is a youtube link of how he teaches evolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcMUnYIYUjE. Believe me, you won’t be disappointed.

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Politeness across cultures and language teaching

(Raheel)

In the 21^st century the field of language teaching and learning has shifted from focusing on form and structure to give more attention to the integration of the culture of the target language. As meaning is usually created within a social context, culture is very important to understanding and interpreting words and sentences. As such, in order for language learners to effectively communicate with other speakers of the target language, they should not only master the language but also understand the culture of that language.

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“What is texting doing to language?” Suprasegmentals and acronyms in English texting

By Melissa J. Enns

In our last class, we talked about some effects of globalization on language. In the course of the discussion, a question was raised as to how expressive one actually can be when using mobile keyboards with predictive text. Based on my experience, I would argue that despite the limitations imposed by predictive text and autocorrect, “text speak” is a phenomenon in which (in particular) young people enact identities through creative use of acronyms and techniques to achieve the effects of suprasegmentals such as intonation and stress (see O’Grady and Archibald (2009) below). For copyright and privacy purposes, the following examples are my adaptations of the types of text samples I have seen, not word-for-word quotations.

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