Dr. Leon James
Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii
1980
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The Science Fiction of FL Teaching References To the bottom |
a pioneering role in the development of techniques of individualized instruction (e.g. see Altman & Politzer, 1971; Gougher, 1972). But performative teaching will lead to performative learning that is entirely free of the creative stifleness of standardized encyclopedic teaching currently in vogue. More -than in any other course, the student in the FL class will come to feel the freedom to learn that is denied him elsewhere. Freedom from the many tyrannies of the current instructional process: freedom from competitive evaluation, freedom from having to go too slowly or too quickly, freedom from being straight-jacketed into a lock-step progression that is alien and painful, freedom from the threat of punishment for not progressing according to an alien time-table for learning, freedom from enforced boredom, freedom from the inimical role relationship defining the present teacher-pupil contract.
(d) The FL teacher will be the first to authenticate the teaching contract of the new philosophy. The teaching contract governed by current public educational philosophy continues to reflect a traditional value orientation; the authoritative powers invested in the role of the teacher, which in an earlier, less technologically advanced era, seemed quite consistent with the prevailing cultural climate and generally acceptable are felt today as excessively autocratic, and objectionable in the contemporary intellectual climate of the young who, from the bureaucratic point of view, exhibit an excessive sensitivity to personal freedom ant independence. Ten years ago, on the North American continent as well as many parts in Western Europe, this imbalance in value orientation towards the traditional teaching contract was displayed by open rebelliousness and recalcitrance which generally went in public discussions under the topic of "student unrest" and the "student motivation problem". The disrhythm seen and interpreted as a "generation gap" along with disrhythmic transactions between parents and these same children. Whether or not that was an accurate diagnosis, it remains a fact currently that. a competitive and inimical relationship still prevails in the classroom, despite the easier and more enlightened attitude of the new young teachers and of many of the older teachers who have come to adopt a more egalitarian posture.
It would seem, therefore, that a change in the personal attitudes of the teacher and students involved is not a sufficient condition to overcome the transactional inequities perpetrated in the school. Rather than a "generation gap", what seems to be involved is a "bureaucratic gap" whereby the conditions of teacher accountability (to the supervisor and the larger educational system) are defined in terms that are not relevant to the individual student who is directly affected by them. In short, what looks good on the teacher's ledger does not necessarily feel good to the student. It's impossible under these conditions to authenticate the teaching-learning transaction. Much of what goes on in the school is contextualized under an inimical umbrella that is characterized by mutual distrust and suspicion, the need of proctoring during examinations, the threat of punishment and failure, open mutual victimizations or silent dislike, inauthentic gamesmanship, restricted and formal interactions, prejudice, and unequal treatment of sub-cultural groups, and the like.
To establish a more benign climate that is marked by freedom to teach and freedom to learn, the teaching contract itself will have to take on a new basis. Task -, topic -, and curriculum orientation must be replaced in favor of a student-centered orientation. The FL teaching enterprise has played an important innovative role in public education by experimenting with new forms of contractual arrangements made explicity between teacher and each individual student at the beginning of the semester. In these newer methods, known as "individualized FL teaching", the student shares with the teacher the responsibility of decision making in many significant areas of the course activities: content, amount, pacing, test readiness, and evaluation.
We expect this enlightened experimental attitude in FL teaching to continue in the future and stand as a model to be followed by the rest of the curriculum specialties. By the year 2,000 FL teaching will be student-centered, de-topicalized, performance oriented, and largely authentic. The FL teacher will act in the new roles of facilitator, friend, and counselor, and will stand as a model to be emulated by other teachers.
(e) The FL course will be at the base of a humanistic education.
Performative, authentic, student-centered teaching of a FL will involve the student in a self-analytic examination of the transactional register whose effects will be general and will spill over to the general educational context of the student's condition. Learning to transact in the target code through the self-analytic process will change the student's conception of himself, his native transactional code, his transactional
performances in and out of school, and the authenticity basis of his daily living pattern. Thus the FS course will incorporate and yield the combined benefits of current ineffective attempts made in curriculum programs dealing with mental health, drama, psychology, linguistics, social sciences, and anthropology.
(f) The FL course will continue to be a leading force in the innovation and use of new instructional devices. The tape recorder, the language laboratory system, the audio-visual teaching aids, the self-instructional program, the individualized student contract, the performance oriented evaluation tests -- these are some major innovations already pioneered by the FS teaching enterprise. Some additional innovations we expect to see within the next three decades include: (i) the making of 'field experience' a necessary and integral part of training as it has been traditionally done in such service fields as medicine, psychotherapy, and social work, and more recently, in more academic fields, such as sociology, anthropology, and linguistics Living abroad for specified periods, attending summer language camps, participating in cultural maintenance activities (see Fishman, 1966), taking regular curriculum courses through-the medium of the second language, and others like these, will be means by which the authentic cultural aspects of the student's life experiences will be incorporated in school work, thus rendering education more "relevant", less specialized. (ii) the enlargement of the teaching base from the school and the teacher to outside social agencies and individuals by the use of such techniques as the employment of para-professionals and non-professionals as contact persons for transactional practice in the target code, not excluding the use of fellow students working in teams. (iii) a greater use of the 'live' mass media of communication and transportation, permitting direct and personal involvement: radio and T.V. broadcasts, newspapers, books, correspondence, overseas telephone lines, weekend exchange visits, direct cultural exchanges at the school level, international FL festivals, and the like.
The FL student will, more often than not, specialize in the acquisition of multilingual transactional performances. It would not be unusual for a student to become proficient in as many as a dozen FL' s. He might take arithmetic in Russian, drama in French, History in Chinese, Geography in Rumanian, the Bible in Hebrew, Literature in Black English, and social studies in Japanese. all of these -while studying conversational Arabic and scientific German. While currently it takes anywhere up to 400 hours of intensive study to become proficient in some of these languages, in the future this time factor will dwindle to a single semester's work.
Thus, while the world's major languages will continue to spread in general use through international bilingualism, at the same time more and more people will come to know third languages and beyond through widespread multi-lingualism.
In this picture, the FL curriculum has a bright and promising future.
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