ideal language learners

Hi everybody,

David's suggestion that economic privilege (and its correlates, formal education and social prestige) are actually less helpful in learning a language than the practical necessity of actually USING the language was really interesting--and I agree completely. What Krashen refers to disapprovingly as "language appreciation" is really only the domain of the privileged. Maybe that's why it's more prestigious to study a foreign language in an academic, grammar-based way than it is to learn it the way it's really spoken on the shop floor, or whatever... the irony being, of course, that you probably learn the language much better the second way (actually, maybe it's precisely the fact that people who study languages in academic context don't really HAVE to worry about outcomes that gives the endeavor its cultural capital. Hence the demand for grammar instruction from many students--it's more prestigious? And the lower prestige of ESL teaching as opposed to other modern language teaching in the North American context?) Ultimately, maybe teaching methodology matters less for language learning outcomes than the linguistic demands posed by students' lives outside of school... over which we have no control. Okay, that makes our job seem kind of useless, and I don't think it is. If our students are intensively exposed to English in their lives outside of school, they'll probably pick it up eventually, but we can answer questions and make the process less stressful by providing them with resources and encouragement. Also, we help them with their immediate needs in the rest of their secondary coursework (in a almost ESP way).

When I read about Krashen's claim that grammar instruction can be useful if it is conducted in the L2, but only as a device for disabling the filter (same as any content-based approach), it made me think back to my own experiences in French Immersion (a content-based language learning program). Our filters were disabled, all right: nobody cared at all about impressing anybody else, and we adopted a bizarre pseudo-pidgin French which worked for communicating amongst ourselves but probably would have been unintelligible to a lot of French speakers unless they also spoke English (we were fully aware that that's what we were doing... we just didn't care). Our low anxiety level did help us communicate spontaneously within the classroom, but for a lot of us, our filter went right back up as soon as we ventured into the outside world and tried to talk to francophones. So, I think it's important not to assume that the psychology of the classroom community carries over once you leave that setting.

Krashen seems to treat content-based instruction as valuable only insofar as it psychs people out and makes them forget their language learning hang-ups. So maybe it's a valuable approach for learning a language... but what about learning the content? What research or theories are out there about that? In the secondary school context, it's important to know how much subject area content ESL students are able to pick up, not just whether the experience of doing coursework in English helps them with language learning.