Non-Terminal Education and Language
Iām not a pedagogue, so Iām a bit out of my field with this. Iāll also note that I donāt have any clear statistics for what Iām claiming. So take it with a grain of salt.
I had to invent a term to describe a phenomenon Iāve witness: Non-Terminal Education. Non-terminal education describes learning settings where little to nothing contextually important is intended to be taught. Note that Iām not saying that the teacher has failed to teach the important thing, but that nothing important was taught in the first place.
Letās give you an example of the opposite: Terminal Education
Schools tend to do a good job of teaching mathematics. From the first grade to the twelfth grade, one is gradually taught more and more complex arithmetic, and then one progresses to geometry, and algebra, and calculus. And most people understand how to transfer these skills into the real world. People understand how to add, subtract, multiply and divide actual things. People know how to measure actual things. People tend to have some notion of measuring rates of change and instances in that change. You may complain that certain aspects of the curriculum are too abstract for real-life application, but the fact of the matter is that you can do maths, and quite a lot of it.
Language is by and large a form of Non-Terminal Education
The question you have to ask yourself, finishing a language course, is this:Ā
Do I now know the language?Ā
Do I have the skills necessary to engage with the language and relatively quickly figure out what I donāt know?
The answer to this, by and large, is no.Ā
The answer to that is very complex, and it does vary from place to place. But letās see if we can get to the heart of the matter in at least one setting.
High schools tend to teach a series of contained, independent curriculums in one year. One takes somewhere between 5 to 9 classes per year, and the order in which you take them does not seem to matter. You donāt need to have an extensive knowledge of physics to take Chemistry. You donāt need to have read a Shakespeare play to understand The Scarlet Letter. You donāt really need to know Euclidean geometry to do calculus. (Calculus does hinge on algebra, though.) You get the idea.Ā
Second languages are different from mathematics and sciences and first languages. You cannot honestly learn a language in 10 months. Schools understand this. So what they do is that they divide create a Beginner-Intermediate-Advanced curriculum that runs anywhere from two to four years. (And letās at least be optimistic and say itās a good and effective curriculum.)
Hereās the heart of it though: Nobody is required to take all four years.
Schools tend to say something likeĀ āstudents must complete one intermediate level course.ā That tends to mean one year of beginner and one year of intermediate. With that, the administration assumes that students have some worthwhile ability in the language.
If you cannot engage with the language, you wonāt.Ā
Sounds rather obvious, but what I mean is that human beings donāt go out of their way to engage with languages they do not know. Very few people who donāt know Chinese pick up a Chinese newspaper and a Chinese dictionary and just start reading it that way. If youāre at the intermediate level, youāre probably not able to do much more than that. When one is a student, and oneās brain is divided between 5 to 9 classes, the one they will put on the back burner is the one that thatās a set of data that they canāt use in a meaningful way.
Pedagogic Institutions Accept Non-Terminal Education
And this is a big problem, because itās wasting peopleās time.Ā
What upsets me on a personal level is what I call Hoop Jumping Teachers. Hoop Jumping Teachers are those native speakers of the language you want to learn who donāt really speak your language and they only teach one or two years of the language.
In a lot of countries, especially in Asia, theyāre foreigners who are contracted by the government or by universities to come in and teach. Theyāre assigned a textbook, which comes with a set of phrases, and they just teach that. And most of them canāt do much more than that. They donāt understand the language of the students well enough to break it down to the point where the students have a good handle of why the sentence means what it means. So they have you ājump some hoopsā until youāre happy with what you snazzy new expressions and then you move on from their class and they do the exact same thing with the next class the following year.
(Iām not saying all language teachers are like this. There are many wonder teachers, both native speakers and second language speakers, who work very hard to get their students to fluency. But theyāre not in the majority. And Iām not dissing on people who go abroad to teach their language for a year, either, because there are many who do give it their all.)
The real problem with hoop jumping teachers is when you leave it to them to establish a curriculum and what they come up with once the level of the language they teach is greater than their own fluency in their studentsā language.Ā
What they tend to come up with is an arbitrary barrier where they sayĀ āafter this point we will only speak to you in [my language]. And at this point you must learn to teach yourself.ā (In other words, you become fluent now and I will not be teaching you.) They give their lesson in their language, leave virtually everyone in the dust, and those who arenāt in the dust are pulling resources from different places in order to understand what their teacher refuses to explain.Ā
The situation, obviously is more complex than this. A lot of the way language is taught has to do with languages imitating the way other languages are taught, in many cases those languages with more extensive histories of instruction being languages that are closely related. Whether or not two languages are closely related is another dimension all together. Each of these deserves careful attention.
But hereās my overall point: Language instruction is not like the instruction of any other subject. It has to be treated differently, and the habits of the industry offer very little satisfactory results and have created a plethora of teachers that are very content with teaching people a small set of information that will ultimately prove useless.Ā
theartofmadeline
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
discoholicmusic
tangentwithtanner
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
origamiaround
