The Linguist On Language

Modern technology may final y bring about a democratic revolution in education. I was reading a discussion on ESL the other day on another website. Some teachers were talking about al the "interesting" things they had their students do. One teacher was asking students to read about the recent South Asian earthquake on the web. Then she had them design a toilet using only the kind of materials that would be available after an earthquake. This was a form of solidarity with the survivors of the earthquake, I would imagine. I guess she was teaching her students to reach out to these unfortunate people. I presume the resulting toilet would be "organic".

However, what if her learners were not interested in the subject? What if they had no desire to get involved in a make-believe project to build a toilet? What if this was meaningless for them? Why not let them use English to learn about something that interests them? If the goal is to help them improve their English, then we need to make the language relevant to them, not to impose subjects and tasks at the wil of the teacher.

Modern technology, the Internet, MP3 players, podcasting, etc. wil enable learners to decide what they want to learn about. Rather than listening to a teacher drone on in class, they wil be able to choose to listen to something that really interests them. The chal enge for the teachers is to make a variety of relevant and valuable content available. Of course it cannot just be anything. It needs to meet certain educational goals. But let us give people choices.

Stimulate them. Do not treat them like mindless objects that can be force -fed whatever nonsense the teacher happens to think up.

I have been a little harsh perhaps. However, if I were asked to design a toilet as a means to improve my Korean I would not be very motivated. Power to the learner!

French immersion

My grandchildren go to French immersion schools. I am happy to hear them speak in very nice French. I look at their homework, written in French. I really get a kick out of that.

On the other hand, for a group of English speaking children to go to school and learn in French is unnatural. They speak to each other in English. They speak to their parents in English.

If they are real y interested in reading about something, they read in English. I have read that there is no difference in French fluency between children who start French immersion at grade 1 (early immersion) and those who start in high school (late immersion). I have heard that these immersion school children do not necessarily become bilingual.

Why? Because in the end it is the motivation of the individual learner that is key. If this

"unnatural" immersion experience motivates the child to learn, fine. If it does not then it is a bad thing. I would favour an approach that gave children an exposure to several languages in the early years, through listening to stories and reading. In other words a LingQ like approach that worked on words and phrases and avoided grammar and did not bother testing the kids.

At a later stage the school children could start the more "serious" study of language. I feel they would do very wel .

I am also not sure that selecting French as the obligatory language makes a lot of sense. I love French, but in North America, Spanish is more important. And there are a lot of other languages and cultures to learn. It is unlikely that young anglophones growing up in Vancouver wil have much use for French at any time in their lives. The students should be exposed to a number of languages and be al owed to choose.

New Brunswick, bilingual province

New Brunswick is the only official y bilingual province in Canada. Quebec is official y French and the other provinces are official y English. The federal government and the country of Canada are official y bilingual. About 30% of the population of New Brunswick is French speaking. Recently New Brunswick announced a change in the French program for English speaking schools.

Beginning in September, English speaking parents wil no longer be able to enrol their children in the early French immersion program; the core French program, which currently makes the language a mandatory subject in school, beginning in Grade 1, wil also be eliminated. The 30 minutes of daily instruction currently offered to the students enrol ed in the core French program wil be replaced with art, music and gym classes.

Report commissioners James Crol and Patricia Lee released 18 recommendations for the province's French second-language programs on Feb. 27, after reviewing the outcomes of French instruction for students who began school in 1995 and graduated in 2006.

The report found approximately 91 per cent of the 1,500 or so students who started early immersion in 1995 had dropped out of the program by the time they reached high school.