The Linguist On Language

The study also found that only 0.68 per cent of the high school students that graduated in 2006, after completing the 12-year core program, had reached the provincial objectives of intermediate oral proficiency. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, I mean New Brunswick.

Teachers know best?

"Certainly, we try to influence government, but to be blunt, we're the experts," the teacher said. (At least he realized he was being blunt.) "We have people with PhDs and masters' degrees and years and years of experience and we're in the classrooms. Why wouldn't you want to talk to the people on the front lines about what we need to do in education policy?"

The answer, of course, is that they should be heard, and with respect. But they should be treated as parties with personal and financial motives, not as the world's only "experts" in what is best for children.

In my experience, a PhD or teaching experience does not necessarily equate to fairness or common sense. University-trained PhDs and teachers have proportionately at least as many narrow-minded, selfish, or simply impractical people as the general population.

Learners need flexibility, innovation, and choice. If I have a child who has trouble reading, or has trouble in some other subject, I should be able to find clinics for these skills and send my child there and not just to the established school national school system. At least 25% of students have reading problems, which means that they probably are not learning as much as they should.

In the famous Lightbown Halter experiment in New Brunswick, French-speaking school children did as wel or better at learning English, using storybooks and tapes, as another group did with conventional teaching.

What makes a good teacher?

What makes a good teacher? If I think of the teachers that I liked, and that inspired me, it was not necessarily their profound grasp of their subject that made them successful. In fact, it is almost irrelevant, within limits of course.

For many students, especial y at university, the best teacher is one who does not get too deep into his subject. If he can keep it simple, clearly explain what wil be on the final exam, and then make sure that most students are capable of getting good marks, that is a good teacher, and his courses wil be popular. It real y helps if the exam is al multiple choice, or true or false, so that the student does not have to bother expressing him or herself in writing. If the goal is to get a degree, this kind of teacher is good. But this is not real learning.

Universities like professors who do a lot of research on subjects that only interest a smal group of their peers. They want their professors to publish papers and attend conferences. So there could be a division of labour, between the researchers who publish papers on subjects of very narrow interest on the one hand, and teachers who ensure that students pass on the other hand.

To me, a good teacher is neither of these. The best teachers I had were the ones who inspired me and chal enged me. They need not have had all the answers. They need not have published learned papers. They just had to be enthusiastic, ask interesting questions, act as if they cared about their subject and their students. They needed to be able to put themselves in the position of their students and not talk down to them. They needed to speak clearly and not mumble.

What to learn

I occasionally fol ow a forum for teachers of English. Recently at that Forum, there has been considerable discussion about whether or not to teach cultural elements in English, and which ones. There have also been discussions on which vocabulary should be taught when, and the importance of word frequency in vocabulary learning. In the past I have seen discussions about which elements of grammar to teach when.

I feel that these teachers are missing the point. The issue is not what to teach. The issue is how to learn. The teacher should not decide for the learner what he or she should learn; what subjects to read or listen to; which aspects of the culture to learn; which words and phrases to learn; etc. The learner should decide this.

The teacher should encourage the learner to be independent, and to discover the language on his or her own. The teacher should make it easier for the learner to do this. The teacher should encourage the learner and provide feedback, always with the goal of making the learner an effective, motivated independent learner. In other words the teacher should focus on teaching the learner how to learn languages.

In that way the learner chooses what to learn. The teacher helps the learner by explaining, providing feedback, asking the learner to use these words and phrases and providing more feedback. The teacher focuses on the HOW to learn, not the WHAT to learn.

Universities