Foreign-language teachers' guide to learning

Foreign-language teachers' guide to learning

By Simon Marcus Gower

This is the first of two articles on foreign language
teaching.

JAKARTA (JP): Education or training, like language, is a
process of communication. In order to educate or train, we are
communicating ideas or concepts, methods or means, tales or
histories. Language is a means of communication. It is a tool via
which we interact, with which we communicate ideas and,
effectively, distinguish ourselves as human beings. It is the
medium via which we educate.

Though we live in a highly visual age, language will always
remain central to human development and our capacity to think. A
picture may say a thousand words but it is through the use of our
words, it is via our linguistic acumen, that we may better
understand or appreciate "the picture".

Thus, educational development and linguistic development share
certain characteristics which, if better appreciated, may prove
mutually beneficial. Through understanding how we may
communicate, through not only a first language but also through a
second and foreign language, we may simultaneously develop
appreciation for how we best learn and how we may improve the
clarity of our thought and thus, ultimately and potentially, our
own degree of intellect.

With the benefit of hindsight one might even suggest that the
development of research into foreign-language learning almost
inevitably evolved to a point where not only were the more basic
linguistic skills of appreciation of the structure and vocabulary
of a language a primary area of focus, but also the methods of
attaining these skills became fundamental, if not critical,
aspects of consideration.

Research into language learning, then, evolved to a point
where models for language learning were being pursued that better
and more directly appreciated the psychological processes of the
language learner. The process of actually gaining the skill to
use a language was, then, being combined with a further and
perhaps more sophisticated process of addressing the actual use
and application of the language in real terms. The titles of
"skill-getting" and "skill-using" being coined by researchers to
describe these two aspects of student engagement in the language
learning classroom.

From the 1970s, throughout the 1980s, and into the 1990s, a
more holistic and humanistic approach was being, and has been,
pursued in which greater care and attention has been paid to
foreign language learners' needs, learning strategies, feelings
in the classroom and ultimate language goals.

In this mode of language teaching/learning it is recognized
that language cannot be neatly segmented and viewed in a cold or
formal scientific manner. Rather, the language has to be seen as
a social mechanism, a creative tool. A tool that the learner will
seek to manipulate and utilize for his or her own devices.

Consequently, the language classroom may be seen to have
developed greater sophistication to accommodate learners' real-
world needs. Facing the reality that for learning to hold value,
it must reflect and respond to the world in which that learning
is needed and may be applied.

Thus, in the language classroom, learners should be guided
toward situations in which they might produce (and hence gain
practice in) meaningful language for real-life purposes. Learning
that is relevant to their needs, appropriate in terms of
comprehensibility and pertinent to current language usage (for
example, going to extremes in analysis of the grammar of a
language is rarely either necessary or relevant. A foreign-
language learner is not, after-all, seeking to become a
grammarian of the language but instead achieve the level of
competent user).

The writer is a director for Academic English at International
University Transfer Programs, Jakarta.