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.