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Fun Language Learning

Welcome to The 5-Week Linguist Show. This week, I wanted to talk about fun in language classes. So I wanted to talk first of all, about the intense expectations that there are in a lot of language classes and about what reality looks like. So if you’ve taught languages in any kind of a traditional academic setting, the vast majority of people are required to work with a set of materials. So it might be a French program that has three different books or a Spanish program, et cetera. And the idea of course, from the very beginning, there’s some survival language in that very beginning of that first level book. Surviving in a classroom, learning about what’s in a classroom, learning how to function in a classroom in that target language. And then go to the end of book number three, and there’s some really advanced grammar, perhaps the equivalent that not necessarily is used in even common speech among teenagers.

So it’s basically this whole journey of structures and vocabulary. And I think it’s really useful in many ways. I know there’s a bit of a backlash about it, but it’s really just sort of a whole language sequence compressed into three different books. And I don’t think it’s realistic that everyone’s going to finish and master those things. I do think that it’s a nice guideline for people working in schools or districts or certain states to kind of know, or have some sort of an expectation of what material has the student been exposed to. So we all know then we’ve got some guidelines to work within.

And if you’ve been teaching languages for a while, you’ll also probably agree that some students just like it more than others, and they’re going to be a lot more inclined to do those really deliberate activities, the rote activities, to help them move faster, farther. And that the majority of your class time is going to be spent on acquisition, right? That teaching students through comprehensible input, helping them understand this new language through understanding language you’re exposing them to, whether that’s through speech or presentations, reading.

I wanted to talk about… there’s a lot of expectations, right? We all want our students to do well. We have high expectations of ourselves, and we know that communities and districts and states and actually, they all have high expectations of us, right? That we need to just keep doing what we can to grow languages because we know how great it is for people. And I wanted to talk about fun.

So I came to language teaching with a degree in drama and theater arts and with one in foreign languages. And I was really lucky to get an opportunity to start teaching at a private school. And that’s basically how I pursued my credential, through classes and testing sort of while I was on the job. So some of that training that a lot of really well-trained language teachers from college would have had, I didn’t have in my undergraduate education. I learned a lot of it on the job, or learning theory and then putting it right into practice, and then taking my practice and coming up with my own theories over the years.

But I literally… plays where one thing that I had, appearing in plays, writing plays, directing plays, designing costumes for plays. Everything that goes into putting on a play was something I knew how to do. And at its most basic form, the most basic level, I knew that if I could get students to approach languages like a play, write these skits and these dialogues, bringing those words that are black and white to life, to a place where they remember them really well,