Pat’s Polemics

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I remember so clearly my first ACTFL, in Dallas. I met Marilyn Barrueta, David Stillman, and so many others from flteach. I have never found a better place to eat than that Wyndham hotel we were in in 1999 (right name?).

Generally, I love going to ACTFL and usually do. This year I am going to two other conferences so I'll wait until next year in Denver, closer to me. So when I read things connected to ACTFL that bother me, I will say something about them and hope no one perceives it as carping.

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http://teach.valdosta.edu/WHuitt/files/latin.html
Efficacy of Latin Studies in the Information Age
Alice K. DeVane
(thanks to Amy Rountree)

If you read over this paper, you will note several difficulties presented by the studies it cites.
One is that Latin is not teased out from foreign languages in general, so you are left with nothing peculiar to Latin in terms of benefits.
The other very serious one is that only one study, as I recall, showed a gain before and after the study of Latin; most simply said Latin students are a cut above, which can just as easily be attributed to their being the sort of people who elect Latin as to anything studying Latin did for them.

Naturally, vocabulary in English will be augmented by the study of Latin due to the large amount of words borrowed into English from Latin. It'd be the same for an Urdu speaker studying Persian and Arabic, it's the source of much of the higher level vocabulary in the language.

The higher cognitive functioning is a dilemma for me. I do not believe people learn languages by studying rules, but I also see that if Latin is presented

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Yesterday NPR had a program on cheating in school and a caller talked about how he cheated but only in Spanish class. Why? Because that was the one class he couldn't make heads nor tails of.

If only I could have talked to that fellow, I would have asked him how the class was taught, what he was supposed to learn. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that it was all about "changing something on the end of the word." Despite cries of protest from grammar teachers, we must realize that the great system and structure all of us language types see in the presentation of paradigms, most of it passes right through the brains of the ordinary person. Even those who gut their way through and make a decent grade are perplexed by the suggestion that they actually use the TL.

A video I show my students, The Child's Guide To Language, has a line in it, "They become convinced they are just no good at languages." I have often wondered why this does not bother my colleagues. They continue writing out the paradigm of demonstrative pronouns on blackboards throughout the country, convinced that if they do it just one more time, a whole class will flounce out of the room using demonstrative pronouns CORRECTLY,. After all, correctness, or as it's known now, accuracy, is their only goal, not the ability to use the language.

That's changing, but oh so slow(ly).

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Think about the way we are supposed to learn a language in a fl classroom: the teacher writes a rule on the board; students copy the rule with the intention of memorizing it. The teacher offers examples of the rule in action e.g. gender agreement. Students then "practice" the rule.

The word "practice" means different things to different people. I've heard strong CI teachers defend practice, by which they mean giving students meaningful contexts in which to use the rule for communication without necessarily having ever heard/seen the rule. Other teachers have students chanting the rule and/or examples of it. Others embed the rule in a dialog the students are to memorize and declaim. And many other variations of "practice" exist.

Back to the rule getting and rule using. Using the rule requires a chance to recall the rule, remember how it is applied, and then form an utterance using that rule. That is cumbersome but possible for writing (what Krashen denominates the monitor); but for give-and-take conversation..... no.

So how do I "know" that when I refer to Coca-Cola and say it's made in Mexico, I say "hecha" instead of "hecho", but if I refer to it as un refresco, I'll say "hecho"? Do I think everytime: OK, c

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I just interviewed a college student who wants tutoring in second year Latin. I went into detail about how she was taught so I could match the requirements she would have to meet. Translation and parsing.

So, given that very common finding, my only request of anyone writing something like the post below is: please define "read". Do we mean read or do we mean translate into English and then read with digressions into parsing.

If this poster's students are really reading unadapted Latin classical authors - not adapted texts, not normal Latin prose, but the convoluted, highly artful language of classical authors, that would be worth investigating. To sit and read another language is a wonderful experience, the better the writing the better the experience. But the traditional Latin classroom does not do that nor does it teach that. This is the reason I ask. I do not ask on the listserv b/c we have had way too many blow-ups on that list to venture into those waters. But it is surely a reasonable question given the frequent statement, "We read Virgil"..... and no such thing happened.

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I've always wondered about the Polish-American author Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird, Steps, and other famous novels. He supposedly arrived in American as an adult with no English and in a handful of years wrote a prize-winning novel in English.

So, a quick romp through a biographical sketch on-line

http://www.angelfire.com/linux/whitney/authors/kosinski.html

revealed that he arrived here without much SPOKEN English. We find attacks on him by several assistants who claim he wrote first in Polish and had the work translated or that his assistants had to clean up his English. Thorough research has discredited these claims and he appears to have written his works in English himself. We get no further information about how he learned English, just the summary:

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Here's a good example of how to kill a kid's interest in a topic. I always loved history and I was taking a course to which one of my favorite approaches was suitable: area studies. I particulary wanted to study the Netherlands. My professor, a very inadequate person in many ways, thought that was fine.

Our library at that time was poorly stocked and all I could find was a book on the history of the Netherlands that was political and military, the stock in trade of history books at that time (the 50s). So I took the book to the professor and said I would like some guidance on finding other material. His response was an exasperated, "But that's what history is, kings and wars."

Here was a 19 year old kid who wanted economic history b/c he was interested in the Hanseatic League. The Dutch were the greatest sea farers, so there's technology. Social history fascinated me and I knew something about it, being an anthropology major. Military history had always been an interest, still is, but this book treated wars only as extensions of policy (which they are, I realize). And, of course, I would have been thrilled to find something on the fascinating mix of Germanic languages in that area: Dutch, Plattdeutsch, Frisian, Flemish, etc.

No help from him and I did not have the resources to explore on my own (remember, no library computers then, just card files, and using the reference tooks was cumbersome and interlibrary loan was creaky). So that killed that.

All he would have had to do was direct me to a librarian who worked in that area, probably modern European history or even outside history to find sociological, economic, linguistic material that treated the area in depth of time, showing its development. That's history.

Nowadays, of course, the post WW II historians have emphasized social and economic history. Due to their sea faring skills, the Dutch founded a huge colonial empire. Not long after my stint as a history student, a group of "colonials" took a whole train hostage in the Netherlands and brought the immigration and imperialism issues to the fore.

After this rant about one professor, let's be clear: all I am saying is do not shut your students down. "That's what history is: kings and wars." B.S.

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A nice quote from Ravitch
Here’s a nice piece from Ravitch, Life and Death of the Great American School System, p. 166, quoting from The National Academy of Education:

The scholars warned that “when test results become the arbiter of future choices, a subtle shift occurs in which fallible and partial indicators of academic achievement are transformed into major goals of schooling....Those personal qualities that we hold dear – resilience and courage in the face of stress, a sense of craft in our work, a committment to justice and caring in our social relationships, a dedication to advancing the public good in our communal life – are exceedingly difficult to assess. And so, unfortunately, we are apt to measure what we can, and eventually come to value what is measured over what is left unmeasured.”

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It's odd that fl teachers who promote explicit grammar study tell us that it's understandable and acceptable that students at the end of 4 years of study cannot express themselves or even understand L2 but will show their proficiency once they are in-country.

The communicative teacher says grammatical accuracry will come with use b/c the learner first has to build an internal model of L2. Use of L2 will get to the point that issues of syntax, word usage, collocations, morphology, etc. will be stored along with the early-acquired patterns.

The question is, can we live with both approaches to language learning or is one superior to the other in some way. cognitively, socially, academically?

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