An Activity for Thinking About World Language Programs

On our curriculum day the other week our middle school and high school language departments had a rare joint meeting. It was such a fun chance to spend time with the educators across campus while thinking about our shared purpose and how do we move forward.



This was our plan:
Homework: Read the attached article. Or click HERE to read it online. 
Pay special attention to the author's point #5:
(excerpted here:)


5. The world is much more open, and events abroad affect the lives of Americans more than ever before. This makes it essential that the educational experience breed cosmopolitanism — that students have international experiences, and classes in the social sciences draw on examples from around the world. It seems logical, too, that more in the way of language study be expected of students. I am not so sure.

English’s emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress in machine translation and the fragmentation of languages spoken around the world, make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile. While there is no gainsaying the insights that come from mastering a language, it will over time become less essential in doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East.

In Meeting: 
This article presents a particular world view.  Whether you agree with this or not,  (and there are certainly criticisms to this position) the reality is that the world is changing quickly as are assumptions and perceptions about language study.   We suspect that most of us see it as more valuable than this author. 


Our essential question for the next 90 minutes is:
What are the things that our 6-12 language program needs to do in order to be as relevant as possible in the development and lives of our students? How do we want to define language learning for our students?


Here are our tasks:  
1. (15 minutes)
What are the essential elements of our language program?
What do we want our students to be able to do/ know / understand when they leave our program?
2. (30 minutes) 
Eliminate the current reality of our language program.  Start from the ground up and redesign the ideal 6-12 vision. There are NO barriers.  What should it look like?  What would the "requirements" be?  What would characterize our classes?  Would there be classes?
3. (10 minutes) 
In your group, design a presentation (3 minutes)  of your new program to present to the board of trustees of Punahou School.  Compel them to okay the change from the current reality to your vision.
4. Presentations and questions 


This plan was sent to teachers prior to the meeting and the results were really exciting.  Some folks came to the discussion with a detailed proposal to eliminate the middle school world language program as it is (5 different languages) and replace it with a multi-lingulal world cultures program in which all of the students would participate.  Ideas about de-tracking, increasing emphasis on spoken communication and cross-cultural understanding emerged.  Another recurring theme in the groups presentations was the essential role of travel and in-country living plays (or has played) in language acquisition. Teachers wondered together about the role of technology can play in facilitating cross-cultural exchanges and relationships.


It was a great day of thinking and wondering and imagining big.  Now we have to figure out what things that we dreamed about make sense, and then just figure out how to get there.  That should be as easy (but as much fun!) as Jet Skiing across the ocean.

Online Translator Discussion

The following are some of my reflections after a department meeting about this topic.

As a language teachers, we have always found some satisfaction in the fact that electronic translators are imperfect. Our thinking around these tools has always been that they make terrible mistakes and if students use them to translate their own work, we will know because the result is often mumbo jumbo.

We started the meeting by watching this short video on Google Translate:

 
We also brought up Jibbigo in our conversations. This is a tool that does voice to voice translation on iPhones and is pretty remarkable.

Basically, things are changing. As translators get more and more sophisticated, students are able to produce more accurate work with the aid of these tools. While teachers can still detect their use by knowing a student's level and writing style, there is less and less mumbo jumbo. Don't get me wrong, they are still not perfect-- as a colleague pointed out in our meeting, language is interesting because of the baggage that words have. She used the example of vacation in English and vacances in French. The words translate, but they mean such a different thing to the people who speak them.

So the conversation could go two ways:

1) How can we continue to communicate the ineffectiveness of these tools and work to "catch" our students using them inappropriately?

or

2) How can we use the increasing sophistication of these tools to closely examine what we believe is essential to the work we do?

They are connected questions, but the latter seems much more compelling. There were lots of interesting comments on the topic and the conversation was thought provoking. We talked about why kids turn to these tools: the structure of assignments, the different motivation levels in students, and the mounting pressure for perfection in all realms of their lives. One colleague spoke eloquently about literacy in general and how different levels of reading and writing ability in the first language impact work in the second language.

We also talked about how, perhaps, this discussion is analogous to the ones that happened in math departments at the dawn of hand held calculators calculators.  Perhaps not a perfect analogy, but it is interesting.

Our take away seemed to be that we would like to produce a document, a philosophy (including "rules"?) about these tools to facilitate our conversations with students. (In the early hours of the morning I imagined a short PSA video. . . we'll see if that comes to be.)

The central themes would be that our classes are about helping students fine tune their ability to communicate that which is meaningful to them in linguistically and culturally appropriate terms. There are many tools to support this learning, (textbooks, dictionaries, on-line translators, friends, etc. . .) but our main concern is not the content that resides in these tools, but, rather, the content that is honestly generated by the hearts and minds of our students.

When you have time. . .

In a regular meeting this morning we were presented with a reality that is unique in schools: We have too much time. Many of this things that this particular group and meeting time used to do have been moved to other conversations (read: meetings). And now, we have an hour a week that isn't going to get used up with stuff.

So our great leader posed the question:

What do we do?

• Do we cancel half of our meetings and meet every other week?
• Do we turn the agenda over to the group members and have them share something (from their classrooms, research, thoughts. . . etc. . . ) once a year?
• Do we meet to "check in" and then go on to other things if nothing has bubbled up?
• Are there other thoughts about how we might use this time?
  

Our "homework" is to ponder this delightful dilemma. When I think of how often you hear "if only we had more time" in schools, this seems like an opportunity not to be missed. What would you do with an unstructured hour a week with 22 amazing educators? I kinda' hope we don't cancel any meetings.

(Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com)