Method
 

The idea for this course germinated in conversations with Dudley Marchi about curriculum design.  Three things came up in these dialogues:

1.  Recognition of a general tendency to allow courses to have their pedagogy driven exclusively by the linear sequence of
      pages in a textbook (a "methodology by default").
2.  Acknowledgment of the already enormous and growing wealth of live resources on the net, a chaotic wealth.
3.  Realization that the net is inevitable.  It will be used by students, but used in a random, inefficient, even useless way
     unless  a method is developed for the organization of the presentation of the resources.

We decided to pilot an attempt to show how the resources of the net might be used in a pedagogically sound way, as resources, just the way a textbook should be used:  not as a method, but as a resource.   In the absence of the security of being able to plow through page after page of exercises in a textbook, instructor and student are obliged to face the cultural arena where communication actually takes place and culture can't be translated.  The course is an experiment which we think will demonstrate some important things about how languages are learned rather than taught and about how the theory must come first, the resources second.  We hope that the experiment will be a model of interdepartmental collaboration in curriculum design aimed at the benefit of the students.
 
 

The course attempts to utilize some new features of curriculum design. These can be summarized briefly as Flow, Context, and Freedom. The three are related and interdependent.  We would like to show first that an effective, communicative course in a foreign language can be constructed without a textbook, using multiple-media cultural resources; second, that such a course actually may have advantages over a linear, unidimensional one, to the extent that it forces both instructor and students out of conventional paths into an arena of contextual process; and third, that this experiment might influence the way we look at foreign language curriculum design in the light of the growing popularity of the internet and the growing availability of streaming and live media.

Flow. The course has no textbook and no single source of information about French linguistics and culture, French language and behavior. Its multiple sources (text, image, photo, streaming audio, streaming video, and live verbal interaction with Francophones) tend to be more natural, more lively, more spontaneous, and more real than the print-and-image of a written textbook, not only because they are streaming, rather than static, media, but also because their sampling of culture tends to be more spontaneous and less artificial.

When foreign language classes were taught in the little red schoolhouse in the middle of a Kansas cornfield, the textbook was the only means of importing the language into the classroom.  We’re not in Kansas any longer;  there are even better means of importing the language: guest speakers and visitors, videos, and the internet with its myriad sources of push-button streaming audio and video.  Thinking creatively, we are not even limited to importing the language; we can export the class.  Each teacher will have a tendency to employ, in his own teaching, the methodology and resources by which he was taught.  He will habitually fall back to these, as they are more comfortable and less challenging, both for him and for his students.  The switch to new resources is difficult but requires only a ruthless adherence to a basic principle : always employ the most realistic, spontaneous, communicative, and culturally-authentic resources that you can lay your hands on.  For foreign language learning the textbook is still a useful resource, but when viewed in the range of our current technical media, it ranks low.

One of the first useful things that widening our spectrum of resources accomplishes is that it gives us a broader sense of the word "text"--a text in the linguistic sense not of a written text, but of oral, even mental/psychological texts as diverse as the phatic communion between guests and hosts, market haggling, business contract negotiations, chants at football games and demonstrations, clandestine poetry readings, ceremonial mumbo-jumbo, impromptu bursts of song, and intimate romantic whisperings. Each is a text--or better, a con-text--with form, content, expression, and substance. Each is a filled vessel, a charged vehicle, a loaded frequency, carrying culture. Human civilizations deposit their experience in these texts to create a culturally charged con-text. Sampling a range of these con-texts, appropriating chunks of them, and practising their performance is the goal of a use-and-performance method.

Since there is no textbook followed page-by-page, exercise-by-exercise, the trap of method-by-default is avoided. Attention, or presence, can rarely be sustained for long in a course which uses only a textbook. In such a course, after a while the students begin to identify the progression of the course with the progression of the numbers of pages and exercises and lessons in the book. In fact the syllabi of many courses are dates of class meetings and numbers of pages. In such courses, the book itself has actually become the object of study. Elimination of this linear progression, and its underlying assumption--that the material is a static object which can actually be described, circumscribed---is crucial. When the students realize that the real object of study is not an object, but a process, and that studying it is being part of the process, focus and flow begin.

A landscape of multidimensional, life-like, and spontaneous resources such as those on the net can generate student involvement, because the immediacy of the experience complements the analytical mode that is traditionally relied upon for higher learning.  Students who are engaged at an affective level learn faster and surer, for the new linguistic structures they acquire have psychological, emotional, and spiritual roots in additional to intellectual ones.

Context. A theme, an area of focus, a semantic field, is created for each 12-week module and for each week of each module. Multiple types of resources are employed: text, image, photo, audio, and streaming video, vignettes of French life, all drawn from real and spontaneous French behavior, all alive with culture.  The themes are selected in part for their relevance to the ages, backgrounds, and interests of the students.  Constellated projects and presentations, based on each new theme, change over time but are related by method and technique of study. This creates context, without which language is merely algebra. Context, rather than translation, rules. The concepts of context, flow, and process are inseparable here. The process involves affronting genuine French enunciated behavior in its ambient context and appropriating chunks of it, rather than talking about how to translate individual English words into individual French words. Using larger chunks rather than smaller ones (words) conveys the context (meaning) and makes the relations and units authentic. Larger chunks are essential for meaning to exist. Units in a larger context can't always be nailed down, staticized, the way they are in a textbook, where authors sometimes attempt to create the illusion that one word in English = one word in French.

Here is a quick little demonstration of the impossibility of smaller chunk translation, in this case, word translation. Translate this into French:

                            69 degrees

"Soixante-neuf degrés"?  Or "soixante-neuf diplômes"?  The chunk is too small to tell.

Translate this one into English:

                            Chapeau melon, bottes de cuir

"Derby hat, leather boots"? No, The Avengers, the title of the movie, vf. Panning out to the context of movie reviews enables us to translate thought-contexts, rather than words. Working in context is the key, and starting with larger chunks, rather than smaller ones.

Here's another example of the need to start with larger chunks rather than smaller ones: translate

                            He swam across the river.

Word for word, we get

                            *Il nagea à travers la rivière

which is not French. It's grammatical, but not French. While English thought begins with an action, he swam, and proceeds to tell what was accomplished by the action, French does the reverse, stating an accomplishment, and then specifying by what means it was accomplished. This same difference in the language-specific, built-in perception of reality between English (Action>End) vs. French (End>Action) is evident in our students' perplexed efforts to render the ideas "I walk to campus" or "I drive to campus," as

                            *Je conduis à la fac.

                            *Je marche au campus

instead of the properly vectored Je vais au campus en voiture.  Je me rends à la fac à pied.

Furthermore, to return to He swam across the river, the translation of individual words yields another problem in the rendering of river, a "copious stream of water flowing in channel to sea or lake or marsh or another river." [Shorter Oxford]

Rivière, "cours d'eau de moyenne importance," [Hachette] won't do, being too small.

Fleuve, "grand cours d'eau aux multiples affluents, qui se jette dans la mer," is not right either. We're left with the paradoxical conclusion that, properly speaking, there is no French word for river.

Words tend to put things in boxes which aren't really in boxes.  Like 'river', 'whirlpool', 'flame', 'life'.   Grammatical categories influence the way in which we perceive reality.   'Flame' and 'life' are nouns, so our perception of them as things is stronger than their reality as processes.  To certain cultures, there are only four colors.  To some, only one kind of snow.  To others, no future time.  A language is a grid thrown onto reality to arrest it, segment it, and compartmentalize it into pieces which can be categorized, hierarchized, and referred to.  The river has to be stopped in order to talk about it.  But one language's little boxes don't correspond to another's!   Here's one of the rewards of foreign language study : it shows us viscerally and palpably how our boxes aren't real or universal.  It explodes our precious little notion of life in boxes.  It expands our minds with the ideas of other types of boxes which don't match our own.  French temps is bigger than English time, as it includes weather.  What we have is a Venn diagram of temps and time, whose circles overlap but are not concentric. Another circle joins temps, that of weather.  Another joins time, that of heure.  Another joins heure, that of hour, and so on, ad infinitum.  The extension of signs explaining other signs carries on endlessly, like the circularity dictionary game in which every definition leads to one in other terms.  At the micro level, we may have the impression that there is precision but for the system to be alive it must be a process and must be without boundaries.

Here we are at the heart of the matter: like this river which is never the same twice and never the same in another language, language is flow, in other words, process. The assumption of word equivalences in two languages and the notion that meaning resides in words filters culture out of the foreign language, deprives the student of a rewarding cultural immersion and desiccates language study, perpetuates the illusion that one can get along by translating words into English, furthering the ethnocentric view that English is all one really needs. Just as words cannot be translated, sometimes textbook exercises cannot be translated into realia and they wind up as talk about what real communication would be. A certain degree of liberation from the overt paradigm and a recourse to diverse samples of  larger chunks of culture-laden context will enable signification. The great Danish linguist Hjelmslev always advocated teaching language by beginning with large texts (chunks) and going in the direction of small ones, rather than starting with small ones and building.

The art of promoting learning ("teaching") is much like the art of jazz improvisation.  The player who stays on the theme all the time gets boring; the player who ventures too far and too long into total tonal chaos loses his audience.  The virtuoso flirts with surprise and confusion, then returns to solid ground, alternately frightening and reassuring his audience.  The key element seems to be chaos alternating with pattern:  pleasant surprise and stimulation of newness, then comfortable return to the familiar, then flight out to newness, and return to the zone of safety.  In the same way, the presentation of the resources in the course must be structured, but the resources must be experienced by the students as if they were not structured.  Learning and teaching in this manner is like an artful tacking between deduction and induction, between structure and freedom.

Freedom. Freedom of choice, freedom of acquisition, freedom of synthesis, freedom of expression, within the area of focus and in all the activities. The acquisition (incorporation, integration, synthesis) of new structures, new competence, and new performance, is not specifically prescribed by the instructor. Students contribute weekly the structures, the syntactic chunks, which they believe important to performance in the context being studied. These are submitted to a common class page and become material for exams. The pathway of the synthesis of new knowledge is suggested by the interaction of an individual mind with a new cultural context. We cannot transmit structures directly into the brains of our students; we lay out the pieces, and they pick them up and reassemble them in unique ways. The meaning of things is relational. The meaning of items in a linguistic system is a function of the relations among the items and their relation to the whole context. As the students reassemble the pieces, along with the whole context, they will assume slightly different and unique relations of the pieces, and hence come up with slightly different meanings than a French person would. This is normal; it's a process of gradual approximation and adjustment. It works this way in the learning of every language. For example, I dressed up my daughter Laura in her favorite pretty dress for the first day of pre-school, where she met her first friend, a girl named Holly. They walked up to each other and said: "Hi, wanna play?" When I picked her up in the afternoon, I asked her what she had learned. She said, "I learned this..." and she made index finger and thumb of right hand into a perfect circle and moved the circle from her right eye out to full arm's length. I asked her what that meant. She said: "It means You have a pretty dress." So this gradual approximation is a normal process and it's a better process than telling students that this thing in French "means" that thing in English. Fenêtre does not "mean" window. Fenêtre is completely different from window, as anyone who has seen and operated both can tell you.

There is, of course, an orchestration (an Oz) behind the students' mediated exposure to what otherwise would be a linguistic cacophony. Grammatical topics are introduced in planned schedule so that there is an alignment of syntactic structures with the semantic structures evoked by the topics. For example, the imperative and direct and indirect objects are introduced at the very beginning of the course, where many instructions are given; the introduction of the verbs avoir and être at the beginning of the first module in the CV; the future tense in the second module where weather forecasting comes in; the passé composé and imperfect where news reporting about international incidents and disasters occurs; interrogative words, conditional sentences, and subjunctive in the third module on personal relations, where questions about doubtful and hypothetical situations occur. The presentation of the grammar, however, is as implicit and covert as possible, to avoid turning the course into talking about the language.

One problem in foreign language curriculum design that has not received enough attention is that foreign languages are not learned in the same way that most other subjects are. Or, to be more accurate, there is a difference between knowledge and knowing, between competence and performance. Many subjects in the undergraduate collegiate education are taught for passive competence. In those subjects, listening to someone talk about them is sufficient for learning them. Foreign languages should be taught for performance. Listening to someone talk about them will not help one's performance, no more than attending lectures on gymnastics or violin will make good gymnasts or violinists. In fact, foreign languages are probably learned more like sports or musical instruments, because of the priority of establishing new neuromotor pathways, which conflict with existing ones. It is not a passive activity, like undergoing surgery. It requires purpose, intent, engagement, and practice. It's a process of self-actualization that necessitates the full involvement of the self. It requires exposure to possibilities, with which the self grapples and from which the self synthesizes new knowledge. The structures of formal education, however, often get in the way of this process, interrupt the grappling, and divert the natural flow of learning away from the interaction of self and problem.

Ironically, formal education sometimes isolates students from the struggle, from the contest, by force-feeding the prefabricated, predigested, solutions and answers---a diet properly repulsive to any young mind. It doesn't work very well, either, which is why most of us have the feeling of a huge and daunting responsibility to make something happen inside the brains of our students, as if teaching were like performing surgery, when this happening is the most natural thing in the world if it is not imposed or prescribed. But they have to be allowed to grapple. Motivation stems from responsibility and empowerment. In this course, the class, and not the professor, will be the ones to evaluate, as a group, their performance of projects and presentations. This shift of responsibility enables them to value what they do.

Students have to be allowed to care.  They learn what they care about and only value what they have to fight for; they remember what is personally relevant, and matter becomes personally relevant only when the self chooses to get involved. Their caring comes from the connection between self and problem, the wrestling match. The less directly we involve ourselves in that arena, the more directly they involve themselves. They may resist this difficult involvement, for real learning requires change, confusion, disturbance, and vulnerability. Our caring for them sometimes leads us to try to jump in and perform the assimilation for them, but this only prevents them from learning, frustrates them, and makes them resentful. Our job is not to demonstrate our own mastery, or even to impart it, but to create the arena in which they can develop their own--through flow, context, and freedom.