The future of foreign language teaching (11/11)

Rethink what we teach

What do we currently teach when we teach a foreign language? Everything! And even more than what a person in the learning situation of his own mother tongue learns. We teach grammar, oral and written comprehension, speaking and writing, plus a bit of civilization. But do we have to teach everything? Or, from the perspective of the learners, do they have to learn everything? Not sure!

Intercomprehension

One could easily imagine teaching / learning the language simply in the receptive mode. We know that it is easier to understand a foreign language than to speak it. Given the very limited number of hours in school to learn a language, it would be not negligible to reduce our objectives, to review our ambitions. This learning / teaching system already exists, it is intercomprehension: I speak my mother tongue and you understand me, you speak your mother tongue and I understand you. Usually, intercomprehension is exercised between languages of the same family (for example the Romance languages), because the effort to access the other's language is less because of the many similarities between these languages. Often, there is natural intercomprehension on the border areas of two countries who speak different, but related languages. Unfortunately, intercomprehension is very rarely taught. Why not introduce international programs where intercomprehension would be widespread in, for example, the whole Romanesque area (France, Wallonia, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Romania, Latin America, etc.)? And why not extend the intercomprehension between unrelated languages?

Rethink whom we teach

The idea is not new, and is making its way incredibly slowly: the ideal age to learn foreign languages, would be before the age of ten. It is therefore in primary schools that the teaching of foreign languages should begin. And it would be a good thing, given the predominance of English in non-English speaking countries, not to start with this language, but by another, the nearest as possible, or why not the furthest possible. As learning English is done as much, if not more, elsewhere (internet, video games, pop music, movies, television series) than in schools, its teaching could begin in secondary school.

The suffering of adolescents

Worldwide, millions of teens suffer during foreign languages courses because what interests this audience is not really what textbooks offer; what interests adolescents is the social relations between people of the same age. Let us really look at the psychology of adolescents, their needs for socialization, and perhaps afterwards we can get ideas to use in the learning of foreign languages, or better still, in secondary school, use foreign languages in order to satisfy their desires for experimenting with social links between peers of different nationalities and go further with linguistic stays and exchanges.

An ultimate emergency path ?

Finally, and perhaps the ultimate emergency route, we should actively collaborate with the neurosciences to really put in place what the OECD formalized in the 2000s, speaking of neuroeducation, neurodidactique in his report Understanding the brain: towards a new learning science. The brain has become a hot topic in the world of education, but there seems to be no real collaboration between the world of language teaching and neuroscience. Research on the mechanisms of learning within the brain, however, does exist.

What we already knew ...

But what mostly results from this research in neuroscience confirms what intuitively or by experience we already knew: for example the benefits of regular use of vocabulary and syntactic structures for better anchoring and ease of use. Or, it confirms what non-conventional approaches to foreign language teaching have done or are still doing: the need for absence of stress in learning (as stated in Krashen's theory of affective filters), the importance of affectivity and emotions in memorization (with the linguistic psychodramaturgy of Dufeu), the body dimension in the acquisition of a foreign language (show what we have understood in physically realizing what has been said with the Total Physical Response method, or associating gestures to words with the AIM method).

A true collaboration between education and neuroscience

We should go further, collectively, and engage in real collaboration with neuroscience specialists. All work on the neuroscientific analysis of reading, dyslexia or aphasia problems in bilingual speakers should be continued and expanded on a large scale, to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages. Some researchers in neuroscience and didactics of languages (eg Huc and Vincent-Smith) have already given interesting results, explaining, for example, that oral and gestural techniques should be favored in beginners' methodologies. However, in spite of the enthusiasm with which their work can be welcomed, we remain a little frustrated, because neuroscience allow us only to validate or invalidate methodologies: if a method activates the same brain areas as the spontaneous oral language, without having recourse to grammatical reflection, then it is a good method, and if it is not, let's put the method in the trash. It is already a giant step, but we would like to not only evaluate a methodology scientifically, we would like to know exactly how the brain learns a language, know what allows learning and thus develop a didactic neuroscientific approach.

To conclude: your future depends on you!

In a multilingual world vision, we can consider that the use of machines in international communications will no longer be science fiction, whether in the form of a universal translator or even a direct neural interface. There will be then practically no teachers of foreign languages, only professionals in the field of computational linguistic. In the meantime, in the medium term, and although this is not always desirable, one can imagine an innovative form of teaching using machines or even chemistry, if not to replace the teacher, at least to assist him/her. What I am sure of is that if the teacher wants to compete with these technological innovations and does not want to be sidelined with global immersion programs, he/she must make every effort: 1. to make teaching / learning of a foreign language becoming truly effective for all learners by using the maximum knowledge of neuroscience on learning; 2. to make these learners feel that this learning is a pleasure and a success; and 3. that, consequently, they devote sufficient time and attention to it. If not, the language teacher is finished.

@ Jérôme Paul 2017

Thanks to Jan Roberts for the proofreading of the English translation.