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Why is second language education so routinely terrible in the United States? (not sure if it is like this in other countries as well, but speaking to what I know). Not only do students almost never achieve fluency after nearly two decades in the system (grade school through college), but the entire academic structure seems completely in denial about what actually is effective at generating fluency. Research on second language acquisition has consistently shown that immersion based approaches with a small amount of grammar at early levels is much more effective than the grammar/translation method. Yet every language class I've been in, from middle school on has been laser focused on verb conjugations, and direct translations. I can excuse this at the high school level because teachers aren't exposed to the latest pedagogical research. But at universities where part of the job of many of these instructors is pedagogical research, this approach is frankly embarrassing and a huge waste of student's time.
I have two theories on why this might be the case. Firstly, immersion learning doesn't really lend itself to test-taking, which is a necessary part of the academic system. Secondly, there is no incentive to actually teach language effectively at scale: Americans don't need to understand foreign languages, and the ones that do want to become diplomats or do business in other countries eventually seek out immersion approaches on their own.
I think this applies in a lesser sense to the entire educational structure in the US, baring maybe doctorate level education. There's so much useless crap in the system that doesn't help with the learning or retention of relevant information. Bryan Caplan makes a compelling case in The Case Against Education that this is by design because the point of education is signaling. I think he's mainly correct, which is why the lib bandying of education as a panacea to society's problems makes me want to tear my hair out.
In Canada, we have French Immersion schooling, where students are to speak, and be spoken to, only in French from kindergarten to gr 9, and from grades 10-12 are to take some high school courses in French (French, and usual history, and gym in slacker schools). I was involved in this system for years, as a student and then as a teacher. It doesn't work. It's effective at the early stages because the bar for "early stage speaker" is so low, in the same way that you can do almost anything at the gym if you are a total beginner and still see results.
"Immersion" means "oral language only," but the only people who learn languages that way are toddlers. After age 3 the paths of those who can read, those who are read-to, and those who get only oral language are set, and the latter group are never going to be good at language (among English-speaker, these are the people who seen a movie last night where a guy drownded). The midwit meme would show the midwit saying "actually, having the sort of parents who read to you is what makes you good at reading, not the reading itself," but it's definitely the reading. Spoken language flies by too quickly for you to grasp the nuances of the grammar, and your conversational environment is extremely limited in the sorts of topics it covers- home, maybe work; in school, French immersion students know all the different words for binders, folders, duotangs, etc, but that isn't very useful on les rues. The only way to broaden your vocabulary and build even a descriptive theory of grammar is to read widely and see the different constructions so you can look back at them and puzzle over them a little bit every time, which compounds into understanding. In English, when this doesn't happen, you get "what I wish I knew before I started med school," "I swum in the pool," "irregardless," "the ancestral tenants," etc. And that's after 25 or 30 years of immersion- with little kids, after a couple of years of immersion, you get "Last day we goed at school," which is how most immersion students sound when they speak foreign languages.
My theory of language learning is that you can't learn the way a small child does if you are not a small child. Adults improve their native language skills by reading and writing, and so foreign language learning needs to yank you up to read/write level as fast as possible, and that requires boring grammar drills and vocab practice (with translation exercises being the funnest possible combination of these) until you become literate in the language, at which point you get better very quickly. But since boring grammar drills are boring, few people make it out of this stage.
So language classes don't work because in North America, school is supposed to be fun or stress-free or whatever, and so language teachers have to play restaurant or grocery store with the kids, and these allow everyone to learn maybe 15 words in 90 minutes, which is six minutes per word, assuming no one forgets anything. So taking a couple of classes in highschool will never get the average person there, just as gym class won't make you fit. As Napoleon himself complained: "Since sixt week i learn the Englich and i do not any progress. Six week do fourty and two day. If might have learn fivity word for day I could know it two thusands and two hundred. It is in the dictionary more of fourty thousand; even he could must twinty bout much of tems for know it our hundred and twenty week, which do more two years. After this you shall agree that to study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged." If a genius on St Helena (nothing else to do) couldn't do it, why would a vaped-out TikTokker in grade 10 be able to do it?
PS: The immersion-equivalent for teaching native English speakers is called "whole language," and it bears much of the responsibility for the terrible literacy results sweeping the continent. So if we don't trust English-immersion to teach English speakers English, why would we trust immersion to teach foreign languages?
Is this just kindergarden / early elementary level? Otherwise I'd expect them to pick up some vocabulary related to math, science, history, art... the stuff they're supposed to be learning while at school. Reading classical literature and writing essays about it in French should help too.
The top 10 or 20 percent get very good, but the average student never gets to the point where all that reading pays off because they resist the earlier drudgery and therefore can’t understand the readings.
Math and science are the first subjects to be dropped from the French program because students tell their parents that their crappy marks are because it’s all in French (untrue since most words are the same: triangle, fraction, oxygen, mitochondria, energy, every word that ends in -ation, etc).
It’s so bad that, at a meeting of the hardest-core French teachers in my province, I learned that I was the only making grade 12 students read; everyone else had them “read along” with the teacher, which means “zone out with the book open.” This was because, after 12 years, even the teachers didn’t expect the kids to understand literary French. Note that we’re talking stuff like Camus, which is stylistically similar to Hemingway- not linguistically taxing. You might chalk this up to the education system’s usual ineptitude, but if immersion works then the French-rich environment should be inculcating French despite whatever the teacher is doing. It works like that until about grade 6, at which point students are celebrated if the hit A2 proficiency. You would expect an adult to hit A2 after 300 hours of study, which is 60 five-hour days. There are nearly 1200 days total in grades 1 to 6. The children do not even learn the language like children. Immersion doesn’t work.
That's deranged...
Shout my name when the angry mobs come for the teachers, I'll try to tell everyone you were one of the good ones.
What? No....
Well, depending on what you mean by the former, I might agree. Children don't learn just by passively absorbing things spoken in their environment. They figure it out because it lets them get what they want from their parents, interact with their peers, etc. Every such activity is an exercise, that's how they get better at it. Later, when they go to school, they're forced to exercise even more, by reading, writing, and interacting with the teacher and each other.
When you tell me there's an "French immersion school", I assume this is a school that forces all the school activities to be done in French (minus, maybe, student interactions). An "immersion school" that doesn't make you do that defeats the purpose!
And if you're wondering what's the difference between what I consider immersion, and just studying a language, it's that you don't try to teach people by taking the language apart, feeding them it's rules, and hoping they'll be able to reconstruct it from that, you force them to do stuff using thr language, correct any mistakes they make, and otherwise make them figure it out on their own.
The immersion schools/classes force everything to happen in French. Students resist it, so it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty much what you’re picturing, minus English class and a day off now and then for the science fair or pride parade. End result: 60 hours of study in 6 years.
And it’s not just one bad school or province. It is a national issue in Canada. Every year there is a teapot tempest about how ineffective this is, but we keep doing it (the political reasons are long-dead by now).
I'm definitely not picturing students being able to "read along" with the teacher. I can believe this is a national issue, I just don't think it's an issue with the methodology as much as it is a simple case of low standards.
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