Lately,
I've been thinking about my own, and others, experiences as an L2 learner. It
seems that I haven't really met any student who is really great at all three
aspects of the language: speaking, reading, and writing. And it makes me wonder
why that is. Why can some students be really great writers and readers, but be
awful at speaking? Or students who have an amazing oral proficiency, but
struggle to construct a logical argument in essay form? Many of the language
theories that we have studied and I would say the overwhelming majority of
topics that we have covered in class have been about oral proficiency. Oral
proficiency is great for when students have experiences with native speakers
whether it be face to face or while using technology. But I feel that we have
spent very little time talking about reading or writing skills. How do you even
go about these skills? In high school, there was a student a few years above me
who was a Spanish native speaker, yet was taking classes in the language
because she was unable to write well. Another friend is a Greek native speaker,
and cannot read or write even as close to how well he can speak. So this leads
me to ask, if we focus so much on learning an L2 in the same ways in which
people learn their L1s, won't we have students who are great at oral
proficiency, but lack in other areas. I believe that, as we have most seen in
our language learning classes, it is important to provide transcripts when
using authentic listening activities. It is also important to have students
practice their writing skills as well as listening. I think that ways in
which we can do that are having students read passages and use the vocab from
said passages to write a summary. I think that, as much as we all believe that
oral proficiency is important, all the other stuff is too. I think that if
students are being exposed to a lot of native language authentic materials, it
is very, very important to have a transcript, in order to see how things are
written. A lot of the models for learning that we have talked about seem to exclude
these and focus only on learning through auditory skills, including Gattegno’s
Silent Way approach and Asher’s Total Physical Response method.
Another question that comes to hand it at what point do we
start teaching each of these: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. I
think that it is important to start off with speaking. These should be
supplemented by vocabulary and grammar exercises in order to expand what you
know and construct new forms of speech. I think that reading and writing can be
the hardest to teach because they require a fair bit of vocabulary work and knowing
how grammar works at its basic levels, but universal grammar can be used for
this. I think that when each of these is introduced really depends on what the aims
for the classes are. If you are trying to get your students to develop survival
knowledge of the language, then oral proficiency is the key. If you want your
students to be progressive in their language learning, then I think that there
needs to be an even focus on all of the aspects, using many different teaching
styles.
I completely agree with you that the greatest focus in on speaking and I can see the reason behind this simply because that is the major way of communicating with others. Speaking is ultimately more necessary than reading and especially writing, but just becasue this is the case does not mean that we shouldn't focus on teaching the other aspects. I think that we get stuck on the speaking aspect becasue of how we teach a second language. For instance, at first it is all about identification and recognition rather than production. Teachers simply want studetns to remember vocabulary or recognize verb conjugations. The final step it to have students produce the second language; write it. I think that many language teachers overlook spelling errors or small gramatical errors because students have a basic understanding. We need to change this and say that a basic understaning is not enough. We need to be as strick with second language writing as native language. Only in this way will students become proficient writers and readers as well. Not to mention that native speakers learn many of their writing skills from reading, so introducing more reading is key!
ReplyDeleteIts interesting, because when native speakers are learning their first language they are repeatedly taught to read over and over again before they begin to write, but in my L2 experience, it seemed the other way around, with writing coming first. I agree that teachers need to be more strict about spelling, especially with languages with accents. My teachers never seemed to care about accents on vocab, only on verb conjugations. Students should be taught the importance of accents early on so they can better pronunciate.
DeleteI like what you said about starting off by teaching and encouraging speaking. I know some people believe that when students are ready to speak it will just "emerge naturally" from them, but I don't know if I agree with that. Speaking in a foreign, L2 language is going to feel pretty unnatural and weird for a long time. Does that mean you shouldn't speak because beautiful speech is not flowing naturally? Of course not! L2 learners need to practice, we need to mess up, we need to get a little embarrassed when we say something totally wrong or freeze up because all that practice WILL make speech start to come naturally. If you're encouraged to speak a lot, speaking won't be as intimidating and making mistakes won't seem as scary. I like your idea of focusing on speaking first because I think it's an idea that not many teachers put into action.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with what you said about speaking being the most important aspect to start with, and I wish that in my prior Spanish classes there had been more of a focus on speaking than reading and writing. I can read and write in Spanish much more easily than I can speak it and I don't like that at all - speaking is the most necessary part of a language and I think that teachers need to be less afraid to put emphasis on students' conversational skills and back off all the reading and writing that can at times be assigned in excess. I easily learned much more in my semester in Granada speaking with my host family and being required to speak in Spanish than I did in all my previous Spanish classes where the focus was on reading novels and writing papers on them. As teachers it is going to be our job to create well-rounded learners so we need to incorporate all aspects of a language into practice.
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