I didn't set out to create a gazeteer of different visions of language learning. This series of posts sprang from thinking about our Year 7 French Art Exhibition which we are examining as part of our National Priorities Project. We are interrogating the role of communication and interculturality in the Art Exhibition and whether these are drivers of language learning. So inevitably the link to Task Based Learning had to be explored. And while the Exhibition challenges pupils to use their language in order to complete a task, I think the way we specify and scaffold the language to be used dilutes its standing as a Task with a capital T. The role of the project in developing our pupils' augmented identity as owners of their language and their ability to use it to communicate creatively, demanded we look at Translanguaging. And I think although some of the practices feel alien to us, the attitude to expression, error and interculturality are more relevant than I imagined.
There is one more idea which demands attention: Interlanguage.
I personally find this way of thinking about language learning very seductive. But part of this National Priorities Project will mean questioning whether it is a wise and useful concept for rationalising the balance of creativity and personal expression with the demands of accurate rehearsal of well sequenced grammar.
A pupil's interlanguage is the totality of their emerging knowledge and conceptualisation of the target language. It includes a flux of conscious and unconscious concepts in a non-linear natural progress towards greater accuracy and fluency. It exists in between L1 and the target language, with pupils' errors demonstrating a default to L1 syntax until the target language grammar slowly gains ground. It is linked to Task Based Learning through the belief that it is by challenging pupils to deploy the totality of their language repertoire and even to exceed its limits, that concepts become articulated into a functioning idiolect that is in the process of getting closer to the target language. It is linked to Translanguaging through the idea that language learning is the process of extending and augmenting the learner's evolving linguistic identity.
In the context of our French Art Exhibition, these would be key aspects in suggesting that the project does advance language learning. It sets the learner a Task which requires them to invest their creativity into self expression, using their repertoire of language in meaningful and purposeful ways, with an insouciant attitude to error, and a nonchalance towards the idea of redundant language introduced just for this particular piece of work.
I certainly see language learning from this perspective. And it seems to me that without the concept of interlanguage, there is no language learning. Just learning. As in the learning of facts and concepts in any other subject. It's the idea of Interlanguage that allows us to understand how exposure to the language, introduction to patterns and rules, and the application of learning in order to comprehend and create meaning, all coalesces to turn learning into language learning.
But there is an alternative view.
What is the alternative view? The alternative view is that in the classroom setting and limited time, we are not talking about language acquisition. We are talking about language learning. Language acquistion in an immersive environment of interaction and comprehensible input may operate on different rules. But language learning is just... learning. Learning as for any other subject. Learning defined as "a change in long term memory".
And all of a sudden, everything changes. Redundant language learned only for this project and never met again, will be forgotten. So no learning has taken place. Asking pupils to try to say things they can't will lead to errors which will become permanent. And the valuable and limited time available should be spent rehearsing accurate construction of sentences exemplifying well sequenced grammar concepts. The demands of creativity and communication will overload the cognitive demands on the pupils and distract from the learning of the language itself.
In this scenario our Year 7 French Art Exhibition would be a vanity project. It would risk wasting valuable time that could be spent securing learning, through direct instruction with carefully sequenced progression and well timed retrieval practice so nothing is redundant or forgotten.
I think this National Priorities Project will add to this debate. We can document and share classroom examples of where the two philosophies seem to apply. Either separately, with each having its place... Or could it be that there can be an overlap, in a richness of approach where the importance of purposeful, meaningful, creative, personal language use has a key role in the cementing of nitty gritty conceptualisation and memorisation of language?
Next Post: Can we come to some conclusions on the importance of meaningful versus mechanical?
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