EDBLESL 497/597 Special Topics  Pedagogy of Language (2 credits)  Fall/Spring

Dr. Roberto Bahruth

This course is specially designed to serve two purposes and to address identified needs specific to the bilingual program.  First, our bilingual students are coming out of their modern languages classes with linguistic competence but not communicative competence.  Pedagogy of Language is a course designed to provide ample opportunity to communicate in the Spanish language.  As the students are becoming more communicatively competent, they are invited to reflect critically upon the pedagogy of the course and the pedagogical space created by the professors.  Second, working in groups, the bilingual students are required to develop and implement a multilayered, communicative lesson in Spanish.  The purpose here is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the pedagogy when implemented in a classroom where a community of learners has been established.  Often in student teaching placements students are unable to explore communicative approaches to language and learning due to emphasis placed on a skills based curriculum dictated by standardized test contents.  The Pedagogy of Language class is a supervised, laboratory type, quasi-student teaching experience while students are going through our program.  It aims to develop the skills to teach language effectively and to develop a first hand appreciation for natural language acquisition processes.  Bilingual students are required to take this class  twice during their coursework in the program.

PHILOSOPHY for Pedagogy of Language   Roberto E. Bahruth, Ph.D. 

            Our pedagogy of language class has been developed from careful consideration and a deliberate sense of purpose.  By pedagogy, we mean that our teaching turns on strong theoretical and philosophical foundations, which require intellectual investment and development on the part of teachers and learners.  We invite you to wander along the “sendero” we provide in a space where the goal is to optimize conditions for natural language acquisition accompanied by an emerging awareness of the cultures of Spanish speakers.  Sendero in Spanish means “path.”  We invite you to meander along your own individual journey into a new language and culture, but we also guarantee that you will be in good company along the way.  Enjoy the stroll and don’t worry about whether you are getting anywhere.  That is our professional responsibility. 

            Most foreign language instruction is more like a superhighway where all of the traffic is moving in the same direction in constricting lanes, at more or less the same speed.  The instructor is more like a patrol officer making sure no one goes too fast or too slow according to commercialized, teacher-proof materials and arbitrary measures of “progress.”  Every exit from the freeway offers expensive, unhealthy franchised food and fuel, which is considerably cheaper if we stray into town and buy where the locals purchase their gas.  This is also where the good food usually is.  On the freeway we are seated in the isolation of our cars, unlikely to interact with occupants of other cars except to vent our frustrations.  We all seem to be in a hurry, but, in the case of learning a second language, few ever seem to arrive.  Why not?

            Observing children learning their mother tongue and culture before going to school reveals a generative process of approximations and negotiation for meaning in the world surrounding them.  By age five, children around the world are successful in becoming communicatively competent in their mother tongue.  This accomplishment comes despite the absence of lesson plans, teachers’ guides, scope and sequence charts, worksheets, commercial materials and tests.  Rural American folklore reminds us:  “You don’t fatten a lamb by weighing it!”  Starting from scratch, and given about 40 waking hours per week for five years, this amazing feat is achieved naturally where the learners are actively engaged in their own development. 

            Language learning as an adult can occur more quickly given that adults already know their first language and have a conceptual knowledge of the world, which, if taken into consideration by the pedagogy, serves as a foundation, which can provide a springboard into communicative competence in a new language. Stages of approximations and development are still normal, natural and necessary experiences, but adult learners can move through these stages more quickly when two conditions are met:  the learners must have strategic competencies in approaching communicative pedagogical spaces; and the communicative pedagogical space must maximize what learners already know in order to make instruction more comprehensible and developmentally appropriate.  Even given that these conditions are met, adults are hardly going to spend 40 hours per week for five years in a communicative setting where the new language surrounds them.  Unless they move to a country where the new language is spoken in daily life, their next best option is to take communicative classes where they live. 

            Unfortunately, second language teachers who approach language learning in natural, communicative ways are a rarity.  Traditional approaches to language “teaching” stubbornly insist upon grammar-based, insult to intelligence approaches where little learning actually occurs.  Sooner or later these “professionals” will have to make the embarrassing connections between not learning and not teaching! 

            Where such opportunities do exist, learners come to experience something new, yet, ironically, they simultaneously request a pedagogy which is more recognizable; more like what school has always been for them.  This prompted Kinneman (1995) to remark:  “The greatest impediment to school renewal is probably the fact that we all went to school.”

            Our Pedagogy of Language class is one of those rare opportunities, predicated upon a philosophy of learning and teaching which applauds and celebrates the natural intelligence of humans to learn a second language as successfully as they learned their mother tongue.  Our classrooms are arranged ways supportive of natural language acquisition as learners are encouraged to progress at their own pace.  Strategic competencies are nurtured in order to enhance each learner’s language experience. All students make progress.            We also encourage our students to remain in a beginning class for a minimum of two semesters. Rather than measuring progress by movement into a higher-level class, we promote actual communicative competence, which is nurtured and monitored by the teachers more thoroughly in the beginning classes.   Students are encouraged to discuss their progress with their teachers after two semesters to determine whether they are ready to take the next step.  We want you to receive maximum benefit of our program design.  Let us help you to make these critical decisions.

            Our goal is to help each learner to reach communicative competence in as efficient a manner as possible.  Nothing we do in Pedagogy of Language is accidental.  Our pedagogy is carefully planned, firmly anchored in sound applied linguistic research, and always keeps in mind that our goal depends upon the satisfaction of our students.Our rewards are twofold:  first, we receive enormous pleasure by doing what we do well.  We watch our students blossom, not just in the new language, but as human beings who come to experience life through the lens of another culture.  Second, Pedagogy of Language gives new and positive meanings to bilingual education, which has been demonized by the news media and by politicians, most of whom are monolingual!  We believe that monolingualism is a curable disease and that a more humane future rests upon our abilities to go beyond our myopic, mono-cultural ways of viewing the world as we step into deeper understandings and appreciations for people who speak the languages we are trying to learn.  The bilingual Education Department is community-minded and we always have in mind ways of teaching, which enhance human relationships.  We look upon our students and our faculty as members of a multicultural family.

            Finally, a word about excellence.  Average encounters with language in classes tend to be anchored in the elitist tradition of classical literature, which prompted Joshua Fishman (1966) to surmise it as a practice, which “amounts to honoring the dead while burying the living.”  The decision to hire adjunct faculty is based upon managerial considerations -- a cost cutting measure for maximizing profits to increase the salaries of full professors-- and has no sound foundation in educational theory what so ever.

            Only our most prepared professors teach our Pedagogy of Language class.  Our faculty go through continuous professional development sessions and are taught to critically reflect upon their teaching as they teach.  We all attend each other’s classes to steal creative ideas and to lend a critical eye to our peers in a spirit of mutual professional development. As they mature in understanding of the philosophy and theory of language acquisition and development, they earn the right to teach our most delicate students:  the newcomers.

            And so, we extend an invitation to you to join our multicultural family.  Make yourselves at home.  Get to know your classmates and teachers during the breaks.   When you come to appreciate the thirty years of applied linguistic research, which conceptually informs our pedagogy, we hope you will tell others of the unique experience we offer. This is the only experience we know of that is available in your area.  We are not a franchise, we are your neighbors and we want to be your friends.

Kinneman, D.E.  1995.  Multimedia, professional development, and school renewal.   Technology & Learning 15, 8.  April.

Fishman, J. A. (ed.) 1966.  Language Loyalty in the United States.  The Hague:  Mouton.