Language teaching experiment

I'm currently in a real stretching place in my teaching experience and wanted to reflect on it a little bit.

PAST
My previous experience with language teaching has mostly fallen under "language for specific purposes." My students want to accomplish something, I help them do it. So I've done some business English and then quite a bit of academic English. I've mostly taught intermediate to advanced students and mostly classes of 8-16. Usually, at least 4 contact hours a week.

CURRENT
I am currently taking one woman from ground zero in Russian as she and her family prepare to move to Central Asia. Here are some features of what we're doing:

• Time is limited: We have 1 contact hour per week assuming our kids are healthy. Her life is quite full, so time for independent practice is hard to find. 
• Basic functionality: Navigating a new town with kids in tow is tricky, doing it in another language is trickier. We're trying to get her some basic language skills to help navigate the basics of taking care of a family. 
• Ling 101: Their end goal is to learn both Russian and their local Turkic language (LTL). Having studied both Kazakh and Azeri in addition to Russian, I'm trying to introduce linguistic concepts that will help with acquiring both target languages even though, I'm not actually competent to teach a Turkic language (and only barely competent to teach Russian, haha). 

THOUGHTS

This has so far been a fun challenge. It helps that my student comes from a technical background so when I dump an IPA chart on her, I don't feel that guilty. She can handle it, and it'll be useful to know the basics of phonetics. We've been able to do basic contrastive analysis of North American English consonants and vowels versus Russian and their LTL. My hope is that she'll be able to take this information plus her general analytical abilities to be a better listener. 

Starting from ground zero with someone has really made me think about success and motivation. I'm trying to tune each lesson for demonstrated success and an obvious connection with her goals. So after two lessons, we've gone through the numbers 1-4 and reviewed all the sounds in Russian phonology, but we haven't spent a lot of time doing lots of other things one might do in the early lessons. 

One surprise is the difference between lesson one and two. In the first lesson, we were very done after an hour. Lots of new sounds and new ideas. We'd done some simple listening comprehension with total physical response and an intro to Russian consonants. In the second lesson, we wrapped up after 70 minutes, but it felt like we could have kept going. We'd reviewed some, practiced a new phrase, gone over Russian vowels and the concept of palatalization, and then added about 20 food words. 

Going forward, I think we'll obviously work on more vocabulary for day-to-day objects and more phrases that are useful for getting things done. What's not obvious to me is what grammatical concepts to introduce. To my mind, the goal of introducing grammar at this point is not to move toward mastery but to ensure that she's exposed to the very idea that a language can be organized in such a way. If she had any experience with a language like Latin or Greek, I'd be less concerned, but that's not the case here. 

Well those are my thoughts right now. I think my next step will be to read my Kazakh grammar book to remind myself of the grammatical concepts that overlap with Russian. The two languages aren't in the same family at all, but in some places they are closer to one another than they are to English. 

Knowledge and living

Yesterday I came across this interview with NT Wright who's book Surprised by Hope I'm reading through rather slowly. What struck me about this interview is how much I don't think about the matters being debated between Wright and Piper. And that got me to thinking why I have resisted the encouragements to go to seminary.

You don't earn a doctorate without some scholarly bent; and being someone who likes to think about the life of faith, a number of people have thus suggested that seminary might be a good thing. I'm not here to suggest that seminary can't be a good thing. However, I'd like to use some of my experiences in the language classroom to explain my resistance.

As I've spent time on both sides of the language classroom as both a learner and an instructor, it is obvious that rule knowledge is not the same as being able to converse with people. I have a love hate relationship with learning grammar. It's neat in a "hmm. They chose to express things using that way. Interesting." kinda of a sense. It's maddening in a "ARG! I need to squeeze my thoughts into those rules and its just.not.fitting.right!" My learning style has typically been to learn a massive amount of rules, try to speak but be overwhelmed by all the rules I'm trying to keep track of and apply, get frustrated, and then actively try to forget most of the rules, selectively apply a few of them and sting words together.

As an instructor, I've seen that sometimes my grammar nuts are my best language users, but frequently that's not the case. Peter MacIntyre a language researcher has proposed that "Willingness to Communicate" is a trait that varies from person to person, can be fostered or discouraged, affects language learning outcome. So my students with ok grammar knowledge but enthusiastic willingness to communicate tend to improve a lot faster (and are more fun to work with). My grammar freaks with low willingness to communicate can surprise me with bursts of fluency, but frequently do better in writing tasks where they can be methodical but scared stiff in speaking activities.

When I say that I am resistant to the idea of seminary, I am resistant to the idea that more knowledge necessarily helps me live a life of faith more coherently. As I read 10-20 pages a week of Surprised by Hope, I do think that Wright's explanation of resurrection will ultimately change my outlook on life and how I make decisions. But I don't think that resolving the debate between Wright and Piper will. To me going to seminary would be like my experience of studying Latin grammar intensively for 3 years and then attending a 45 min class on speaking Latin and only being able to produce "The soup is hot. The soup is cold." (True story.) It's far, far too much information at once to integrate into practice.

When I tell people I'm a linguist they frequently think that I know many languages. As a personal preference, in the past I have studied quite a few. However, on a day to day level, I don't study a particular language at all. I am not learning a new language. I look at language use with little reflection about my own experience. I don't want this to happen to my spiritual life. I don't want to dissect, examine, and write about other people's thoughts and experiences on the matter. I actually want to live a faith-filled life. So I'm taking it slow. I appreciate the hard work of others, but I only digest a bit at a time.