Job Discussion Forums

[Samantha]

mapache wrote:

[MELEE]

I'm also enjoying reading the thought provoking posts.
Unfortunately, I've taken on a new class this week and and now my day and there for internet time is all chopped up into little bits, leaving me little time for indepth reading and responding.
I would like to know what Patrocledies thinks of the Common European Framework Rubrics, which deal with speaking and listening situations as well as reading and writing ones.

I also think he is linking language and culture too closely. Remember that todays languages are often shared by very different cultures. My students probably have more in common with young people in small town America than they do with the youth of Madrid, despite the fact that they share a common language with the Spanards.

I also teach my students to make use of cognates, but I take the approach of "when you see a word you don't know, look at it to see if it resembles a word you know, either in Spanish or in English" So just as they can work out an approximent meaning of implemented because they know the work implementar. They should be able to work out the meaning of campfire if they know fire and camp sparetely in English. Teenager is a nother good word for teaching this. I'm amazed how many of my students do not come in with an ablity or maybe willingness to guess at words like this.

Personally, I think the ideal teacher in a homogenous classroom is a native speaker with a high ablity in the students first language/dominate language. But that is a self serving belief.

[ls650]

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[Guy Courchesne]

I chalk it all up to post-Christmas traumatic stress syndrome. I know I'm certainly sufferin' it.

[Samantha]

My credit card always suffers that PCTSS. I wish there was a seasonal vaccine.

[Patrocleides]

Well, Mr. Courchesne, I don't want to make bilingualism too subjective or oppose it it unnecessarily to successful communication. Perhaps I think of it as a standard or a purpose which, like a mountain, seems very far away and gets more complex as you draw nearer. Communication skills that prove effective are the footwork, the making and breaking camp, all the lugging, the ogling and the sweating you do along the way. Of course there's a big overlap in which "successful communication" and "bilingualism" are just aspects of the same thing, one a bit more "dynamic," the other a more "static" way of looking at things.

Melee's reminder that language and culture have to be separated perhaps more often as often as they are linked is something that practically I do even if argumentatively I might talk as though I didn't. Languages, at least in the abstract, are fungible commodities. Poetic nuances and folk wisdom aside, what can be done in one language very largely can be done in another, so people of similar cultures can speak quite different languages and people who speak the same language may be culturally nearly incompatible. As Churchill quipped, "The English and the Americans are two great people divided by one language."

I'm sorry, Melee, that I know absolutely nothing about the European "rubrics." It's not impossible that they might be excellent. Still, the sort of thinking involved in these tabular evaluative and descriptive frameworks doesn't seem to me to be any different than that found in the descriptive-yet-purposive classification systems that flowered fifty years ago in personality theory, social science, and cultural analyses, and failed badly because they tried to mix "scientistic" language with tacit "value orientations." Nobody works with them anymore, at least not in "behavioral science."

What doesn't work as logico-mathematical-empirical-technical-methodological science may very well "work" in professions to keep people talking the same language and reading from the same page. When they are used evaluatively, they produce "grades" that are more consistent and warm the hearts of administrators. When they are the common coin of professions such as teaching, they get teachers to walk, talk, and squawk as if they were all the same breed of ducks.

They tried that in the intellectual "traditions" and "schools" of two and more generations ago. It only worked for a while until all the unclarity and all the inconsistencies in arguments and intentions emerged. Rather than solve them, the usual solution was to revise the rubrics by other rubrics, have fads correcting fads as it were, and call it "progress" and "professional development." In twenty years will any of these "rubrics" announced with appropriate fanfare by eminent educators still be read, still be used, still be respected?

Read the shrinks, sociologists, and cultural classifiers of forty years ago to get your answer. Nobody now reads them because they are unreadable. Nobody was more respectable, more required reading, fifty years ago than Talcott Parsons. Read ten pages of his thousands upon thousands of pages, and you'll wonder how on earth anybody could not have seen through it all. They didn't in general because social pressure from its "academic community" twisted academics' perceptions--or at least taught them to keep their contrarianism to themselves if they wanted tenure.

The same effect is used to get teachers to subordinate their individual judgment to "the school system" and do like other teachers do. That has its uses, but it's not apparent that better education is necessarily one of them. Keeping classroom teachers all doing and talking the same way is. Business does exactly the same thing. It systematically evaluates its employees sales, customer service, and team player capabilities, not to encourage individual enterprise or foster employee discretionary skills, but to get one employee to be able to substitute for any other--just like teachers in departments. They call it "professionalism," too, although the independent judgment of a professional is the last thing to be included in the term.

When was the last time you could walk into a language school of any size, any resources, and reorder the school curriculum, syllabi, and package lesson plans? You might, and it might be an exceptional school, but try it at Interlingua, Quick Learning, or, here in Guadalajara, Proulex. In such schools teachers' professionalism doesn't emerge as academic freedom or innovation, it shows up in getting evaluated in the same way by the same rubrics for the same performances--just like retail clerks and customer service people. You are there to sell the school and service the clients who will always pass.

Rubrics are not there to be "right." Rubrics rule.

[Ms. Atondo]