Blog feedCommunicate.08 Keynote – Prof Richard Johnstone’s take on our languages futures
March 8th, 2008
Professor Richard Johnstone continues to be in awe of what new technologies permit language learners of 2008 to do, things which back in his 1950s school career would be only a dream.
In the 1950s language was taught as a written code, with the technology of a course book, jotter, pencil, dictionary and a ‘reader’. It enabled Class 2a, 1950, the top stream, to read texts like this. And they knew how to pronounce it all. The first lessons of the year would be phonetics, so that even the newest of words would present no difficulty to the learner in terms of pronunciation. It was very limiting, of course, since the learners rarely spoke the language at all. But can modern technology match the 1950s technology for its ability to help students read the language?
In the 1960s and 70s, the possibility of travel came over the horizon with the birth of the package holiday. The course-book was born, using imaginary characters to create a sensation of speaking and reading the language ‘for real’.
During the 80s and into 2000, we saw increased use of course books which finally went beyond the stereotypical characters, becoming more lifelike with more colourful photographs and realia within. Flashcards and graded readers (to cope with the wider range of students) joined the first computer technology, in the form of the language lab and BBC Micro computer. But it also saw the increasing linking of objectives of learning to the objectives of the language examination.
Moving forward in the 21st Century
Group-work takes over, based on pupils undertaking a research task using a computer amongst other tools, but splitting themselves into a production team, with a web researcher, books researcher and graphic artist. This, in a primary six classroom in Aberdeen, where students as young as eight years old are learning in near total language immersion.
Partners in Excellence provided a model of how language learning could be made seductive for teens who would normally be running away from languages towards, well, anything else. With an online community feature of the weekly surgery – a real-life teacher on the end of a virtual language clinic – students were using technology both for research and for face-to-face virtual coaching.
Technology-use in language learning isn’t about getting capacity. It’s about becoming a different sort of person, and that is what both of these projects have managed to achieve.
Prof Johnstone (retired) has become a changed person thanks to technology, too. He is teaching himself in Cantonese and Mandarin, using Quizlet to test himself on the 1038 Chinese characters he needs to know, and using the technology’s advice to work on those he needs to hone down. His motivation has gone through the roof, desperate to get over the 1000 word barrier.
This, if anything, would have reinforced the 1950s learning through reading. If only we could match part of our past pedagogies, with some of our modern technologies.
Soon: the full audio from this talk.