chronicle

[gthomson]

At 10:31 -0500 07/03/01, J. Douglas Clayton wrote:
>
>I sense that my students, even if they have had only one semester of
>Russian and are not able to converse freely in the language, still
>have had a valuable educative experience. Surely that is what we as
>educators should be telling our deans and administrators.
>---
>J. Douglas CLAYTON

This is one way to respond to the allegation of ineffectiveness in
language teaching--point out that something other than language
ability can be a worthy goal. But what would be wrong with simply
making the language teaching more effective? Douglas' approach here
has the advantage of leaving current, allegedly ineffective, teaching
practices intact, which may save a lot of  money and labour. Do
others agree that the development of communicative competence can be
relegated to other means, such as immersion or Berlitz schools, and
university language departments can be left to providing "valuable
educational experiences" as an adequate alternative to effective
language teaching? Or is the assumption that effective language
teaching as such is simply impossible in North American universities
(which seems to be implied by David Maxwell's decision--or is his
negative assessment of university language teaching simply wrong?)?

Greg Thomson

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