Personal accounts about language teaching

[Patricia Chaput]

As one of the participants in the previous thread on personal experience I
want to clarify--I think books such as the Belcher and Connor book Loren
notes can be extremely useful as sources of data in understanding how
languages are learned.  (Another well-known one is Earl Stevick's "Success
with Foreign Languages" (1989).)  What such books do is demonstrate
vividly how varied (and idiosyncratic) experience can be, and why it is so
dangerous to assume that one or even a few personal histories should be
sufficient as a basis for decision-making.  I look forward to reading this
book and using it as yet another source of data for the continuing
investigation of how to study and learn languages well.
        One other caveat--we have to keep in mind not only the variation
in our students' talents, learning styles, etc., but also the various
goals of foreign language study, especially at the college level.  We have
students with instrumental goals and students with general educational or
enrichment goals.  The more we understand about the study and learning of
second language, the more we can teach to both populations in ways that
are meaningful and promote progress for the continuing students as well as
give the non-continuers a valuable educational experience (for our
multi-cultural world), doing the most we can in the limited time
available.  The fact that most of our students will not have the time or
motivation to become proficient speakers or writers does not mean that
they cannot learn a great deal about language and cross-cultural
communication.  Let's remember that there are multiple "exit points" for
our students who may take one, two, three years of language, or who may
have had pre-college or heritage language and end up with many more years
of experience.  Our goals have to be flexible and varied for all of those
students.  In the old days we used to assume that our goal had to be an
advanced proficiency, and courses were sequenced in ways that
disadvantaged students who never made it to the advanced courses/levels.
No doubt that is still true in some places.  We need to remember that this
book is a collection of 18 accounts of very advanced students, the
"experiences of highly successful second-language (L2) academic writers,"
a relatively small subset of foreign language learners and one that
deserves our attention.  What they did--or didn't do--may--or may not--be
applicable to other subsets of learners.  In any case I am delighted to
learn of this book and thank Loren for bringing it to my attention.  As a
source of "ethnographic" data, books like this one can yield particularly
valuable insights.

Patricia Chaput
Harvard University

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